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Comment by Thriptic | Hacker News Reader

I have trouble leaving Facebook because for better or worse it is how many of my friends and acquaintances communicate. I ended up finding a nice compromise: I installed an extension which hides all the content on news feed but still allows FB chat. When I couple this extension with ublock, the only thing I see when I go to Facebook is the chat interface, which is perfect for how I use the service.

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Facebook have done that themselves! No extensions required! www.messenger.com is literally just FB chat, nothing else.

wow thanks, I feel stupid for not knowing about that.

I only found out recently and I think it's relatively new 'feature'.

Awesome. Thank you! Can't believe I didn't know about this.

Wow thanks!

Wow, that's almost the opposite of the way I use Facebook. I keep chat turned off all the time. I hate interruptions that demand (or even imply) an immediate response, and that's what live chat/text messages/IM represent to me.

Yes, sometimes I do want real-time messages, but that's not how I want things to be most of the time. I'm perfectly okay with seeing "old friend had a baby" or "cousin graduated from high school" the next day, or whenever. It's not that I don't care about these things; I do care about them. I just don't want things that don't require a real-time response sent through a real-time communications medium.

Or just use https://www.facebook.com/messages/ ?

Or even just https://www.messenger.com

This still shows the notifications, the sidebar that suggests groups, new friends, etc. It's a minor detail, but I don't want to be bombarded with events, tagged photos, whatever. But I do really love Messenger as a chat platform. It's quicker and more consistent than SMS (at least for my carrier) and syncs well across all of my devices.

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