Make a group chat. Also, see my recent posts.

I was once a Facebook using programmer guy like you, then I took an arrow to the knee did some work for Meta and got a close up and personal look at their internal culture. It beyond pissed me off and creeped me out. I just couldn’t.

Now, people have to text me to invite me to events and parties and stuff. I don’t know what’s going on with major chunks of my friends group half the time. I have to get my news and gossip the old fashioned way.

Before my Meta subcontractor experience, I spoke like you. But after, I don’t even miss it. Thinking about logging on to Facebook is like fingernails on a chalk board.

You are in the denial phase of deleting your Facebook account.

I still use Facebook for family and friends. They aren’t going to switch and would sooner leave social media altogether.

I spend about five minutes or less a day on FB but I only check my friends feed. Aside from that, I don’t enjoy the majority of the content I see on FB and choose not to engage with it.

• marketplace
• messenger

Literally my only attachments to Meta at this point. I want to delete my account so badly.

How are you (plural, I mean other posters too) managing to use Facebook to keep tabs on your friends? It’s so full of “sponsored”, “clips” and “ad” posts that it takes absurd amount of time to get to what people in your friends list posted. And it’s like 1 post from someone I know, 10 irrelevant trash

It does show the events (mainly concerts for me) other people are going to, so that’s why I do open it once in a few months

I use Facebook to communicate with my HS classmates as I have been in charge of organizing our class reunions and no one wants to be contacted on platforms. (Not that I blame them)

However as soon as our 15 year reunion comes around this summer, I’m gathering email addresses and will organize the 20th via email because I’m deleting my account after that. If people want to get together for our 20th they can either give me their email or can plan it without me.

Personally I stopped using Facebook years ago, but I kept the account around for my grandma’s sake.
She has since stopped using the computer all together, so I took that opportunity to finally delete my account.

I do still use Whatsapp though… I would prefer if I didn’t have to use it, but there is no real way around it in the Netherlands.

I’m in a similar boat. I immigrated to Canada back in 2017, and I have a daughter now who is turning five. As of right now Facebook is the single most effortless way for me to stay in contact with my friends and family back home, and allows them to feel familiar with and/or connected to me and my daughter.

I keep using Facebook to keep up with family and friends I don’t see all the time. I also use marketplace. I maintain a group of family members where I post jpgs of raw family photo scans I host (moving the raws to Immich at the moment). Other than that I occasionally post a funny thing from Lemmy as a “still alive” post.

I still use it for the various buy swap sell and town info groups. It’s a handy place to keep up to date with what’s happening in small towns. As a result, the sponsored content isn’t in the way much.

I don’t think there’s anything in the Fediverse meant to support the family updates use case.

We use giant SMS text message threads for that.

For more privacy, we get everyone to use Signal or XMPP with OMEMO.

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Mastodon has a post only to followers feature, admins will be able to see those posts (because they would have to be able to if they are to send them to your followers on their instance) but other than that, it’s private.

Now mastodon isn’t a one to one replacement like friendica but it doesn’t seem like there isn’t a reason they couldn’t make a similar feature as far as I know

Most people won’t close their facebook account. if it ever does happen it will be because the accounts are purged (highly unlikely given facebooks raging hardon for data) or that the site undergoes a massive transformation after losing a ton of value and rebranding ala myspace.

That likely wouldn’t happen for many many years until a solid competitor arose that grew enough to overtake them and that’s real challenging given their size. It was one thing when user counts were in the millions or even tens or hundreds of millions but facebook has several billion users. That’s like a sizable chunk of the entire population of earth.

It would take a very novel approach to overcome those numbers and then you also have to consider momentum: at this point there are a great deal of people who consider facebook “the internet”. Like they open their browser/phone and that’s what they do. It is their habit. Then in second place you have instagram so even if you knocked facebook off meta would still ultimately be ok. And with the incubation period of social media they’d probably have another one up and coming long before your threat became viable that would have the benefit of starting in like 7th place simply because of their massive market share (see: threads). By the time your social network had the 10ish years it takes to get to hundreds of millions of users they’d potentially have that one at a billion, or have pulled the plug and moved on to another trial with a massive head start

Doesn’t mean to give up on the fediverse stuff, just that the gross corporate social media likely wont go away for a very long time, if ever. Barring outside influence like regulatory change of course