Deleting Facebook permanently
blog.spacehey.com
blog.spacehey.com
Whatsapp for group communication with friends overseas.
Both of these apps don't have the BS that comes with Facebook.
If you still want to get your fix, TikTok is better platform for getting a mix of interesting content from normal people.
Aside from using Facebook messenger to chat, I don't see a good purpose for Facebook any more, maybe the groups are useful for people?
One group I'm in, entirely devoted to online games, has switched to Discord. But there is a 0% chance Discord will be adopted by the rest of the groups/friends that use FB event scheduling and messaging.
From what friends have said, FB groups features (scheduling, etc.) are what keep them on that platform, along with messenger.
Is this an equally dumbfounding use?
It would be silly if your reason for quitting FB was because you were opposed to them, and then you ran onto IG anyway. Sort of silly when that happens.
I don't have any Facebook apps on my phone, tablet, or computer. I use Instagram and Facebook with Firefox with them locked to a Facebook container. For Instagram, I use User/Agent Switcher to tell it that I'm on an iPad using Safari. It works well except that Facebook won't let me set up two-factor authentication and asks me every time to download the app.
Every once in a while Facebook asks me to join the Facebook and Instagram accounts and I refuse to do so. I assume that they're combining the data anyway. But Facebook does let me use a security key as 2FA and I don't want to lose that.
The major downside is that I can't post to Instagram. But that would bother me more if I were a better photographer or my kids were younger than teenagers.
I also use Fluff-Busting Purity (formerly Facebook Purity) and two kinds of ad-blockers (AdGuard DNS on the router, uBlock Origin in the browser).
Although the instagram platform is more active than ever for browsing chatting and comments, the individuals aren't posting often and the individual activity has shifted to TikTok.
People used to post images every day on Instagram, that's down to like once a year maybe amongst my friends in their 20s and younger.
With the ephemeral stories being common-ish.
And it seems like most of the viral stories/reels/IGTV are just resyndicated from TikTok.
Meme/activist/comedian/lifestyle brand accounts are like all the static post activity. Which is a lot of activity and growing, but I don't think it is fulfilling the "social network" itch that people think it is, the itch where people have just gotten used to seeing a feed/stream of their friends over the last 15 years. I think that has moved on elsewhere.
Instagram was better for the longest time. I noticed a trend of friends using Facebook for events and nothing else, but they were still posting personal content on Instagram. But during this presidency, with everyone being politically charged and angry all the time, I noticed people were posting political content to leverage their Instagram followers, and now that too is overwhelmed by it.
All that said, Twitter comes off to me as the biggest cesspool. Its entire format is built around short hot takes, sniping at others, "virality", and other societal dark patterns. Reddit is almost at the same degree of cesspoolery with their new designs. Both are also a lot more of an echo chamber than Facebook for me, although I do like that you can use them anonymously (without a real name). Personally, I really can't see why all this hatred is directed at Facebook when Twitter and Reddit are around.
But this isn't a binary choice either. I do get the sense that society would be better off if everyone disengaged and de-escalated from social media in general. It's just hard because it's an effective way to spread one's (political) ideas and gain exposure, and so it's a bit like asking for mutual disarmament.
Can't speak for anyone else, but as OP my post isn't about deleting Facebook because social media is rampant cesspool of dopamine hits. But because Facebook, Inc is an evil company and we shouldn't use their products.
Sincere question: what do you mean by this? I don't perceive them as "evil". That comes off as a vague and subjective accusation. What specifically are you referring to? What makes them worse than other organizations?
Twitter and Reddit aren't even playing the same game, let alone in the same league.
This is typical for every company to the extent that they have the data to do it. Reddit for example, can personalize your feed without needing an account, because they are able to track your behavior based on IP address. Google does the same thing across all their properties, such as YouTube, and arguably their presence is more pervasive than Facebook's.
I figured out that Facebook itself is not awful. It may be in many ways, but it is my 'friends' who drove me away. When I was around them they seemed semi normal. But put them behind a keyboard and the truth came out of what they were and how they really thought about me and my beliefs. Their inner keyboard warrior came out. They were not real friends but 'friends' of proximity. I had confused friendly with friends.
I had similar feelings before I left Facebook. This sort of thing even irked me back in high school, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why.
Every time it was my birthday, my timeline (or "wall" as I think it's known on FB) was inundated with Birthday wishes and greetings. Most of these greetings and wishes came from people who very rarely, if ever, talked to me on FB and oftentimes, never talked to me in real life (Usually my "true" friends would send me a direct message and wish me a Happy Birthday), and these people most certainly wouldn't know when my birthday was if Facebook hadn't reminded them.
It all just seemed so disingenuous, fake, and at the risk of exaggerating, inhuman. It all felt so joyless and disconnected. Before I left FB, I simply got to the point where I wouldn't comment, like, or interact with these birthday wishes in any way. Eventually, the amount of birthday wishes I received became less and less. Thinking about it now, I probably should've just removed my birthday from Facebook.
Regardless, I'm happier without Facebook and I certainly don't miss it.
Was this back when the CDC guidelines were saying the same? I can't fault lay people for placing faith in the words of supposed science/data-driven institutions (if that was what was happening rather than people spouting ridiculous conspiracy theories).
Everybody I know is on Whatsapp/Signal, so I really don't feel like I'm missing anything.
I wish I could say this. It seems the US is the only country where everyone wants to continue using SMS/iMessage for everything. It's literally the only way to communicate with most of my American friends.
I use Whatsapp regularly and it still can't hold a candle to iMessage. I blame Android adoption, and the fact that Google never built an iMessage competitor so they are stuck with 20 year old SMS.
Most non-nerd friends just do what they’re told and love the idea of “Signal is WhatsApp but Zuck isn’t reading your messages”.
Same, and in addition, everyone I know has since moved to Instagram. I think what Google+ wanted to do with "circles", Twitter and Instagram did it more elegantly with "follows".
Reading between the lines of this presentation at f8 [0], I think, even Zuck's resigned to the fact that Facebook the company is now all about WhatsApp and Instagram.
The more I think about the WhatsApp deal, the less it makes sense for Jan and Brian to have cashed out. It could have been a different world had they not.
There's extra financial value in knowing who is attracted to whom.
I cannot imagine just how terrible the privacy must be for people dating via Facebook.
My FB was becoming a ghost town 5 years ago, so I stopped using it, then deleted my "real" profile. I maintain a shell account now for Marketplace, Groups, and Messenger. I have the "light" apps on my phone with all requested permissions denied.
Marketplace SUCKS from a usability perspective, but it's become equally as active than CL in my area.
Groups are a goldmine of information - my neighborhood has one that is active, I have an active one for my model vehicle, and there are B/S/T groups that are nice, as well. Groups have effectively killed the old Forums/Bulletin Boards.
Messenger is required if you want to buy/sell, etc. I don't use it for anything useful.
I have a house in a remote community where it's hard to find contractors and the like. The local FB group has been invaluable in finding local resources, getting to know neighbors, and alerting neighbors of local conditions. The alternatives are basically Nextdoor and craigslist which suffer from network effects among other things.
Of course people use the group as a soap-box or meme/clickbait sprayer at times, but the mods do a pretty good job such that there are very few wortwhile "forked" groups.
Similar applies for a few other interest groups I'm in. Groups.io is starting to eat their lunch on that, and reddit is gaining steam in the mainstream, but again network effects are strong.
When using an app container and limiting engagement with clickbait content, there is still some human value in participating on facebook in these very limited ways.
There are people I know from mailing lists and newsgroups and fora who are my acquaintances, even though we've never met in meatspace. I have cried over their deaths and been happy at news of their joys.
There are people I remember from tens of years and thousands of miles away, whom I hear from more regularly because of social media networks. That's nice. It's low effort for me, it's low effort for them, and we all get more out of it than we put in.
If what you mean by the word "friend" is, someone who will answer your call in the middle of the night and bring over a shovel and a tarp -- I have only a few of those. Those relationships take more work, and are not fully sustained by social media, though they may be partially supported by it.
However, today due to everyone moving to Facebook and other content silos with a mobile app, independent website forums are severely hollowing out. On some of the forums about various hobbies that I follow, the most active posters left are often extremely curmudgeonly elderly people, and if they hail from very polarized countries they are quick to descend into political rants to the point that they do little on-topic posting. Facebook isn’t a satisfying place for friendship due to the feeds and algorithms, and independent forums can now be high-stress environments. Consequently, the internet feels like a more lonely place than before.
Tools being tools, some of them are better than others.
Here's a list of subjects that I know people have bonded over:
- fandom of specific works - generic fandom - fish aquaria - genre literature - a period of history - games (video, board, role-playing, LARP...) - sports - watches - cars - appliance repair - carpentry
You need strict enough moderation that firefights and trolls are quashed immediately, and loose enough moderation that the occasional side-conversation or on-topic rant is allowed through. Proper threading and the ability to know what you've already seen and what is new: those are also necessary.
The internet is what you make of it.
Not only do I not miss it, I'm actively hostile towards Facebook for the damage it does to the idea of friendship.
My first wake up call came from Trump winning the 2016 election, 2nd from Cambridge Analytica. 3rd, The Social Dilemma put the nail in the coffin.
I just could not see myself contributing directly or indirectly to these externalities. The costs outweighed the benefits (if any at all)
PS: I know this post might be marketing for you, but ultimately all social networks will become polluted as long as they encourage the weaknesses/dark sides of human nature. I don’t see Spacehey being any different.
So, whenever someone makes a fuss about that huge importance of deleting Facebook and how supposedly hard it is - I genuinely fail to understand the problem.
in addition there are many hobbies groups on FB that have no alternative venue other than old-style forums which suck
and finally FB marketplace has been very useful to me ,especially with this corona situation causing store closings and delays in shipping
I never use facebook, but I will never delete it. I don’t trust facebook.
You end up with this self-feeding cycle of people keeping facebook around because they have to. Eventually what ends up happening is an alternative comes along and people essentially forget about the platform that it just shuts down and collapses on itself. We're slowly inching towards that final outcome.
Facebook accounts cannot be taken that way.
I now have a minimal facebook account that I log in twice a year to keep a current photo. It's like how businesses have to squat their own domain names on TLDs they don't use.
I now have a real account just for my gaming group and my old account occasionally pops up in my suggested friends list.
In some ways for a business, not having a facebook is like not having a URL.
Keep the account . If you are worried about discipline , reset the password to a random password and lock it in a safe
E2EE, Federation, self-hosting, open source, etc. are all great, but they don't really address the real reason social network sites are so toxic - We have to entirely remove the advertisers from the equation.
People would be far less likely to post or share dumb stuff if being banned means there's a risk of losing your 'equity' in the platform.
Isn’t this like HN already? Also who will define what is “dumb” if even the community can be eventually polluted and biased? Would a moderator or owner decide this?
Careful, money and greed can pollute anything. I tend to find that content that is not profit motivated are often the most truthful- ex: whistleblowers
It turns out that even for channels I subscribe to the percentage of stuff they post that I want to see is pretty damn low, even lower than the "hit rate" of the algorithm which also isn't great. Now imagine a social network where you connect with people for reasons other than that you think you'd like what they post (you met them IRL and they asked you to add them, you want to talk, etc). An algorithm of some sort would be absolutely mandatory.
Social trends seem to come in waves, and people get bored quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if the world tires of today’s brand of social media in a decade or two. The Facebook Killer will thus be something completely different, not merely a better or more ethical version of contemporary social media.
Or maybe I’m just being too optimistic.
The next big thing must flush you with probably an order or so more dopamine - maybe some free artificial/AR world with hundreds of new cool friends who aren't real but make you feel better. That would be so 2020s!
People love to speculate about "Facebook Killers", but what is there to even kill? Facebook doesn't offer people a useful service. It's just familiar and ubiquitous, so it exists in perpetuity.
> The Facebook Killer will thus be something completely different, not merely a better or more ethical version of contemporary social media.
Then it's not a "Facebook Killer", is it? It would just be another social media platform added to the pile. Just another Twitter, Snapchat, TicTok, etc.
I just can’t imagine young people (main drivers of social media) are going to be happy with circa 2005 social media forever.
I held out on deleting Instagram for literal years until about 2 months ago. I finally got fed up when they overhauled the UI to focus on selling cheap and crappy goods. I always thought it provided a lot of benefit to my life because it was fun to share pictures. Turns out I didn't even care when I deleted it lol.
I think about deleting Twitter too, but it's just so darn useful for breaking news. And I could never get rid of Reddit. It is certainly an echo chamber but unless something bad happens it's basically the best website to find other hobbyists and even ask technical questions.
1. I am not using whatsapp and recently I stumbled upon an iOS app that asked for a phone number to register and then tried to send OTP through whatsapp. SMS was a fallback option there which showed afterwards and was not active for 5 minutes because of the “timeout” between otp requests )))
2.A bottle of water advertised some lottery and had a QR code which was a FB link leading to a page that showed me a vague message about FB messenger which I don’t have.
It turns out that some people/companies nowadays assume FB and affiliated/owned companies to be a kinda standard for communication.
Boys and girls, write down and remember a simple rule: none of the commercial organizations will provide means of communication (apps, public APIs and SDKs) as standards unless those aforementioned means fit their business model.
Real standards belong either to public domain or to established non-commercial foundations with clear and transparent governance, leadership and policies.
Back on topic. I remember FB as a site that united students and alumni of major universities. This was probably the only period of fun in facebook history.
I remember VK.com being a Russian facebook clone with similar initial posture and user base which was also fun until its users started to go to jail for political reasons.
I would argue that this fate is waiting any “social” “network” after some point in their evolution.
A Cozy platform for chitchats and pic sharing gains more and more users, attention and money and transforms to a monster that starts eating its children and encourages all the deadly sins.
If you know an example of a social media that managed to escape this fate I will be happy to stand corrected.
Mastodon has a growing active community, is completely open source, federated, and community driven.
What eventually wrecks any of the "meet friends/family/strangers and chat loosely" MySpace/Facebook/Google+/etc. networks toxic is that they're "unbounded" to serve their business model. They want to show 50% quarter-over-quarter active-user growth, and when that caps out, they need to squeeze the user bases for ever more interaction and engagement. Quality is not on the radar. So they're incentivized first to load the site with bots, desperate virality and recruitment efforts, and low-quality content, and later more and more obnoxious algorithms and dark-pattern design.
A topic-driven forum tends to have different motivations. The definition of success is to be a compelling community and content for a specific, and typically finite, audience. You're not going to growth-hack Hacker News or Deskthority in quite the same toxic way as Facebook does.
A small, but tighter-knit community often can be self-funded via subscriptions or donations, and if you go ad supported, there's a potential for a high-quality non-programmatic-nightmare ad experience, based on direct relations with advertisers directly relevant to the site theme and audience.
There's also granularity and control created by it not being a single all-purpose systen. Each new community is an opt-in choice rather than an algorithmic imposition, and you can punt the toxic ones without having to delete them all.
I am currenlty well on my way in the process of uncondition myself from using Instagram, and I haven't touched WA in months.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was reading my ads profile summary in Facebook settings. It claimed I was in “Established Adult Family Life with Children” or something similar. This was revolting. I was disturbed that Facebook seemed to know I was expecting a baby. I realized that Facebook was extracting far more value than it was giving, so I deleted my account.
And so I have not yet bought my self a VR set. Thankfully Valve stepped up last year.
I was a FB member for a few years and quit mostly because I wasn't actually interested in what anyone was up to. As far I could tell, FB worked perfectly fine. My breaking point was realizing that my friends and family aren't that interesting.
It is the platform that social group has settled on, somehow, worldwide, for advertising & organizing events and, most importantly, communicating last minute changes to those/after parties, etc.
If you are a tango dancer and not on FB you must communicate with people who are, constantly, to not miss stuff. It's not practical.
That being said: I never look at my stream. I mostly use messenger and post in groups, when looking for flat-/car sharing for tango events.
How will it not be overrun by bots and unsavory characters? We don't know. It's not a corporation backed platform. It's literally an 18 year old developer who pined for a simpler time that he unfortunately only got to experience vicariously through those who weren't a toddler as he was.
But I've made it my non-business related social media platform and support him and it.
My main activity was to stay up to date on events. What's happening, who goes where, etc.
Huh? For many people it's exactly the opposite. The value of Facebook was in casual chat, posting, etc, to connect with friends and random followers in the age of Corona.
My friends use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Twitter, Instagram etc.
The juice just isn't worth the squeeze to me. (Turns out I was the one being squeezed anyway.)
More recently, I've had issues logging in via mobile browser so that's helped as another blocker.
Time passed, people moved on; had families, etc. I've tried a few other platforms like facebook, but they all seemed so fake, shallow, and "designed for AOL'ers" that was a recipe for crap. So I never stuck around.
G+ arrived and had the right feel, but it never grew legs.
Facebook has two things going for it. (1) it's an echo chamber (2) the "OMG I can communicate with somebody over the internet" dopamine spike
Well I got #2 too, but I was 12 years old on a C64 connecting to BBS's. So I out-grew it. Why can't all these people outgrow this?
You've touched on a fundamental point that G+ was trying to get across with "circles." I'm a member of probably 20 different groups across various messaging platforms. These are tight little communities with a lot of trust. It isn't that we all agree politically or anything, but we trust each other to be kind, consistent, and not too spammy. Anyway, I think small groups in WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, IRC, etc.. are the present and future of good social interactions.
1. I quit fb many years ago. In my case, using it made me anxious so getting back on it would have been the challenge instead. The main drawback is that you lose out on some of the organic meetings that strengthen relationships. It's not that people forget about you, but that by simple friction you will not participate in certain interactions. This will be generational as the youngest users will be on another service and older users will have networks that aren't as influenced by fb. Note that fb is still extremely popular even among the <30 crowd in Europe.
2. I eventually caved in and installed fb messenger without linking it to my account, which I use for certain group chats. I don't regret this usage at all, as it's only intentional communications and there is none of the browsing aspect that makes fb notorious. The other advantage is that I no longer have to explain to new people why I'm not on fb, I just add them to messenger. Many years ago, people would actually be insulted if I told them that as they would interpret it as me not wanting to connect with them further. This was particularly true in places outside of Europe and the US where fb pretty much was the internet for people.
3. I had a negative impression of Instagram from the get go. I use it to look at the work of artists and photographers, but exclusively on the laptop. In this specific use case, it's pretty great. The purely social or cultural aspect of it (by that I mean the culture and behavior that is a consequence of the app itself) is absolute cancer in my opinion. Almost like a mental illness and conformity factory unless you already have high social status or some instagrammable quality, in which case you will get much out of it I suppose.
4. Of course, it's one of the oldest traditions in the world for older generations to completely misunderstand the young. I do not envy people growing up today however. The fear of being filmed doing dumb stuff or the constant pressure is no joke.
Twitter, on the other hand, is both compelling and threatening. It draws me in and sucks up far too much of my time. And when I've waded into controversial waters I've been met with hordes of strangers calling me names, making fun of my appearance, and even in one case emailing my employer in an effort to materially harm me for disagreeing on the internet.
Nothing like that has ever happened to me on Facebook.
Between Facebook and Twitter I find the latter both far more threatening and, because it's also actually compelling, far more difficult to leave.
Facebook is a zero by comparison.
Just to be able to read and post in local groups to my community. I use a special browser for it with facebook container installed.
I’m only missing superficial connection as elegantly detailed in the Digital Minimalism book.
The other one (relevant to this thread) is that Facebook is a great product and people only hate it now because it's a such a horrendously efficient mirror of the ugliness of humanity.
Considering that cats 1) have been human companions since the ancient Egyptian days, when the penalty of killing a cat was death, 2) ONLY became human companions of their own volition after their utility in eradicating mice and rats was recognized (note that until a few decades ago, pets were kept outdoors most of the time)... I really, REALLY doubt this prediction tremendously LOL.
Also, you have entirely obviously never had a cat. (I've had both dogs and cats. Cats are more interesting. Dogs are like permanent 3 year old boys.)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/cats-are-an-extreme-....
10,000 years of interactions with cats, and they're just as wild, genetically, as their wild counterparts. Interesting?
If you want to get out of the FB world, you need to delete FB and IG.
I know google is more pervasive in services, these two can be a good start.
But also instead of Chrome use Brave or Edge, both built on Chromium and are essentially Chrome, but without Google's spyware bloat.
I'm too lazy to like transfer all my playlists and liked songs to a new account.
[1] https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Answers/I-want-to-d...
for some handy automation of this (previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963599)
FB main platform I'll use for events and, most importantly, Groups. I have been overall quite impressed with the communities in the FB Groups (of course some are better than others).
For example I've been a huge fan of the Streets of Rage series; SOR4 came out last year, 25 years after the previous release. The Streets of Rage 4 facebook group has been an absolute godsend. Very active community, tons of expert players posting videos, very easy to find people to play with, funny memes, the works. The SOR4 discord is hit and miss and reddit is too much of a message board and isn't so active. FB Group is light years ahead of any other community for this game that I've found.
I've also joined groups for The Office, Futurama, etc (all of have dozens of different groups, each tailored slightly differently). I laugh at anyone who says all they see on their feed is people posting bullshit, vitriol, and misinformation. That is a YOU problem, not a FB problem. My feed is filled with relevant updates from friends, as well as a constant stream of The Office/Futurama/Streets of Rage 4. Exactly how I want it.
If we're just passive where I'd love to see an update about life stages and progression... fb it is. Really wish the world was but a series of email mailing lists.
Thankfully, it's completely possible to use only Messenger, but you need to jump through some hoops. Facebook will automatically enable your "normal" account, so you need to disable it (not delete it) to "keep" the Messenger functionality while closing your profile.
As for FB as a social network, I don't know. I'll echo the sentiment in the currently top voted comment here: nobody I know uses it that way anymore, except the oldest ones in my family. Looking at it cynically, I guess it makes sense that the generation that are the least resilient to online disinformation are also the last ones to jump ship.
By deleting completely and going to alternatives, that's how we tell them it's not ok.
Got a backup being generated right now by Facebook of all my data, and will be permanently deleting it after that.
There are so many app alternatives out there (that are as well built technically) that you don’t need to rely on anything from Facebook's ecosystem anymore. Give it a try, no disappointments
* Not really.
To manage the best I can, I purely use messenger.com and stay out of facebook.com. I keep in touch but I don't get caught up in the rest of the BS.
It's not about making a point, it's about not actively being part of the thing I see as a problem.
news.ycombinator.com 127.0.0.1
or whatever the formatting should be
Unfortunately, I never been able to get people to try it.
Even so, the fidelity of access you have control over is brilliant. I can hide my content, open it up, hide it again...whenever I want and instantly.
Something to think about if anyone were to try to create a new platform.
But, with all the people I know who don't have a Facebook at this point, I'm gonna just say I have zero confidence most of their users aren't bots. I would be surprised if FB had a billion real users at this point. It should literally be close to impossible to find folks without them in western countries, statistically, but it's not. It's becoming easier and more common... or folks just lie about not having facebook for some reason (which is plausible though very weird).