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).
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.
This is the way
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
- marketplace
- messenger
Literally my only attachments to Meta at this point. I want to delete my account so badly.
I’ve heard that you can keep your account but delete your Facebook Profile
Also owned by Meta
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.
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.
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.
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.
This. I basically didn’t use my facebook for the last 6 years and i left it deactivated most of the time. My thinking was that people could use messenger to reach out to me (and my family has mostly been using messenger for stuff anyeay) but even then, that only proved true for a handful of circumstances, and the people who did make use of messenger or a non-deactivated account all had my phone number anyway.
Would my experience be different if I was more active on facebook? Eh, maybe. Maybe I’m an oddity, but most of my high school and college connections barely post on facebook as it is, if at all. I didn’t lose much by finally giving it the axe last week.
I think you bring up a good point about college and high school classmates. I don’t personally care about this but I imagine millions of others do. IMO, these groups should maintain their own social platforms. If you want to keep in touch with your classmates from Harvard, Harvard (or a private student counsel board) should maintain a forum for you.
Right - you want to post a picture of your kid for family, classmates, friends, coworkers to see all at once. Well, that’s (supposedly) where the fediverse comes in.
The fediverse, of what I know of it, is still lacking a lot of these tools that would be useful to people. People are pushing it really hard but it is not ready for the masses.
Fediverse by design is ideal for institution-based social networks for sure. Each school hosts a server and federates with the nearby institutions (possibly in a limited manner so it’s still focused on your group but you can easily interact with other people from your city)/school district too.
Maybe the school has two servers: one for active students, another for alumni. Some configuration for letting people say “only fill my main feed with stuff from my graduating class +/- 2 years” and so on. When you graduate, you get auto migrated to the next server.
Hometown sort of tries to do this for cities as a Nextdoor replacement (and even nextdoor for a long time tried to keep things hyper local with optional visibility elsewhere until they caved to ad money and NIMBYism)
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.
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The main reasons I still haven’t closed Mine is that there are a couple niche groups I follow, local 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.
Facebook Marketplace basically gutting Craigslist really blows. I can list something on Craigslist and not get a hit for a week but if I list it for the same price on marketplace I typically get a hit the same day as more people are over there now.
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 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
Only on desktop an in popular browsers, though. I tried the Greasemonkey version but it didn’t seem to change much
Make a group chat. Also, see my recent posts.
