I also stopped using Facebook, shortly before the revelations of massive surveillance. At that time I was convinced I shouldn't be in the arms of companies, stopped using many services and started self-hosting stuff. People didn't understand me.

Then, Edward Snowden revealed that the possible abstract threats I wanted to avoid can in fact become real. We are fortunate to have received this information. People still didn't understand me.

In the beginning of my time without the services I clearly felt that something was missing, but it wasn't hard to withstand, for the idealistic flame burning within me.

After some time my interest for the services faded away, like an addiction you successfully cured. Now, I'm not even thinking about using them anymore.

Many don't understand me even now, and I'm not holding my breath, anymore.

Similar situation here.

Frustrating as it is, it's The Right Thing to do. It's a shame that some people assume you're disinterested, but then don't return emails/calls.

I heard about an old Norwegian guy who had always made short calls to friends and family throughout his life and that those people appreciated that. That's more the direction I'd rather go in over the passive friend-surveillance that has crept in.

I'd rather do that over an encrypted line with open protocols, but you can't have it all! At least I've managed to move over nearly wholesale to open software - phone, OS, email, syncthing, text file notes etc. etc. - so that's one of the major personal benefits to me.

The drawbacks I still need to learn to better work around.

Addiction/productivity doesn't really come into it for me; I have my days of perfect self-discipline and others where my procrast-fu is strong. I've used and use all manner of productivity systems to make sure the bread and butter work gets done (currently running an espeak Pomodoro reminder every 25 minutes, with semi-ironic (totally not...) inspirational quotes read out in the breaks), it's just the side-projects that sometimes suffer. That's no fault of social media, though, that's on me.

I would like to follow your lead, but in some ways it feels selfish of me and thats why I stick around on FB. I live quite some distance from my family and it is the easiest way to share photos of my family with all of them without requiring them to all get a new account somewhere else.

Are there better more private solutions that are still very convenient for everyone from my 15 year old niece to my 80 year old grandparents? I also am friends with just about everyone I've ever had any sort of meaningful interaction with and I hate that I am constantly scrolling through my news feed seeing stuff that I could care less about but just doing it to pass time. I would love to shut Facebook off if it didn't mean losing the ability to share photos with my close family and friends.

Maybe its just a matter of paring my Friend list down to about 20-30 people (from about 350) but I'd still like to stop offering my personal information to a megacorp to sell out to their advertisers and who knows who else.

Maybe a bit out of left field, but I'm using Telegram (that open source messenger app) to share pictures with family. It was on a whim; once when I was at my parents place, I just set up Telegram desktop on both their PC's, the app on their tablet and on my mother's smartphone (dad has this thing with big buttons).

Now we have a group chat together with my partner (would've also added siblings if I had them) and share pictures and simple things. Everything syncs on all devices, my father who needs a big screen follows mostly on his PC and puts their pictures on from there, my mother uses her android phone.

Works better and surprisingly much more intimate than anything before, and everyone participates.

Of course, people around me have been having whatsapp groups among peers, but there's something about the telegram desktop clients' easy sharing of images and links that I started to realize recently 'just works'.

Thanks for the recommendation. I will have to check out Telegram.

I stopped using Facebook when a stalker mentioned to me about a post they saw that I thought was private which ended being creepy to me as it was quite personal.

I had set everything to private and FB helpfully shared it with everyone. I stopped posting from that day onwards.

I stopped about two years ago also and now have a fake account because I needed one for Tinder. I've been given flack for being 'antisocial' but i'm rewarded by being able to play clueless about the facebook dramas that people talk about.

I would value some detail about how you go about self-hosting.

this is a great start: https://mailinabox.email/

It doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain contact with people that are important in our life today. The relationships that are important to us need to be nurtured, not followed. Facebook has created this (inadvertent) anti-social follow use case, and I think a lot of people have fallen into it.

Eh, I remember the days of trying to keep in touch via email, and not getting replies, or feeling bad that I wasn't sending a reply. Just to keep in general contact, with no specific goal in mind. I don't look forward to going back to them.

Facebook has become something of a "Third Place," in this respect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

if people don't reply to your emails, maybe that says a lot about how much they care about you.

Exactly? I'm talking about a situation where we both care exactly at a "casual Facebook friend" level. Like we would meet up if we were in the same town at the same time, but we aren't writing emails back and forth about what has happened lately. And that is great, IMHO.

Or maybe it says nothing about that -- but more about their email patterns, work stress, guilt, etc.

Exactly. And if you keep seeing similar posts on a regular basis from the same set of people (close or distant), it gets repetitive and boring. How often do you need to know that x is doing y?

Any of my more "important" relationships are maintained via frequent text messages and less frequent phone calls. For me, Facebook is rarely used for keeping in touch and mostly for its group features. Otherwise its just old acquaintances from yesteryear who'd I don't necessarily care to keep up with anyway. In fact, if it wasn't so painstakingly tedious to delete large numbers of "friends" on there i'd probably only have about 50.

I stopped at about the same time as you, but I actually returned a couple of months ago. Without friending anyone. And the reason? I use Facebook as a very simple way to get news about really minor things of importance to me:

+ my climbing gym has some new routes!

+ a new video by K.I.Z, yeah!

+ oh, demonstration against some Nazis demonstrating in my neighbourhood, should definitely go there

+ Someone's looking for a climbing partner next weekend, finally heading out to the rocks again!

So likes have become a poor-man's subscription to an RSS feed and groups have become an easy to follow replacement of forums. The key in these cases is the newsfeed, which is okay for having an overview of important stuff (and without friends is not crowded with inane stuff).

I repeatedly have idle thoughts about a startup idea, combining Facebook with github's business model: Any entity such as users, companies, organizations get a page where they can post arbitrary stuff like on their current facebook profile. Users can subscribe and get an overview on their newsfeed. So far, just like Facebook but without the social crap. Financing is not done through targeted ads but by requiring companies to pay for the service - something like 500 subscribers are free, 1000 - 10 $/months etc. Quite rough around the edges, the idea, but I personally would like such a service. Anyone interested in working on that with me?

You can get an RSS feed from a facebook for some things, personally I use this with ifttt to get email of posts by various institutions (e.g., my kid's school) that I want to follow.

For climbing partners; I came across the founder of http://www.climbfind.com at a wall a while ago but I don't use it myself. Seems more focused on the US, Canada and Australia. The founder was an Aussie IIRC.

I think your idea has legs but it might be worth focusing on a niche area first (like climbing) and expanding after. Much like Facebook started with Universities.

So, like twitter with more media and text options?

Yes, somewhat. Anything shareable. The major point would be the github-like financing model: It's not the individual users that pay for the service by enabling targeted ads but companies that want to get in contact with potential customers on their page. It seems like a minor difference but would have quite strong effects on user privacy - there would not be a need for ever more tracking of every online activity.

Ello recently tried this, and they're still making good progress

For me it's more like twitter that anyone I know actually uses.

More like Facebook is to RSS what HTML email is to plaintext.

I don't find Twitter is at all useful for keeping on top of interests.

..That would just be Tumblr

This is exactly what I did too, for similar reasons. I use Facebook like Twitter. There are some organizations I'm interested in that don't use Twitter and instead post updates or news only on Facebook.

I much prefer Facebook with zero friends

I have trouble leaving Facebook because for better or worse it is how many of my friends and acquaintances communicate. I ended up finding a nice compromise: I installed an extension which hides all the content on news feed but still allows FB chat. When I couple this extension with ublock, the only thing I see when I go to Facebook is the chat interface, which is perfect for how I use the service.

Facebook have done that themselves! No extensions required! www.messenger.com is literally just FB chat, nothing else.

wow thanks, I feel stupid for not knowing about that.

I only found out recently and I think it's relatively new 'feature'.

Awesome. Thank you! Can't believe I didn't know about this.

Wow thanks!

Wow, that's almost the opposite of the way I use Facebook. I keep chat turned off all the time. I hate interruptions that demand (or even imply) an immediate response, and that's what live chat/text messages/IM represent to me.

Yes, sometimes I do want real-time messages, but that's not how I want things to be most of the time. I'm perfectly okay with seeing "old friend had a baby" or "cousin graduated from high school" the next day, or whenever. It's not that I don't care about these things; I do care about them. I just don't want things that don't require a real-time response sent through a real-time communications medium.

Or just use https://www.facebook.com/messages/ ?

Or even just https://www.messenger.com

This still shows the notifications, the sidebar that suggests groups, new friends, etc. It's a minor detail, but I don't want to be bombarded with events, tagged photos, whatever. But I do really love Messenger as a chat platform. It's quicker and more consistent than SMS (at least for my carrier) and syncs well across all of my devices.

Facebook is not cool anymore but Facebook is more useful than ever was and will probably remain so for a long time: they managed to get almost all available users (directly or by aqquisitions) and changing the status quo would be really difficult (not even Google was able to do it..). Facebook is the userbase.

I still use FB because everybody is there, if I need to talk to someone or arrange an event, I can send them a message without knowing their actual email or phone. I'm not interested in knowing that a friend I meet once a year went to the restaurant (I can easily block it) but I am interested in being able to contact him if I need to. Facebook is great for that.

Yeah I slowed down heavily around 2 years ago. The original value prop of connecting me with my friends is all but gone from the platform. It reminds me of AIM which started off as a great chat program, but AOL added too many features and ads. The original reason why I wanted to use AIM was peppered with so much bloated software cruft on it, that it became to frustrating to use. 12 years later, I'm at the same point with Facebook.

The only reason I still have it is because I have friends overseas and it's the best way to keep in touch with them if I need to get a hold of them; otherwise I don't need it.

For me Facebook works best as a calendar. Nearly everyone I know has a Fb account (one they check every day, at that), so it makes planning group trips/parties/events easier than trying to sync large groups of people across platforms and devices. It allows me to update my event details without having to worry that one of my friends won't get they update because they synced an out of date .ics file or added the event to their work calendar by mistake.

I feel the same way @junto. Facebook was a nice phase but now it's phased out of my life. Anyone that is important to me has my email/phone.

This is a thing I think people start to realize about the digital era. We can have it all, more friend, more memories, more data... but nature likes to recycle, evolutionary pressure to keep things people working together together while the rest rearrange.

Agreed – I stopped because there were too many posts I didn't really care about. I've found that if there's anything significant, someone will mention it to you anyway.

The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong.

> The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong.

I'm wrong?

No I'm an individual with my own preferences. Each to their own. I wasn't telling anyone else to leave. I was just describing my experiences.

I kind of had the same thought the person you are responding to had. You switch from "I" to "you" in your last paragraph, which seemed to imply that you were using your experience to declare how things are for others. I found myself nodding while reading the prior paragraphs, as I have similar experiences, but disagreeing with your last paragraph as it clearly wasn't true for many others. It's somewhat true for me now, but I joined Facebook because my mother was quite (terminally) ill, and it was a perfect medium to share with her but not place any particular burden for her to write emails or respond. And I'm the 'you' in the context of your message.

Thanks Roger. I hadn't realised that you could read it in that way. I was talking about myself, but it wasn't clear.

Feeling connected no matter how small is a very strong force. I like that I have connections from my childhood to my present and to all the places I lived. Even if it is I see that my friends kids are now in high school or that someone had a great event that I had zero impact on them having.

When my son was dying from cancer I just had to jump on Facebook and I had a ton of people that were willing to help out or send him messages and videos. It was a great tool to find people who could help.

That is awful. I don't want to imagine one of my children being seriously or terminally ill. I'm glad Facebook was able to help you and your son in that horrible situation.

Thank you for sharing your alternative viewpoint.

I'm sorry about your son.

Facebook would like to thank you for giving them the opportunity to monetize your son's cancer.

Isn't that 1.5 billion accounts? How many are bots, fake, duplicates, or otherwise not representing exactly 1 person?

how many of those are no longer active?

  936 million daily active users on average for March 2015
  1.44 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2015

https://newsroom.fb.com/Company-Info/

Guess that means I'm wrong too about reality tv, Justin Bieber, fast food and the importance of cars as a status symbol.

Oh, and let's not forget the believe in the existence of an omnipotent deity.

(S)he's on the wrong side of history.

If you actually think that you might want to look up what that actually means.