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 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.
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 :)
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.