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How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

ronaldlangeveld.com

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

#131

Post by taude »

jameskegel wrote: post #128
antjanus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's happening for millenials already. Everyone I talk to feels that emptiness of blindly sharing status posts and photos. And pretty much everyone I talk to about this mentions that they do those status updates and photos for family members more than friends, and that they keep up with friends differently. In fact, I keep up with all of my friends through direct messages on one platform or another or IRL. The only e…

A closed and self hosted family social network without the marketing momentum would be great. Self hosting removes the need for marketing and data sharing shenanigans that most companies require for growth.

This is basically what Path was....though they had some mis-steps along the way.

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

#132

Post by pixelbath »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #92
mothsonasloth wrote: post #73

I quit Facebook for about 2 years back in 2015. It was a good time to self reflect and focus on myself. However I realised I was missing out on birthday/wedding/social invites. I reactivated it and have a policy of only checking it 2-3 times a week. I dont have either apps on my phone. My profile is tidied up and has contact information that my friends can use to reach out to me (hardly anyone has). Reddit is the nex…

The "problem" with Reddit is that (depending on your selections) most information there is actually relevant. After Google killed Reader, i found myself using Reddit and HN far more than i had previously, as these are good aggregators of stuff i find interesting.

Reddit has the problem of highly relevant information with terrible search. Google is the preferred way to search for content on Reddit, but there's no advanced filtering by time, popularity, or any of the other metrics that Reddit useful.

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

#133

Post by tokyodude »

Maybe I'm just not very social, I have 834 "friends" on facebook but I don't feel any need to delete it nor do I feel any fear of being left out or stuff like that nor do I spend too much time on or any of the myriad of other things so many HNers report with their experience on FB.

I don't really want to delete it as it's how I stay in touch with friends and family. It's how most of my friends organize events. Messenger (not the FB app) is the #1 way friends communicate with me and each other as well.

I did do a few things though. I aggressively unfollowed people. Anyone I only met a few times. Friends I haven't seen in years or don't expect to see. Anyone who posts too much (except my sister who I feel I can't unfollow). Friends who post too much political stuff. I click "this ad offends me on every ad". I use FB Purity on the desktop web site with about 10 filters to filter out a bunch of crap like "was mentioned in a post" or "replied to a comment", "shared her post", "shared his post", "is with" and other attention spam.

Not that much shows up but I'm still able to keep up with a few really close friends and family and still participate in event organizing etc and not feel I'm being spammed too much. I don;'t have FB Purity on my phone but I guess I don't use the app all that much on the phone. I mostly use Messenger for messages and the FB app to look at profiles (linked from Messenger) and to read/post in shared event pages.

Of course maybe you want to delete FB because of leaks or you just don't want to be tracked which are really good reasons to get off. All I'm trying to say is I don't recognize many of the other complaints in my own experiences with FB so maybe others might find those solutions useful?

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

#134

Post by styfle »

bfred_it wrote: post #24

Accepting 1500 friends and then complaining they’re too many. Who’s to blame here? Facebook is what you make of it. It offers relatively granular control over who you want to see so if even you must be friends with someone, you can still unfollow them. Surely the default is a bit annoying, especially when joining groups, but those can be unfollowed too. The only thing I can complain about is “your friend reacted to o…

I started getting friend suggestions from facebook very regularly about 6 months ago. They show up as notifications and there are typically more suggestions then actual direct communication notifications. I used to see things like: you were tagged in photo, friend commented on your post, etc. Now all I see is: you might know John Johnson. I don't even see a setting to disable these suggestions. So it's not surprising to me how people end up with 1500 friends.

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

#135

Post by iKevinShah »

jameskegel wrote: post #129
davchana wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too, about 1.5 years agi, realised that facebook & orkut is consuming too much time of mine, kind of addictive. I coldly uninstalled app, logged out everywhere. Felt so free. Then found reddit & hackernews, & now again whenever I feel i am spending too much time, I just delete the shortcuts of these from my most-recent-tabs.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard someone say Orkut was a time monopolizer. Can you share a bit about your background and use for this network?

Oh boy, not OP, but Orkut was the thing in my network those days (I was in high school), a majority of part was in "communities" which were sort of like subreddits and the ability to read your friends' scraps (essentially messages) was dope (and time consuming)

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

#136

Post by 0db532a0 »

In 2013 I left Facebook. I decided who I wanted to stay in contact with and sent a message to each one explaining that I was leaving. I asked them to email me if they wanted to stay in contact. I am still in contact with every person I wanted to stay in contact with.

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

#137

Post by ryandrake »

bunderbunder wrote: post #111
TaupeRanger wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's so unsettling that their parents privately shared photos and videos of then with family members and friends. They will be horrified of this, I'm sure.

I've seen how some of my family members share photos of their kids and grandkids. It ain't private - most of them are set to "Public", and are going to stay that way. Even if it's just shared with "Friends", most people will Facebook-friend a much wider range of people than who they would consider friends in real life. It's not just the close friends and family members who, a couple decades back, might have got a cha…

When you post something to the Internet, you should assume it is or eventually will be public. You’re sending it to a for-profit company, not privately to someone you know, and hoping they do the right thing with it forever. What are the chances? It doesn’t really matter whether you asked the company to pretty please make it private.

I think best case is there will be a generation whose only “online presence” are the stuff about them from ages 0-10 that their social media obsessed parents posted before the kid could acquire any agency in their own online life.

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

#138

Post by ilikehurdles »

danburzo wrote: post #76

I quit Facebook before GDPR came into effect, so it's heartening to see FB now has better export tools. At the beginning of the year I had to write my own: https://github.com/danburzo/fb-export

Facebook had this a year ago as well. I quit and exported my data at the beginning of 2017. I actually only just looked at the export after reading this hn post. Up until now I just kept it zipped as a backup "just in case". Looking back at all the things I used to share and participate in on social media just reconfirms my decision to ditch it.

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

#139

Post by ryandrake »

TomMarius wrote: post #79
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> many other people don't use FB either This is the problem, I'd be literally the only one. I tried it once - of course they didn't exclude me, but a lot of info got to me too late (when I had other plans already) and smaller events not at all.

The way I see it is: if friends won’t stay in contact with me without me being on Facebook... then they are not really friends. Leaving FB actually improved my social life because it became clear who were the real friends.

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

#140

Post by ryandrake »

manmal wrote: post #49
nitemice wrote: post #20

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.

If you believe this, you can measure it. Take a year and write down all the truly important things that you see on social media, then cross them out when you hear about them outside of social media.

I would bet that at the end of the experiment you can count your list with one hand or less.

FB has made billions instilling this FOMO into their users’ heads. It’s fake.

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