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 became vegetarian and am going vegan and almost all of the people I would have told before have no idea, but it doesn’t matter at all. I’m just living my life, and when cool things happen I share them with the people I’m around.<p>With the continued leaks and breaches on Facebook, I’d like to do what the author does here. I do want to download the information, but then I’d like to delete my account.<p>I still wish there was some kind of social media platform like Facebook from 2008, but it’s not that big of a deal. I’m glad I don’t get stressed by some app on my phone all the time. People who want to talk to me email or text now.<p>I think social media could work. But until then, consider letting go of the existing platforms are stressing you out. We do just fine without sharing our day with the internet, as long as we have good people in our lives.
I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying / making my feed non-personal.<p>How?<p>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 under 10 seconds. Over time my mind hated using FB and clicking on that app went away from my muscle memory without me trying to force any habit changes.<p>Why not just delete the account?
FB is still great to find old friends, ex-colleagues who I might have lost contact with. I also use it as my public mic to post stuff that I want to share as widely as I can.<p>It's fun to take on the PMs who design addictive products that influence us at psychological level and beat them at their own game. Bring it on!
I just have a single strike policy for most of my friends. I unfollow anyone as soon as they post something I don't want to see. I don't tell them, obviously. It works quite well.<p>Scrolled down just now and saw one post of someone running a 10k, a complaint about not having a holiday on Monday (haha), an ad from Triplebyte, a photo of the SpaceX rocket launch visible from the city, pictures from Yosemite, a birthday, an ad for Fairy, and a friend cosplaying.<p>Not so bad. I'm fine with that.
"Anything from Upworthy"<p>Good for a laugh, but it's pretty easy to get rid of that stuff in particular. Anytime anyone reshares something, I go to the 3-dot menu and select "Hide all from xxxxx".<p>It makes most of the crap go away... except for the one "friend" who somehow manages to reshare everything under the sun. Somehow that guy keeps finding new sources for me to "Hide all" from. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯<p>It is by no means a solution, but the signal-to-noise ratio is increased.
Accepting 1500 friends and then complaining they’re too many. Who’s to blame here?<p>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.<p>Surely the default is a bit annoying, especially when joining groups, but those can be unfollowed too.<p>The only thing I can complain about is “your friend reacted to or commented on some post” I don’t care about. That’s Facebook’s fault but your friends are your fault. Most of the time I add friends and promptly unfollow them because they share memes.
I wrote about this a while ago: <a href="http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Facebook.html" rel="nofollow">http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Faceboo...</a><p>"""
Problem with the facebook exporter are:<p>- All comments are missing. Even the ones you wrote yourself!<p>- There are no images in the timeline.<p>- The number of likes and shares is missing on the posts.<p>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.<p>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:<p>[...]
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If you lose contact with someone after deleting Facebook, they were not your friend in the first place. My conclusion after deleting my account four years ago. Getting rid of Facebook was one of the best decisions of my life.
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.<p>I reactivated it and have a policy of only checking it 2-3 times a week. I dont have either apps on my phone.<p>My profile is tidied up and has contact information that my friends can use to reach out to me (hardly anyone has).<p>Reddit is the next thing I am contemplating my usage. It sucks up way too much time for the reward of fake internet points.
This thread seems a good place to re-pimp my Facebook profile cleaner (for those that missed it first time):<p><a href="http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comments-and-likes" rel="nofollow">http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comme...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
FB is really great about making you feel guilty if you delete the app, don't use the app. You miss your friends, they miss you, you don't get all the news, you feel out of the loop, you are lonely again.<p>Deactivated (not deleted) my account a couple weeks ago. Guess what? Life goes on. Nothing happened. I am still in the loop and I spare a couple minutes per day. Gained a bit more freedom, at least it does feel like it.
I’d love to make a dumb social network which could import friends/photos/videos from a Facebook export.<p>Which just shows photos videos and comments/posts.<p>Ditched the shares, likes, and all the other crap. And was just a place where we can keep in touch with people. And leave it at that.
When I downloaded my Facebook data few years ago, my notes were missing. I had to reactivate my account, save them as HTML pages, and queue account for deletion again. One should not think of profiles on these sites as reliable archive of ones data. There is no alternative to local backup for this. With deletion one loses so many little memorable things, for example comments.
Why do people care about the photos? There's a Lewis Black joke where he opines on this exact same thing: "I didn't even like looking at my family photo album". Why not close the account and never look back without regard to the photos?<p>There seems to be a belief that holding someone in your list of contacts is equivalent to being their friend. You're not. You're an entry in a really small Rolodex. If you haven't actually personally spoken with them in a few months, you are dusty card in that Rolodex. Burn the pile and let those relationships that matter emerge from the ash.
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: <a href="https://github.com/danburzo/fb-export" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/danburzo/fb-export</a>
I un-fallowed everyone, including pages/groups. No feed, no ads.
When I open fb, i see blank screen after few seconds of load.
Now I'm now too lazy to fallow them again.
I've only deactivated Facebook, not deleted. I'm worried that if I completely delete I have no way left to access the data Facebook has on me. Is anyone aware of how their shadow profiles work? If I deactivate, are they still able to attribute things like someone uploading my number from their contacts back to my profile?<p>It's this reason that I haven't nuked it entirely yet. I also use Messenger on occasion to communicate with those I haven't spoken to in a long time. I'm ready to make that leap soon. And no, not all of those folks whose numbers or email addresses I lack are not 'friends' necessarily - I have a few former colleagues and bosses on there as well I like to chat with on occasion.
Chiming in to say I'm similarly semi-disconnected from Facebook at this point. My account is still active and I still post occasional updates from a third-party platform (mostly articles I've read), but I rarely browse the site anymore.<p>The only thing I find useful on Facebook that I can't find reliably anywhere else is a comprehensive listing of local events and concerts (as well as invites to things my friends host). If there were a separate site that could aggregate and organize events content as nicely and completely as FB does I would have deleted my account outright a while ago.
Sadly deleting Facebook isn't an option for me, as it has become _the_ place to get notified about social events around here.
Twitter/Reddit/whatever doesn't have as strong a presence here, and the traditional websites have all be replaced by facebook pages.<p>I've cut out all the services from my life that siphons my "metadata", and while my daily Facebook usage was around 15 minutes/day, i still can't completely delete it.
Instead i've banned the Facebook app from my phone/tablet and only check facebook when i'm at home during the evenings, and even then i use Firefox with Facebook Container.<p>As for (Facebook) messenger, i'm trying hard to teach people that i don't use it, or telegram, and instead they can reach me on Signal, or just plain old iMessages/SMS. It takes a few weeks, but usually people "get it" when i don't reply to their messages.
I left my Facebook account idle for about 6 years now, and didn't miss it at all.<p>Now I'm trying to delete it and I can't find the link to "Your Facebook Information" no matter where I look. This is where the delete option is according to Facebook's help section.<p>Anyone having the same problem or is Facebook deliberately burying that link?
Very timely post.
Full disclosure : my current project [1] deals with archiving content from social network, and we're considering adding more things to import from facebook. The friends list example from the article is a good one :<p><pre><code> As for my friend list.. well.. It's all in Json format..
So now you can essentially use the power of your brain to think how your friend looked.
If you can't, well then you probably weren't friends anyway. Sorry.
</code></pre>
I'd be interested in your experiences either in leaving facebook, or about things you'd which you could have saved<p>[1](<a href="https://www.getkumbu.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getkumbu.com/</a>)
This doesn't actually answer the issue posed in the title, "How not to lose your friends". I was expecting at least a little discussion on how to replace Facebook friends, how to stay connected, alternatives etc.
I've been using the chrome plugin "Kill News Feed" for several years and took the app off my phone. I feel like a have a healthy relationship with FB now. If someone wants to send me a message, I'm still there. If I need/want to look someone up or tag my family/friends in a photos I can. But the feed is gone, and I won't get sucked in.
Good for him. Although I don't really understand his stance: did he want to be on a social platform because it was `cool`? It might be only me, but I never wanted to be there because it's cool. I joined it because I wanted to keep contact with some of my friends be it cool or not.
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.
We posted this a while back, just a simple tool to make the photo exports a bit better, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16682940" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16682940</a>
Unfortunately, deleting facebook means losing captions on your photos. Most of my college memories are captioned, so I can't just delete my account :(
I have a account just for some niche buy and sell groups. No Pic no posts, nothing. I can even use it as a SSO. The only info fb has is when and where.
as a side note, keep in mind that with the option of downloading your entire messaging history, it will be sent as an unencrypted zip file to your email address. a surveillance dragnet dream come true.
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.
"GOOD MORNING!<p>Want to see someone getting killed by police and watch your friends quickly get baited by Russians to form to actual American protests related to their preconceived notions?<p>No? Well its already playing enjoy! but be careful where you tap because IF YOU LIKE ANYTHING you'll lose half of your friends in real life but thats okay because we were only going to show you more of this exact thing regardless"
I've always felt that if deleting facebook caused me to loose contact with someone entirely, we probably weren't really friends in the first place
There is a IPCC report out today about climate change and how it would destroy the world as we know it.<p>Yet, people are more worried about Facebook! Amazing!!!