I have decided to write down the reasoning behind me not (yet) closing my Facebook account. Which I really want to do, but feel like I cannot (yet).
My background: software developer.
What I use Facebook for: to keep up to date with family and friends.
In other words: I do not need “outside” people to see my posts. Not everything has to be shared with everyone for me.
I have noticed a lot of people opening up bluesky accounts “because it is not meta”, (which is a good thing, obviously).
The only issue is that the fediverse is a twitter (I refuse the name X) platform. Everything is public. On friendica, I can at least control who follows me, but I cannot determine who can see my posts.
So in my case, what happens is that some people might open a bsky/fediverse account, realize that everything is public and not use it again.
Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts? While I do realize that with the Federation protocol everything is sort of public, this is the thing that keeps me from moving from fb to fediverse.
Edit: Holy crap guys, thank you for all the responses. The fediverse is aliiiive.
Too much to respond to, but:
1: yes i know fb is evil 2: as soon as the friend updates end, i stop scrolling. No desire to see all the stupid diy “tips”. 3: yes it sounds lame to use it to keep updated, but there is quite some distance between me and my friends and family 4: even if mastodon has the ability to not make posts public, every node admin can access the database. And I think that goes for every Federated platform, diaspora included.
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Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts?
It does. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon and Lemmy.
Especially Hubzilla and (streams) with their advanced permissions systems provide what you’re looking for and more. Only downsides are the learning curves ((streams)’ learning curve is not exactly shall, Hubzilla’s is steeper), UIs that don’t look like they were made in 2024 from venture capital and a total lack of native mobile apps (you can install both as PWAs, though).
- marketplace
- messenger
Literally my only attachments to Meta at this point. I want to delete my account so badly.
Same my friend, same… I’m on FB since 2008 or so as all my families and friends. For years now everyone gave up on it (I mean nobody is posting their vacation or food plate anymore) and the feed is mainly sponsored ads and far right stuff (In Canada there is no official news, only alternatives news).
But everyone are still using Messenger to talk, we have groups etc, and damn Marketplace is the thing here in Montreal, everyone is using it and it’s incredible to buy/sell, you need it or you will never buy/sell anything used.
I’m in the same boat, I want to ditch Meta, but Messenger/Marketplace has no alternatives.
Unfortunately, also, all the good old forums died off and people are using FB groups now, but it’s not as good
I never installed WhatsApp or Messenger on my mobile devices. I’ve found Signal is a good alternative, and increasingly people are adopting it… https://signal.org - it’s owned by a charitable foundation, not a mega corporation.
For marketplace there is a project in development. It’s called Flohmarkt. Not quite ready yet for primetime but worth keeping an eye on
I’ve heard that you can keep your account but delete your Facebook Profile
Also owned by Meta
OfferUp, while not defederated, seems like a good option for a marketplace alternative for now.
Messenger can be replaced by signal, discord, or any other messaging type app.Messenger can be replaced by signal, discord, or any other messaging type app.
… Messenger can be replaced by what the person you’re trying to communicate with is willing to use. I’ve resisted using WhatsApp on my personal phone for years because I just don’t trust Meta products, but you have to have it in Costa Rica. It’s just a fact of life. Same with messenger in a lot of ways.
Why do you “have to use” whatsapp in costa rica? Other services don’t work there?
network effect
There are countries where every service has their official support on WhatsApp. I just booked a medical appointment via WhatsApp, it’s the preferred method of communication.
I think they’re saying the friends and family don’t understand or can’t/won’t figure out the alternatives. If you want to text them you have to use Messenger.
It’s sad, and familiar. All of my extended friends and family on Windows I just have to give them a sad look, like, “Aw. Poor thing.”
Oftentimes you can convince people to switch for one on one convos, but in a lot of places, all the group chats are on whatsapp, so like your alumni chat, your work group, your friend group, the group that was made for that event next week.
Those things are near impossible to change unless you are close to the organiser and they are willing to do you a big favour.
I was once a Facebook using programmer guy like you, then I
took an arrow to the kneedid some work for Meta and got a close up and personal look at their internal culture. It beyond pissed me off and creeped me out. I just couldn’t.Now, people have to text me to invite me to events and parties and stuff. I don’t know what’s going on with major chunks of my friends group half the time. I have to get my news and gossip the old fashioned way.
Before my Meta subcontractor experience, I spoke like you. But after, I don’t even miss it. Thinking about logging on to Facebook is like fingernails on a chalk board.
Thanks for sharing. Could you consider doing an AMA about your experience there?
You are in the denial phase of deleting your Facebook account.
Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts?
Because of the way the protocol works.
There is no way to accomplish this is a publicly federated network without trusting the portals people use and/or creating some sort of public key exchange on friend requests.
This results in privacy breaches being as simple as compromising one node, or writing some code to make a node hostile.
The key idea would be basically when you friend/follow someone you send them your public key, they keep a list of keys and encode/individually send followed messages to people. Very onerous.
This.
The constant refrains of “Why won’t this public content sharing network bend over backwards to keep the things I share private?” shows a persistent misunderstanding of what’s going on here.
And also of how much privacy they actually have while using centralized social media. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
How do I upvote this post twice?
You can have multiple accounts, maybe on different instances, and you can upvote with all of them. A lot of clients allow easy account switching, e.g. in voyager if you tap on your username on the bottom bar twice, it opens an account selector dialog.
that’s a whole other kettle of fish
I will use that liberally from now on. An upvote from me.
Yes, people very much misunderstand thus stuff.
Doesn’t PixelFed allow marking accounts private though?
I don’t know what mechanism they use, but I have a hunch that if you allowlist one user from an instance, the instance owner could potentially see the stuff. Not just your own instance owner.
How are you (plural, I mean other posters too) managing to use Facebook to keep tabs on your friends? It’s so full of “sponsored”, “clips” and “ad” posts that it takes absurd amount of time to get to what people in your friends list posted. And it’s like 1 post from someone I know, 10 irrelevant trash
It does show the events (mainly concerts for me) other people are going to, so that’s why I do open it once in a few months
It’s mainly on facebook messenger for me. You’re right that it’s really hard to keep tabs on family/friends with a feed that’s full of stuff you’re not even following or subscribed to. So by “keeping tabs”, it’s actually just being able to keep in touch via messenger. Other than that, I use marketplace to sell stuff, but that’s it.
Ah, yeah. Messenger got so big that I’ve heard some users don’t even know it’s part of Facebook. They use it as separate app
I use “Feeds”. Click on the menu, then select Feeds, and then Friends. You will still get ads, but it is much better than the default feed.
Hm. I’ll have to take a look where to find it in SlimSocial. Thanks :)
I still use Facebook for family and friends. They aren’t going to switch and would sooner leave social media altogether.
I spend about five minutes or less a day on FB but I only check my friends feed. Aside from that, I don’t enjoy the majority of the content I see on FB and choose not to engage with it.
A couple things you may not have considered about Facebook.
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It’s horrible for keeping up with friends and family now. 95% of your feed is sponsored content crap that you didn’t agree to see, and can’t get rid of. Facebook does not want to show you what little content friends and family are still sharing.
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You are probably not as private as you think you are. Your account is private, but everything you say on other people’s posts who do not have a private account is public.
i have an extension that fixes the first one. it’s called fb purity. let’s you control what content is on your feed and how it’s displayed.
i don’t post to Facebook anymore, i just browse it to see what friends and family are posting. it still works quite well for that with this extension.
Ah, I have that on my desktop. It’s a pretty great plug-in. Unfortunately I haven’t found an equivalent for Firefox Android, and I do almost all of my browsing from my phone. I work from home at my desk for 8-10 hours per day, 5 days per week, so the last thing I want to do after I get off work is to sit at my desktop computer some more. Facebook is also pushing so much junk that it really decreased the amount of stuff people share, so it’s kind of a hollow shell of what it used to be. After you purge the sponsored content, there’s not much left. It really shows how fake the whole platform is now. Zuck is making billions of dollars pushing sponsored content to other content sponsors.
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Make a group chat. Also, see my recent posts.
Most people won’t close their facebook account. if it ever does happen it will be because the accounts are purged (highly unlikely given facebooks raging hardon for data) or that the site undergoes a massive transformation after losing a ton of value and rebranding ala myspace.
That likely wouldn’t happen for many many years until a solid competitor arose that grew enough to overtake them and that’s real challenging given their size. It was one thing when user counts were in the millions or even tens or hundreds of millions but facebook has several billion users. That’s like a sizable chunk of the entire population of earth.
It would take a very novel approach to overcome those numbers and then you also have to consider momentum: at this point there are a great deal of people who consider facebook “the internet”. Like they open their browser/phone and that’s what they do. It is their habit. Then in second place you have instagram so even if you knocked facebook off meta would still ultimately be ok. And with the incubation period of social media they’d probably have another one up and coming long before your threat became viable that would have the benefit of starting in like 7th place simply because of their massive market share (see: threads). By the time your social network had the 10ish years it takes to get to hundreds of millions of users they’d potentially have that one at a billion, or have pulled the plug and moved on to another trial with a massive head start
Doesn’t mean to give up on the fediverse stuff, just that the gross corporate social media likely wont go away for a very long time, if ever. Barring outside influence like regulatory change of course
You didn’t answer the OP’s question.
Personally I stopped using Facebook years ago, but I kept the account around for my grandma’s sake.
She has since stopped using the computer all together, so I took that opportunity to finally delete my account.I do still use Whatsapp though… I would prefer if I didn’t have to use it, but there is no real way around it in the Netherlands.
but there is no real way around it in the Netherlands.
The way around it is to force everyone to learn how to load Signal. If they can’t overcome this incredibly tiny step, you must excommunicate them from your life. It’s harsh, but to be fair, they had a 30 year head start and still can’t figure it out.
Mastodon is a huge part of the Fediverse. It allows you to control who can follow you (you can set it to prompt you to approve each new follower). You can make your posts visible to your followers only. Each post you make has a visibility option, and you can set it to followers-only by default.
Is that enforced by encryption or does it rely on federated instances to respect the visibility settings of such posts?
Yes, it relies on federation. I don’t think the data will even be sent to instances unless someone follows you on that instance.
friendica, diaspora, and hubzilla all have groups/circles/aspects/whatever you wanna call it for post sharing privacy and are solid feature rich platforms in general
I don’t mind having 2 tools: one for public conversations with strangers and one for family and friends.
WhatsApp has replaced Facebook for family and friends here in France. However, I keep using Facebook due to local groups and town hall posting there.
Y’know that’s still just meta right?
Unfortunately yes.
I’m a minority: I’m using Signal a lot, as well as Mastodon and Lemmy. However I was describing the situation around me and they’re largely using Meta products.
I still use it for the various buy swap sell and town info groups. It’s a handy place to keep up to date with what’s happening in small towns. As a result, the sponsored content isn’t in the way much.
