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Facebook is an attack on the open web

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Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#381

I deactivated my Facebook account several months ago, and it's been about 90% great, 10% frustrating. It's great for all the obvious reasons (less timesuck, less compulsion to endlessly scroll your life away, no notification interruptions). The frustrations are real, though. Primarily it's around events and photos. There are some communities I participate in that regularly organize events through Facebook, and now I…

I have an account for a long time now, because some groups, people and activities require it. But I've disabled notifications for a long time, and rarely log in except to check on events. I don't see a reason to deactivate it complete.

I have to say though, FB tries really hard to reactivate your notifications. It's especially annoying when it hooks into your mobile Chrome browser notifications (took me a while to figure that out!). And the fact it can't be uninstalled on Samsung devices - at least you don't have to login.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've enjoyed roughly the same experience but without the downsides. As far as events go, the neckbeard in me hasn't actually minded. I still get invited to "high quality" events (things my real-life friends are going to) and haven't really missed the lower quality events. Photos I just conveniently had solved by having all my photos on Google Photos anyways (I stopped trusting offline storage long ago). I think my Fa…

Putting my old photos on Google Photos is a good idea and I think I'll do that - thanks. Although it doesn't fully solve the issue of photos that had me tagged but were uploaded by someone else, which FB doesn't give you a copy of when you download your data (afaik). Funnily enough, I found Messenger to be the worst of all their offerings. The lack of searchable history, the terrible ( terrible ) scroll-back, the def…

> The lack of searchable history, ...

Use https://m.me - It's the web app just for Messenger; on my desktop I launch it via Chrome with the --app= param so it runs in it's own window.

Click on the ⓘ that's located in the top right of a conversation, and you'll see the search option (among other things).

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#385
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protip: try mbasic.facebook.com for messaging, or the "Toffeed" app on Android which is just a thin wrapper around this.

That's very helpful, thanks!

There's also https://touch.facebook.com for the not-quite-as-light-as-mbasic version.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#386
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that don't know, September was when all the freshmen would get their first access to the non-commercial internet in college. It was a pain because they (we) had to learn all the nuances of how to interact with the people already on it. Newgroups, IIRC, etc. Eternal September is the term for when the internet went commercial in 1995. Wow that happened 27 years ago. Time does fly.

Not to quibble, but it usually refers to 1993, which was when AOL created a bridge from its proprietary network to USENET.

It's about time we all went back to USENET really.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#387
post #234

> Content that isn’t indexable by search engines is not part of the open web. I'm not really sure what this means, but my knee-jerk reaction is that the 'open web' exists without search engines.

In Ultima Online you could write books. While those were fun to find, would you say they were part of the open web?

What if those books were in Ilshenar, guarded by two stone gargoyles?

Hey, let's just meet and talk there. I sure love to go to Ilshenar. I'm sure my friends from all walks of life/culture/class would also love to go to Ilshenar see what I am talking about.

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#388
Facebook is the AOL of the 21st Century. There will always be these closed gardens, walled-off. (Could've been CompuServe.)

The point is, the open web is the open web. This also needs to be common. Eventually, kiddos grow up and escape the pretty gardens - at least lets have something out here that they can clutch on to, in awe, at all the non-curated, non-owned, non-manipulated/-manipulative content ..

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#389
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no pictures of what your friend ate for dinner Posting pictures of your food should be a criminal offence. Nothing too serious, just a couple of years in prison or something.

I can't help but laugh when I imagine what this would've looked like before the internet existed. "Look, honey, we got something in the mail from Katie and John! It's... oh... just a bunch of pictures of food. That's odd." Meanwhile Katie and John are still at home, furiously stuffing envelopes with the same food pictures so they can send one to everybody in their address book.

Your joke is my command:

http://www.jaruzel.com/files/look-honey.png

:)

Re: Facebook is an attack on the open web

#390
post #94
post #14

You've ever been to one of those pages that embed Facebook's comment engine? Yeah, those are the worst. I did some analysis on a random page with just three Facebook comments. Requests to Facebook's servers accounted for 1.5 MB of the 2.4 MB tranfered by the ENTIRE page. 87 network requests, 35 javascript files injected and it didn't even load all the comments! (I had to click on a "Load more comments" button to load…

Oh god, the shit where incredibly overweight pages make you click the slow "load more" buttons just to load a few more kb of text that could've been immediately shown to you for basically no extra cost drives me crazy. And as much as facebook sucks, most web sites suck. It's amazing to me how many sites I read on my phone are basically unusable until I fall back on Safari's reader mode. Javascript handlers that fuck…

There are sites that have a "Load Comments" button and the comments are already loaded, embedded in the page! All the button does is trigger a bit of javascript to populate a previously-hidden div.
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