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Comment by Perceval | Hacker News Reader

> if I cut myself off of Facebook I'm losing out on a huge, huge percentage of social interaction

Is it possible to have a Facebook account but just use it as a back-end? For instance, don't use the website or the app. But use Cue to pull events out onto your calendar, and Verbs to get Facebook chat, and so on?

https://www.cueup.com/

http://verbs.im/

Is there a way to use a constellation of apps that access Facebook info so that you effectively don't have to be on Facebook itself?

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I don't even use cueup. You can pull fb events directly into a gcal.

For me, using fb as a backend has proved to be really effective in eliminating a lot of the social 'noise' while not missing out on fb-only event invites.

Cool, I didn't know about Verbs for chat. I've linked FB to my Google Calendar before, the only problem with that was people making month-long events for college promotions -- you don't realize how much calendar spam noise your friends make until that data leaves Facebook's filters.

Is there value in utilizing Facebook's databases and allowing them to track your connections, but having to manage your own front-end for everything?

There was a time (maybe it's still possible) when Facebook Chat used XMPP, which means you could use a client like bitlbee or pdigin to connect.

It's still possible. I used pidgin today for Facebook Chat.

It was never very stable.

Define stable. Do you mean it crashes? or that it drops out once in a while? Because I use Facebook over XMPP and I've never actually experienced any problems.

It dropped a lot when I tried using it, and the "in browser and Adium and a Pidgin" combination was super unstable -- caused it to crash a lot more. It may have improved, but I couldn't get it to stay connected more than 15 minutes. This was about 2 years ago maybe?

This is awesome. I actually deleted the app and stuff for a few days, but the main problem was with stuff like events. I would have an event on FB but forget where it was and have to log in to check. I'm really not sure I could emphasize enough what a POS facebook is for actually interacting with other human beings.

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