Exactly why I would love to see this fail. I try to be a non-Facebook user, but everyone uses Messenger, and my local Craigslist has deteriorated because everyone sells on Facebook now, so I use it for certain things. Every once in a while, I find myself getting sucked into the "feed" view on my way to the Facebook Marketplace, especially since on mobile, every time I press "back" from a listing that I go into details on, it takes me back, not to the listings that I was looking at, but to the news feed. Facebook knows exactly what they are doing.

One of the best things I did was unfollow everything (i.e. friends, family, pages, celebrities, the kitchen sink, EVERYTHING) on Facebook. This explicit unfollowing took a few weeks and wasn't something done in a day.

Now, I have the advantage of using facebook for all the useful things I need such as "Login with Facebook" and Messenger without having the risk of ever succumbing to the "Feed"

Part of my experience here showed me how Facebook would automatically "make me follow" all my House/Senate representatives even if I never explicility followed their pages/profiles.

Ocasionally, I still have to unfollow these auto-followed pages when I log in. But for the most part, I've been feed-free for a 5-6 months now. It's great!

I did this a few years ago when I found myself at a party, looking through my feed, and it made me start questioning what the hell was wrong with me.

Eliminating the feed entirely was fantastic. Soon I stopped checking my notifications (if I'm not seeing things on the feed, I'm not reacting or commenting, and not getting feedback.) Thus the only people I cared to check in on were literally the people I cared about. As a result, I grew much closer with those individuals.

Then messenger slowly started being useless, as all previously mentioned good friends were already either on hangouts/discord and preferred those (Mileage will obviously vary on this one.) I can still keep it around for my weekly check to make sure no-one is desperately trying to get a hold of me. And if they do, I immediately direct them to my chat platform of choice.

Events is still pretty handy, unfortunately, but not something I need to check in on often at all.

Honestly, I don't miss it at all, and I haven't really lost any value. I'm about as social as I was when I stopped, and in fact I consider the friendships I've had in my post-social media era to be stronger than ever.

The only people I have followed right now is a friend currently trying to break out as a social media author presence, in which case following her actually matters, and a band that one of my childhood friends is in, who I'm supporting for the same reason. (Though I often give them engagement elsewhere when I can.)

News Feed Eradicator essentially does this (browser extension) - I've used it for years can't tell you how much time it has saved me from the FB timeline!

An alternative method is to add the timeline to your ad blocker so you don't see it any more, and only use the Messenger app on mobile!

That is incredibly unethical and standard behavior for Facebook.

Worse. When and if you post something that facebook guidelines do not like, instead of getting a "we removed your post" message, you will get fined! And that fine, will be instantly covered and subtracted from your account's balance!

New avenues for monetization!

If you dig into the documentation they've released so far, you'll find that it explicitly addresses this (I also am in the "No Facebook-owned Services" camp, so I went digging for the answer.)

There are two subsidiary organizations: first, the Libra Association, which is the governance organization populated by the "validators", i.e. the corporate partners who ponied up the $10MM entry fee.

The second is Calibra, the engineering arm spun off of Facebook itself, which is developing all of the bits and pieces that make up this technology. This includes the endpoints, client software, node servers, and so on.

Neither of these subsidiaries requires a Facebook account to interact with (although it's unlikely any of us will interact with the former, realistically); this is explicitly stated in the FAQ on the Calibra page, where it states that you can interact with the payment ecosystem using the (forthcoming) wallet software directly.

With that being said, they will also be integrating it nicely with Messenger and WhatsApp; this is likely where the majority of users will interact with it, which provides a nice front-end (the screenshots look very similar to Apple Pay).

Thus, if you need a long, unwieldy, or hard-to-surface address to send assets with the Calibra wallet, or if FB users can't easily target a wallet address for payment, then you're still facing a usability barrier, if not a technical one. I'm not sure if there's much a difference between the two, honestly, beyond the semantic one.

Furthermore, there's absolutely no guarantees that this won't change over time - I could absolutely see FB bringing the pressure down on Calibra to play within the garden, so to speak. We'll have to wait and see what implementations actually appear, not just what they've announced on Day 1.

I wonder if this can go that far. It's one thing to offer a Facebook-scale version of arcade tokens, where you buy some and then distribute them within the arcade to use your choice of the arcade-owned services on offer. It's another to effectively declare your own currency and have separate businesses which only accept that (and/or can only be reasonably reached via Facebook). If the latter is not where this is going, and the coins are not good for speculation, then what is the point? And why wouldn't the various world governments have a huge problem with it?

Come on. You think Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, the Chinese and whoever else are going to let Facebook alone have this cake. We are not even talking about what the Big Banks think yet.

This is just the first page of whats going to be a very interesting story.

>Now I’m going to be unable to carry out financial transactions, too.

Not so, their wallet requires no FB or Whatsapp account to use. It's open and so competitors can build wallets which also have no FB connection at all.

Your statement also assumes it will become some sort of "global currency", which it certainly won't. I mean, why would it?

Sounds like that's exactly how Facebook wants you to feel.

I'm going to choose to view this in a positive light as it's a great indicator of where to not spend money. I find company values to be an increasingly important factor when choosing who to patronize.