Fediverse

I was once a Facebook using programmer guy like you, then I ~~took an arrow to the knee~~ did 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.

You are in the denial phase of deleting your Facebook account.

• marketplace
• messenger

Literally my only attachments to Meta at this point. I want to delete my account so badly.

A couple things you may not have considered about Facebook.

1. 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.

2. 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 deleted it and have no regrets, I couldn't even say what I want without hearing someone from my family and I don't care what crazy shit my family has to say I don't even like them

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.

If I remember right, diaspora was kind of poised to be the fediverse facebook a very long time ago, one of it's major features was aspects, which indeed was set where you added people to categories, and could make posts only visible to certain categories (basically if you remember google plus, that's what they were copying). Though from what I've seen it took a huge PR hit very early on, but still is kind of alive last I checked.

https://diasporafoundation.org/

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

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.

I use it for fam and friends, special interest groups, and local events. It’s still a useful platform if you curate it well. It just takes effort. And Firefox plugins.

The main reasons I still haven’t closed Mine is that there are a couple niche groups I follow, and places that post daily status updates about things like ice fishing conditions that only exist there and marketplace. I hate how Facebook hollowed out Craigslist.

Personally, as someone who hasn't had a FB account for well over five years, it's super weird to me that you need it to "keep up with family and friends". You're using a data harvesting, advertising, and propaganda platform to conduct personal communications. There was a time when this was done using nothing more than the United States Post Office and the telephone. So, we probably have the technology to keep in touch today while excluding Facebook.

In response to your concern with privacy controls: it's not federated and I can only assume they're being honest about privacy, you might consider looking at Vero. It has up-front tools to control who sees what.

Still, I would encourage people to minimize their reliance on any platform owned by someone else to maintain relationships. At someone point, something will break, will be hacked, will go out of business. Do you think Facebook will exist for 25 to 50 years from now? When it goes, all your photos and videos and conversations go with it. When someone dies, all the memories they've captured are gone. Hashtag: bring back photo albums.

Mastodon has a post only to followers feature, admins will be able to see those posts (because they would have to be able to if they are to send them to your followers on their instance) but other than that, it’s private.

Now mastodon isn’t a one to one replacement like friendica but it doesn’t seem like there isn’t a reason they couldn’t make a similar feature as far as I know

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.

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.

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

I have linkedin and facebook and its exculsively to just keep up contacts and I look for work on linkedin and occasionaly bitch at some corp on facebook.

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.

I use Facebook to communicate with my HS classmates as I have been in charge of organizing our class reunions and no one wants to be contacted on platforms. (Not that I blame them)

However as soon as our 15 year reunion comes around this summer, I’m gathering email addresses and will organize the 20th via email because I’m deleting my account after that. If people want to get together for our 20th they can either give me their email or can plan it without me.

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.

You should be closing your Facebook regardless of your desire to use an alternative...

If you want private messaging decentralized, there is Matrix. If you don't mind, there is Signal or Threema.

I don't think there's anything in the Fediverse meant to support the family updates use case.

We use giant SMS text message threads for that.

For more privacy, we get everyone to use Signal or XMPP with OMEMO.