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How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

ronaldlangeveld.com

61–70 of 181 posts

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#61
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can attest that this would be an effective technique, because recently I accidentally did the opposite. A while back, I did a big clean up of all my groups, likes and (most of my) friends, which greatly improved the signal to noise. Before that, I hardly ever checked FB because there just wasn't anything I really cared about, and if there was it was too well buried. Now, though I find myself checking it, just in ca…

FOMO is the only reason I haven’t deleted FB. There are some could-be-important-for-work people on there that I would rather not lose contact with. Other than that, I like doing real life things with people 100x more than seeing their polished vacation pics.

Many interesting events in my area are propagated on FB exclusively, including meetups of my friends :-/

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#62
post #59

I just wanted to say that I walked away from Facebook about a year and a half ago now. I didn’t delete it, I just logged out and uninstalled the mobile app. It’s all been totally fine. The most social social media I use now is reddit, where I’m more just talking to people. I don’t post status updates anywhere, and often amazing things happen to me that I never tell anyone about. I eat great meals and don’t share. I b…

I wrote up my own quitting FB approach here https://gaius.tech/2017/12/29/less-facebook-more-faces-and-b... I still use Insta and WhatsApp tho’ so I am not entirely free but FB is the biggest time sink for sure.

Likewise. I'm still on Instagram and Whatsapp... But in terms of controlling the content you see, Instagram and Whatsapp are a lot more manageable compared to Facebook - especially considering the state my FB was in.

I'm trying to win my friends over to use Telegram instead. It's miles ahead of Whatsapp in my opinion.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#63

Realistically, what are the odds that deleting a Facebook profile actually removes one's data from Facebook's servers? It's far too easy to secretly retain such data, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly demonstrated the requisite malciousness.

Plenty of people have reported deleting their account, creating a new one later, and seeing all their old friends recommended to them. It’s obvious that nothing is ever deleted, just hidden.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: How would such a platform be significantly better than email? I'm genuinely curious as to what features of social networks people think can't be fulfilled by email. The only issue I have with email is convincing other people to use it for sharing their life, rather than/as well as on Facebook, but I would have exactly the same problem with a brand new social network.

Just that you can post something and then your circle of friends / family can view your post. At their own leisure. You don't have to write an email and send it to people and such, and try figure out which friends want to see it and which don't. IMO 'Facebook' should be a /dumb/ social network, dumb in the sense that it's features are basic, once built it doesn't need a billion features added to it.

What if it was easy to manage mailing lists? So my email provider allowed my friends to subscribe to my mailing list if they want to hear from me, and unsubscribe when they don't.

The good thing about email is: * Everybody has it, * It's decentralized, we don't need to all agree on one company, * There's a lot of clients for reading it already, and everybody can choose their favourite, * If I own my domain, I can change providers transparently, * etc.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#65
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOMO is the only reason I haven’t deleted FB. There are some could-be-important-for-work people on there that I would rather not lose contact with. Other than that, I like doing real life things with people 100x more than seeing their polished vacation pics.

Many interesting events in my area are propagated on FB exclusively, including meetups of my friends :-/

Be the change. People are lazy in general and will use whatever is easy and others use not giving too much thought to consequences.

In my circles I always openly say "I'd love to, but I don't use Facebook" - so if someone wants to have me included, they need to think about a more democratic way to include others. It's not egoistic - many other people don't use FB either. Excluding them just because a group of people is too blind to notice is a very negative approach.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#66

Realistically, what are the odds that deleting a Facebook profile actually removes one's data from Facebook's servers? It's far too easy to secretly retain such data, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly demonstrated the requisite malciousness.

The GDPR enforces that. Not saying FB cares.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#67
post #11
post #7

I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying / making my feed non-personal. How? I became member of all sorts of group: Buy-N-Sell in my local area, technology groups, 10+ DevOps groups and so on. The quality of posts on these is poor and is irrelevant for me for the most part. So every time I used to open the app out of habit, I would see all non-personal crappy posts and I would close the app in…

This is an amazing mind hack. Truly out of the box :D :)

I did something similar but for different reasons with several of my puppet FB accounts and man, was it terrible. The amount of gibberish that's out there is enormous. You know something is very wrong if ads become the signal in the noise...

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#68
I wrote about this a while ago: http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Faceboo...

""" Problem with the facebook exporter are:

- All comments are missing. Even the ones you wrote yourself!

- There are no images in the timeline.

- The number of likes and shares is missing on the posts.

Before I delete my account, I wanted to have a more decent backup of my timeline. I looked into printing out the timeline, exporting it as pdf, full-page screenshots, massaging the DOM/HTML. I could get none of this working, with acceptable effort.

Eventually I went throught the whole timeline (100s of posts!) and screenshotted each one individually. To make this process a little less tedious I changed the OSX keyboard shortcut for full page scrrenshot to F1, so I could use the following combo:

[...] """

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found just deleting the app on my phone was a great way to cut the habit of opening it every time I looked at my phone. I thought I was about ready to delete it after a few days but then suddenly realised that without it I would lose touch with a heap of businesses around town, food trucks, nice takeaways etc, that I wouldn't otherwise know about. Deleting the app has easily cut 90% of the time I was spending on fa…

Well you can create just a fake account with all fake information and no friends, so you use it just for getting out some information from FB.

[deleted]

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just that you can post something and then your circle of friends / family can view your post. At their own leisure. You don't have to write an email and send it to people and such, and try figure out which friends want to see it and which don't. IMO 'Facebook' should be a /dumb/ social network, dumb in the sense that it's features are basic, once built it doesn't need a billion features added to it.

What if it was easy to manage mailing lists? So my email provider allowed my friends to subscribe to my mailing list if they want to hear from me, and unsubscribe when they don't. The good thing about email is: * Everybody has it, * It's decentralized, we don't need to all agree on one company, * There's a lot of clients for reading it already, and everybody can choose their favourite, * If I own my domain, I can cha…

I can't imagine any of that working for my inlaws and such.

But thinking about this, what if (assuming this was an open source social network) there was a data source hook. For example:

When I create my account, I could say "Get my data from X, and send my data to Y". Where I can expose an API on... AWS Api Gateway. Then when you visit my feed/wall, it pulls the data from that source. The only thing the social network stores is the API, and any Auth criteria. Then (Say I owned "Dumb Social Network") I don't own your data, you do, I just provide a place to display it.

If you don't want to use your own source for data then I can store it for you, but I may limit what I store to protect myself as a company (like GDPR)

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