Edit: Oh and I use it in a Firefox Facebook container so I'm not at all worried about it tracking me online.
I used to think so too, but then I realized that Facebook would let people add me to group chats or something without my knowledge and that these people would then blindly assume that I had read the messages in those chat groups. I find that "I have a Facebook account but I almost never log in" tends to get misunderstood, whereas "I no longer have a Facebook account" gets the message across quite clearly.
You think that once you log in to FB in a container -- Facebook can't track you? Those container details are now appendage to your online fingerprint as far as Facebook are concerned.
Containers only work if you don't actually log in to such services. The only sure way for FB to not track you is to not use FB at all -- even then it requires other steps too as they'll be building a shadow profile on you.
Is that naive?
Facebook wants to be addictive, but it's okay and possible to use it once every two or three months so you can add your great aunt and post holiday photos (so people know you're safe). And by using Facebook less, it takes away some of Mark Zuckerberg's power over you and our society.
I have a hobby which is growing carnivorous plants and last year I started a small side business selling my extra plants. The entire community is now on facebook (before that it was mostly forums) and I had to reopen an account to be part of it.
Sadly it is essential for some people. Not facebook itself, but the fact that it is the main social network makes it essential if you want to be a part of some communities. I hate that I have to use Facebook, but I don't have the choice.
It opened so many more opportunities for me than when I wasn't using it, it has really been surreal and I've never felt more engaged and happy in my life. I wouldn't credit facebook for it because in the end, it's the people on it that brings me happyness, but there's no way I would have interacted with them without it.
Of course if you don't have any hobbies/business that depends on it, deleting Facebook is indeed the way to go, but for a lot of people it's not such a black or white thing
Stop making excuses for sidlining your personal integrity, you are now just another part of the problem.
I quit using Facebook close to 10 years ago, yet I still have a robust social life, communicate regularly with friends and family, participate in hobbies (even ones who unfortunately moved their community to FB) and do all of the above without the unhealthy “like-obsessed” feedback loops. It’s great!
But when you tell people it’s possible to live without Facebook, all you get are lame excuses about why their case is special and they couldn’t possibly do it themselves!
I feel our brains could do much better with a little less of constant bombardment of highlight-reel version of other people's lives. The psychological literature on the negative impacts of social media usage is only ballooning by the day, and there's never been a better time to quit Facebook.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-...
For example, I have good friends in other countries, and sending pictures and short texts is one of the best ways to stay in contact. We do talk over the phone occasionally, but not having a simple way to send pictures or links would pull us much further apart.
Sure, email could be an option, but WhatsApp is just so much more convenient.
I've been trying to get people on Signal but it's a struggle especially for older people used to WhatsApp. For a lot of them WhatsApp → Signal is a big step even though (for us) the apps are pretty much similar.
I was wondering if they found some other strategy to keep in contact with their close ones without using messaging in the first place, not replacing Facebook services with some other service.
Also i dont agree at all that its more geeky. If you don't think about technical backround Signal is ux wise simpler app.
- My martial arts classes post updates there
- So does the community garden I help out at
- Keeping up with family news, and directly talking to family
- Keeping up with what's happening to my friends in the USA or other far flung places
- Access to topical news that matches my political beliefs rather than being heavily centrist-biased and ignoring all the important stuff
- Monitoring political campaigns and issue campaigns
And honestly, good luck finding all that anywhere else.
127.0.0.1 graph.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 staticxx.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 api.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 an.facebook.com
Put another way, what's the difference between 0 and 127 here? What makes it safer? TIA
From that page:
> We prefer to use 0.0.0.0, which is defined as a non-routable meta-address used to designate an invalid, unknown, or non applicable target.
> Using 0.0.0.0 is empirically faster, possibly because there's no wait for a timeout resolution. It also does not interfere with a web server that may be running on the local PC.
For 0.0.0.0 it won't even try to connect (or fail instantly depending on how you look at it).
Easiest way to quit was to add "facebook.com" to my LAN's pihole blacklist and delete their (tracking) app from my phone. The account is still there to reserve my name but it has no other real data.
It is if you are travelling often, especially in non-western countries.
Rent in local Facebook groups is sometimes 2-3 times cheaper than AirBnB and alike, as well as large expat communities.
They don't realize the impact it's having on their lives. Facebook has become a justification to bring hate into our personal conversations. Their crazy aunt says something on there so they believe this makes it a public conversation, but I have no idea about that.
Their debates are personal conversations had in public. Facebook has made the problems of talking about class, religion, race and politics inescapable.
There's a reason we avoid those topics at holiday gatherings and business functions. They divide us and cause psychological injury.
Fb has capitalized on this fury and drives profit from anger, dispute, hate and all these other emotions we don't want to have. These are the conversations that don't end and people want to win. They're live long disagreements where people won't change their mind and find equally violating people to fuel their rage and others to direct it at.
These didn't use to be everyday conversations. Fb makes it easy to intact with those you disagree with violently and often. People you'd choose to avoid in real life but new can't because fb makes more money of pitting those two divergent personalities together and continually antagonizing them.
It's hurting their mental health to be surrounded constantly by dissenting voices trekking then they are wrong for whatever reason.
You're wrong. You're wrong. You're a bad person because you believe that. You're inconsequential. Someone said this thing about you.
It's ruining people and I don't know how to get that awareness through to them. They're telling me more often they wished they'd just never gone on there and I say don't go back. Fb is like the abusive spouse they are addicted to.
How do we save our friends and family from that abuse? How do we help them escape? I'm so sad for them and I feel helpless to save them from the peril that is so obvious from the outside.
I still have an account but I rarely log in (perhaps couple of times per year and when I do it's with Firefox Containers and with cookies cleared after log out plus I block third-party connections from Facebook and its domains), but Facebook is more than Facebook.
A lot of people I know spend way more time on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger then they do on Facebook itself so it will be difficult for them to not use it.
I'm not able to avoid it. Since I can't make extended family members use something else, it's a source for family news. My family is large, both on my side and my spouse's, so FB isn't trivial to replace.
Something that could scrape and mirror a curated "family news" would be cool. But given the rate of change at FB, it would be hopelessly brittle.
How did your family accomplish this 10 years ago? How valuable is the family news if you need it curated?
I don't see how that matters. I'm not going to be successful convincing 100+ people flung across the country to go back to how we used to do things. They like Facebook, and likely aren't interested in their crazy uncle's rant about Facebook. They post their news there, and not anywhere else.
"How valuable is the family news if you need it curated"
FB is my source for things like "who graduated", "who is pregnant", "who got married", "who got a new job", "how that horse on cousin Fred's ranch is doing" and so on. I like to know these things.
By "curated", I mean something like a scraper that could pull out posts from family people and put it somewhere so I wouldn't need to log into Facebook and get exposed to a bunch of other stuff I don't want to see...and the pervasive tracking. I also mentioned it's probably not practical.
I'm also anticipating applying differential debugging techniques to automatically compile ad blocking filter lists. View the top X sites via multiple personas, diff the content, anything static is more likely not ads.
Although this is fascinating, the amount of attack/defense in our browser just trying to put a block of ad in front of you and the CPU cycles that are wasted, I don't think it apply to my case.
Please don't tell people you don't even know what their lives are like
Fanboy's Annoyance List and Anti-Facebook List: https://www.fanboy.co.nz/
Fanboy's Annoyance List (source): https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/fanboy-annoyance....
Fanboy's Anti-Facebook List (source): https://fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-antifacebook.txt
AdGuard Social Media filter (source): https://filters.adtidy.org/extension/chromium/filters/4.txt
All of these work with uBlock Origin.
I should hope I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but... quitting really isn't as hard as you tell yourself it is.
It's not as essential as you think it is.