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.
I still use Facebook for family and friends. They aren’t going to switch and would sooner leave social media altogether.
I spend about five minutes or less a day on FB but I only check my friends feed. Aside from that, I don’t enjoy the majority of the content I see on FB and choose not to engage with it.
I’ve setup an automatic redirect from the FB start page to:
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chrThis is the feed from followed people only - sorted by date, most recent first.
That’s the only sane way of using FB. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a similar option in their mobile apps.
StopTheMadness on iOS allows redirects (and I’m sure other extensions do too) but it doesn’t actually take you to that page; it just directs back to the regular homepage.
Using the website (with an ad blocker) is marginally better than the app already. I hated the app in the past as I was convinced it was draining my battery unnecessarily…and it turns out that was a deliberate social experiment which filled me with rage.
Event listings is why I still use it, though. Friends, gigs, etc. I’ve tried to get friends to use Partiful instead at least but that doesn’t work well enough, and even that has issues.
On the mobile website, you have to go to the menu and select “Feeds”. However, there’s no direct link to it.
What I don’t like about using the mobile browser is that FB doesn’t behave like a PWA but opens as a normal webpage instead. Which means the cookies can be used to track the other pages I visit (that use FB login or other components from FB).