Hacker News Reader

Comment by chishaku | Hacker News Reader

People want to leave but stay for the network.

How can we leave and take the network with us?'

Edit:

I actually didn't have "friends" in mind. Small businesses, formal and informal groups of interest, event discovery, the use cases are far beyond what I'm aware of.

Also, organizing and protests...

View on HN

I've been toying with removing all of my content, unfriending the vast majority of acquaintances and unfollowing family who post garbage. Then don't feed the zuck machine by posting, liking memes, or regular checking. Disable all notifications from communities.

Basically try to keep to "business and meaningful contact only" rather than engage with the time-sinks. Make it work for me. (The Intention firefox extension has been super helpful as well.)

Don't forget to log off and clear cookies when not using it so you're not tracked by every "like" / "comment with facebook" button if you don't want to feed the zuck machine. Or use a quarantine browser for your sessions.

The Facebook container add-on does this for you even if you’re still drinking the zuckeraid. It’s amazing how much it blocks.

I went through that process a year ago. It was a good amount of work. When I was done, I realized I wasn't getting anything out of Facebook and deleted.

Last post: "Here's where you can find me in the future. I'm not on Facebook anymore." (And optionally: "Here's why.")

If people want to get in touch with you, they'll do so. If people want to broadcast information only to those following them on one service, then you'll stop getting that information. That's fine. Other information will take its place.

What if (hypothetically) those 'people' are an organization that needs to organize work, and they're using it because they've tried email and other methods for years, and found that those didn't work?

A lot of us use FB for organizing, not just for seeing what our friends ate for dessert last night. It's not reasonable to tell people abandon one channel without suggesting a replacement. You might as well ask people to give up email, or their phone.

Zulip, Discord, Slack, Signal groups, mass SMS, just to name the first five that come to mind.

How can you be so bad at email that it "doesn't work"?

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. We're talking about a company that has knowingly promoted white supremacists groups for the sake of clicks. I think that warrants putting just a little effort into email.

No tool is going to do your job for you. If Facebook succeeded where email failed, it's just because someone wasn't doing their job, not because of some special sauce that Facebook has.

Just curious - how much organizing do you do? Do you host events with any regularity? Do people like to ask a lot of questions about your events or want to share publicly that they're going to them with people? Do people sometimes want to know who is going to your events so that they can choose when not to go because they don't like that person? (And when someone is going so that they can go) Do you have a very active group of people who like to interact with each other in a public forum? Now is that group size beyond 100 people?

You'd be surprised how crap email is for any of that. You'd be surprised how people don't want to have 10 different apps for all the activities and prefer one central source to catch up on everything. Facebook can be very useful.

I say forget "the network". If your so-called friends don't have your email address, they aren't your friends.

I would agree with this for phone numbers, but not email.

Especially in the case of Instagram, it's a de facto RSS reader for a lot of really good content, if you curate it right.

I'm happy to say that the network I have built through Instagram has taken my photography to new levels and facilitated social interactions I'd never have had otherwise.

It is very fair to want to take the good (network/community) and leave the bad (walled-garden and tracking).

My RSS reader doesn't spy on and profile me while I use it

You're assuming a similar, or even the same, network can't be found outside of <site-x>.

I suspect this is a subset of what I call "The Fallacy of The Best", the idea that things can objectively be quantified as "the best" and that there is significant value that cannot be realized without "the best".

In reality, the products and services you choose have relatively little impact on the quality of experience you have, both because there is little substantial difference between most things on the main, and because the effort you put into things is far more important.

Many people need to feel part of a social circle in order to be happy. Many if not most of those members of our social circle are going to be friends merely out of convenience or inertia, but that is an unpleasant fact that we avoid thinking about directly.

Leaving social media can be traumatic because you are suddenly brought face to face with the fact that many relationships in your life are a bit of a lie – people don’t really care about you all that much. And sure, you are left with a handful of “real friends” who are still willing to engage with you even though you are now the weirdo of the bunch who doesn’t use social media, but still. I sometimes wonder if the psychological toll of continuing to use social media is less than that of quitting social media.

> If your so-called friends don't have your email address, they aren't your friends.

I don't think that's fair to say in 2020. I'm not arguing for facebook's goodness here, just its ubiquity. When it comes time for me to organize a friends-only event (i.e., not a meetup or community event), I'm not aware of anything better than FB for the task. Say a party with 50 people at it - not all those people have my phone number or email address, but we're still close enough that I could tell you where they grew up. Maybe we chat on messenger sometimes.

I'm actively looking for alternatives. I think I'll disable my FB to still have access to messenger, but mostly I need a replacement for Events. Marketplace is pointless - I get way more hits on my craigslist posts anyway. Photos is stupid, I just put my stuff on photos.google.com and share the URL with people. Hah, though I am just now remembering Instagram is owned by FB.

Query your friends for alternative contact information (email, phone #, etc.). Select your next platform(s). Leave contact information on FB. In 1-6 months, return to FB and remove your account.

You forget that Facebook is not for friends only. Millions of groups of common interest exist as well as communities formed around pages and personalities.

That's fine if you only want to talk about topics nobody will disagree with, like how much we all love some particular piece of media, but I think it's a waste of time to look for sincere deep conversations under the enforced banality of FB's one-size-fits-globally Community Standards.

You can get contact information and maintain ties with communities in other ways as well. Leaving FB can make discovering communities harder, but it doesn't mean remaining part of communities is lost.

For some communities, you're losing most context by not being on FB. Most of the discussion happens on Facebook and not anywhere else. For some communities I'm in, you're basically completely out of the loop if you're not active on Facebook. Yes, you could try to get context from friends but they're getting it from Facebook as well. Once you're all out - none of you will have context.

We used to just spin up a phpbb instance on a shared host for that. A lot of the hosting platforms had/have one-click installs for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com