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Cpo @lemm.ee

What keeps me from closing up my Facebook account

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.

72 comments

  • I was once a Facebook using programmer guy like you, then I took an arrow to the knee did some work for Meta and got a close up and personal look at their internal culture. It beyond pissed me off and creeped me out. I just couldn't.

    Now, people have to text me to invite me to events and parties and stuff. I don't know what's going on with major chunks of my friends group half the time. I have to get my news and gossip the old fashioned way.

    Before my Meta subcontractor experience, I spoke like you. But after, I don't even miss it. Thinking about logging on to Facebook is like fingernails on a chalk board.

  • 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.

  • The main reasons I still haven’t closed Mine is that there are a couple niche groups I follow, local 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.

  • 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.

  • Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts?

    It does. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon and Lemmy.

    Especially Hubzilla and (streams) with their advanced permissions systems provide what you're looking for and more. Only downsides are the learning curves ((streams)' learning curve is not exactly shall, Hubzilla's is steeper), UIs that don't look like they were made in 2024 from venture capital and a total lack of native mobile apps (you can install both as PWAs, though).

  • friendica, diaspora, and hubzilla all have groups/circles/aspects/whatever you wanna call it for post sharing privacy and are solid feature rich platforms in general

  • I use it for fam and friends, special interest groups, and local events. It’s still a useful platform if you curate it well. It just takes effort. And Firefox plugins.

  • I hate Facebook. Haven't used it for years, but a bare-bones profile sits there because of VR. But now I had the shocking thought of trying it for dating, because the alternative is the shitfest that is the Match Group monopoly on personal relationships. Neither is terribly appealing. Sucks.

72 comments