When will we stop using Facebook?

I keep thinking about deleting my facebook but a few days ago I went back a few years to figure out what I needed to do to drag myself out of a horrible depression I've put myself in the past few years and I found the exact thing I needed and all I could think was, I could never delete this if it was this important to me. I feel chained to the website in a way, I've had it for 6 years and quite a bit of important social interactions are hidden in between things that don't matter that I might never find again and completely forget that part of my life.

Is there any way I can separate myself from the website without losing these things that I might need later in life at some point? I'm really wanting to just delete it but the history makes it important to me.

I really want to be able to do PARTS of these apps all in one place. They can keep their individual responsibilities after that.

To be a bit dramatic, I get frustrated whenever:

- I have to choose between identity platforms to sign up for a site. I wouldn't be sad if there was an option (e) that was open source, transparent, not planning to monetize me, and easy to integrate with lots of various apps and services.

- I have to come up with credentials to a new website

- I have to remember what apps and services I've signed up for

- I have to save data on two different distributed file systems that don't interop.

- I have to connect with the same person on two different platforms. Or, I have to decide how much of my life I want a person to be able to see on two different platforms.

- I have to figure out if I'm okay with the privacy and security of various platforms on which I have an identity.

- I have to fill out a form with data I've already given to a service on the web.

- I discover that a friend uses a service I also use and I just wasn't aware of it.

- I have to choose between text, email, snapchat, FB message, gchat, Skype, Whatsapp, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram based on what (I've memorized) a particular friend or colleague uses.

I don't mind the different services doing different things. Users do want to use Instagram for Instagram things and SnapChat for SnapChat things. I just don't like the part where they're all mostly standalone but solving the same problems over and over and forcing me to jump through the same hoops over and over for no benefit. But I don't trust any existing system to aggregate these responsibilities either. I barely and reluctantly trust Google/FB/Twitter enough to use them for identity services across multiple sites, just because the alternative is so painful that I have to.

I still have FB but I never use it unless I'm tagged or messaged on it. I use it primarily as a massive rolodex but I never read my news feed except for on accident if I log in to read a message or notification. I tweet some and those are auto-pushed to FB so it kind of looks like I'm active (that was not the goal, just a side-effect). I've got way too many friends that use FB to plan events and the like to leave it anytime soon.

I don't hold it against you if you don't have a FB but I'm also not going to feel back if you miss out on an event because you were harder to reach. I find the vast majority of FB-Defectors to be insufferable to listen to when they talk about how they aren't on FB (seriously, they fucking talk about FB MORE than the people ON FB!) and when they whine about a group of us talking on FB (therefore leaving them out) I just ignore them. I don't like FB and the reach it has into our lives but I'm not about to cut off my nose to spite my face by deleting my FB. There are plenty of ways to use FB without letting it use you IMHO and people who just flat out quit are too lazy to do so (Sign up for an account, don't add any info, turn off all location stuff, block the FB widget so it can't track you one sites, etc...).

What I really want is identity provider and FB gives that to me today (along with "first party" chat, messaging, photos, etc). Ideally I would have something like OAuth (but not OAuth) and all my friends could pick a messaging platform that supported it but right now nothing like that exists and/or the UI/UX is so terrible I'd never get my friends to switch.

I would value some detail about how you go about self-hosting.

What's your aim in doing this? For what reason?

Surely your family and acquaintances and people in the street are free - depending where you live (?) - to take pictures. So you're going to have to police all of those images in perpetuity to prevent images from appearing online. The likelihood is that when they're a teenager they'll put their lives online themselves in some way ... so?

If your child goes on a playdate or attends a nursery or goes to a public location then there's a good chance (at least in the UK) that they'll appear on Facebook no matter how many "I do not consent for my child to appear in photographs" statements you sign. Once they appear in the background of images then in the not too distant future face recognition is likely to be good enough to trawl the net for images of them. I think what you'll find is that the images are all one's you haven't curated whereas if you were adding your own images (no matter if it's only a few) then you at least have some control over the general presentation of images.