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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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.
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.
Is that enforced by encryption or does it rely on federated instances to respect the visibility settings of such posts?
Yes, it relies on federation. I don’t think the data will even be sent to instances unless someone follows you on that instance.
I have FB for (by priority):
My job’s business profile I have to help manage (for now).
Communication with extended family and a couple of friends from years ago I don’t live near anymore.
Rarely, marketplace.
I hate messenger and have myself set on permanently unavailable. I wish I could keep my basic FB but completely disconnect from it.
I don’t post anything on my personal page.
I’ve never had an Instagram or used it. I have an okay VR but have never even looked into meta. I have Steam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i have an extension that fixes the first one. it’s called fb purity. let’s you control what content is on your feed and how it’s displayed.
i don’t post to Facebook anymore, i just browse it to see what friends and family are posting. it still works quite well for that with this extension.
Ah, I have that on my desktop. It’s a pretty great plug-in. Unfortunately I haven’t found an equivalent for Firefox Android, and I do almost all of my browsing from my phone. I work from home at my desk for 8-10 hours per day, 5 days per week, so the last thing I want to do after I get off work is to sit at my desktop computer some more. Facebook is also pushing so much junk that it really decreased the amount of stuff people share, so it’s kind of a hollow shell of what it used to be. After you purge the sponsored content, there’s not much left. It really shows how fake the whole platform is now. Zuck is making billions of dollars pushing sponsored content to other content sponsors.
This was funnily what got me considering binning my account, (then Cambridge Analytica being in the news made it a thing I went through with).
I discovered that filtering out sponsored, friends-of-friends, shared posts, and sorting by most recent, there were 3 posts maximum each day written by someone I know! :) It made me realise how manipulative the site was, how frequently I “checked the fridge”, and how little I might actually miss. :)
Not the aims of fbpurity, but damn I’m happier since binning facebook :)
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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.
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
You should be closing your Facebook regardless of your desire to use an alternative…
I’m in a similar boat. I immigrated to Canada back in 2017, and I have a daughter now who is turning five. As of right now Facebook is the single most effortless way for me to stay in contact with my friends and family back home, and allows them to feel familiar with and/or connected to me and my daughter.
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.
Make a group chat. Also, see my recent posts.
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.
that’s a whole other kettle of fish
I will use that liberally from now on. An upvote from me.
Yes, people very much misunderstand thus stuff.
How do I upvote this post twice?
You can have multiple accounts, maybe on different instances, and you can upvote with all of them. A lot of clients allow easy account switching, e.g. in voyager if you tap on your username on the bottom bar twice, it opens an account selector dialog.
Doesn’t PixelFed allow marking accounts private though?
I don’t know what mechanism they use, but I have a hunch that if you allowlist one user from an instance, the instance owner could potentially see the stuff. Not just your own instance owner.
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
