Facebook apparently has a grudge against me XD

[Mæstro]

These services are even more cancerous today than when they were new it seems, in more aspects than apparent when just glancing from the outside.

Remember all the glib talk in the early 2010s when the Arab Spring was hailed as proof that SNS were a force for good in the world and it was thought that large businesses could never adapt themselves properly to online life?

[UCyborg]

Guess I've become a cynic over time.

[Mæstro]

A friend of a friend said this today in our chatroom when I mentioned that one’s sex is not pertinent online, and that I am old enough to recall children’s internet safety advice not to disclose it:

It's crazy that Facebook and other social media came along and was like hey post your real face and name!
My tinfoil hat theory is that it was all a psyop to make spyware less threatening to the average person

I recall NFT hawkers about 2021 presenting non-representational profile pictures as if they were something groundbreaking, in much the same way any Western developer who has never heard of visual novels hits upon the idea of non-linear gameplay as if it were some radical idea.

[Night Wing]

I found Facebook was tracking every user; through third party tracking cookies from other sites in cohoots with Facebook, who did not have a Facebook account, that raised "red flags" for me. I found every Facebook addresses I could find, including mobile and placed those addresses in my Hosts file in all of my five computers where the SSD's are running MX Linux and Debian. Ditto for Meta.

None of my three browsers; Pale Moon, Waterfox, Firefox cannot visit Facebook or Meta on any of my computers. If one tries, they get a prompt saying "Facebook may be down or is undergoing maintenance". Doing it this way, I do not have to worry about any Facebook tracking cookies. And I check Pale Moon cookies once a week.

And I've got other social media sites in my Hosts file too.

[Octopuss]

I don't really use Facebook outside of messenger anymore (and haven't for a long time), but still have the account registered under an email address that isn't used for anything else, and I block all these third party cookies where possible, and obviously use Ublock. I like to believe this is good enough bare minimum protection from this piece of shit platform.

[Mæstro]

Like Windows 11, the battle is easiest won if never fought. I suppose i had a skirmish of sorts about 2010, when my parents and others encouraged me to join, never mind that US age registry rules should have nipped that idea in the bud. They had me try some of the Zynga games of the era. Because I was used at that time to the best Newgrounds had to offer, ‘do one action and wait six hours or nag an acquaintance’ was patently inferior and I refused to go any further. Later, I could learn that this is done to habituate play within an already existing Facebook routine and prevent a player completing the game in a few hours, but I lacked the former and was used to the latter in Flash games. Happily, they had got the message early and stopped trying to push me onto SNS. Later, smartphones and large language models et al were other technologies which simply failed to take in the end after an experimental phase.

[UCyborg]

Recently I heard on TV about how some sketchy providers of aesthetic surgeries only advertise / sell their services on social media sites. That alone would be red flag for me. The journalist that was investigating called one such provider, said being interested and the person on the other side said to go to their Instagram and...well I didn't catch what was supposed to be done there.

I really only used FB Messenger in the end. I think the reason I made an account during high school days was in case something useful school related would pop up there once in a blue moon. I remember the site used to have sensible UI. Eventually, they turned it ugly and slow.

After losing all contacts, haven't touched my account since.

Is Discord what people use these days for messaging? If it even works for that... The only thing I got out is that it's a horrible replacement for forums.

[Moonchild]

Is Discord what people use these days for messaging?

I use Discord and Telegram for instant messaging these days.

[moonbat]

it's a horrible replacement for forums.

It's not, it's a chat server. I don't know why this trend has started of using chat as a substitute for a regular forum with threaded discussions. Both are completely different applications.

[Moonchild]

I think it's because of the increasing need for immediate gratification, and lack of patience. It's why e-mail is also in use less. People would rather have phone chats than taking their time to write something with substance.

[moonbat]

It's still stupid because it requires people to be online at the same time to talk to each other in a world where people are in different time zones. And a single scrolling group chat with multiple messages in it, how on earth can one keep track of anything? Not to mention trying to search through the whole chat history.

[frostknight]

I think it's because of the increasing need for immediate gratification, and lack of patience. It's why e-mail is also in use less. People would rather have phone chats than taking their time to write something with substance.

Off-topic:
100% This...

Also think instant gratification and lack of patience is also what pushed proprietary software to victory in the first place.

Windows, Android, Mac, etc...

They all took advantage of that weakness in humans by being what most people needed by default by being easy and just working for most people.

I cannot say this is as true in current day, but that's where I think that all started

[Mæstro]

A Generation Z adult has gone to law against Facebook, YouTube and Tiktok for addicting her to SNS in her childhood.

It's still stupid because it requires people to be online at the same time to talk to each other in a world where people are in different time zones. And a single scrolling group chat with multiple messages in it, how on earth can one keep track of anything? Not to mention trying to search through the whole chat history.

Oddly enough, the women I know through Discord think that it does a fair job of promoting asynchronous communication, and even discourage forcing them into synchronous in it. One, when I tried to present her with Jabber, confused it with IRC, which pressured her too much to reply quickly. Another friend described Discord as ‘a messenger which flirts with the idea of being a forum’. When writing a reply, one can select any past message, which will appear above like quoting a message on this board. This permits threaded discussions. I am used to leaving answers on something interested from several hours earlier, or getting answers which were sent while I was asleep. None of us think of IM as that instant, although real-time conversations are possible and sometimes happen. I oversee a chatroom with twenty members scattered across Europe, Asia and America, and have never run into difficulties. Meanwhile, Discord’s search feature supports a variety of filters, notably date ranges. I have never found it hard to retrieve messages.

In 2017, when I first began to care about internet privacy and made other reforms like replacing my old email account with Tutanota, Discord presented itself to me as a drop-in substitute for Skype, which I had hitherto used, which would not scan my messages or advertise to me. I was socially isolated then, and convincing enough friends to count on a single hand to migrate was easy. Since then, I have made friends through Discord and learnt about Discord’s technical and other faults, in that order. I am not attached to any larger chatrooms, but persuading these friends (who live hundreds of kilometres away at least) to switch has been a glacial process. The best I have got is their acceptance of the condition that, if DIscord announces plans to implement LLM scraping or similar, then I must leave the site, and they would presumably coöperate with me to maintain contact.

[Mæstro]

Per the advice given me, I come bearing new insights on the main topic now that the editing window has long since lapsed.

As a non-Facebook user, it was a mild surprise to learn that the courts ruled two years ago that holding a site for ransom money if users reject tracking, like I have mentioned some German sites do, is illegal. Sites must offer users traditional, contextual advertising, free of charge, instead of paying or tracking. (Here is a mirror of Facebook’s policy.) One is reminded of Your Ad Choices and Google Analytics’ opt-outs in the USA. Brute, technical measures to thwart tracking and abstention from the worst offenders are easier (for me, at least) and preferable, but it is still assuring to see that even somebody enmeshed in the SNS net has some legal recourse.

[Moonchild]

Interestingly, since I mentioned this I've had more people trickle in telling me they experienced the same thing, but with the important note that it was a thing when signing up with e-mail, but notably they could sign up with their phone number just fine, instead! From the exact same location and computer and connection (going through their router).
I definitely don't want Meta to have my phone number in their systems, so that's a no-go for me (unless I get a burner sim for some reason).

[Gemmaugr]

(unless I get a burner sim for some reason).

Which has become impossible in Sweden thanks to forcing registration of pre-paid SIM cards ("justified" through claiming it's to stop criminals). You might be interested to know that Denmark and Finland don't require this, as of yet: https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.co ... try#Europe

[Mæstro]

They are quite dear, but satellite phones exist if needed. For my part, I have gone about a year now without any mobile phone at all, and I cannot say that I truly miss even the clamshells and bars, now that I left them behind. I would not mind going back to a feature phone if I truly needed, rather the clamshell I had in the States than the bar I had here, but I have had no need. For placing calls, if I needed to do this on my own, a landline would suffice.

[Moonchild]

Which has become impossible in Sweden thanks to forcing registration of pre-paid SIM cards

Oh don't get me wrong. I don't mind them knowing the burner number being linked to my person. I do mind opening my main number up to Meta-induced phone spam.

[Mæstro]

Meta-induced phone spam.

I wonder whether this is why my parents get so many fake calls, whereas I had never got any at all when I had my own telephone number.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

I don't know, I'm not on FB nor any other "social" but I've been forced to give my (only) cell phone number to Google for their 2FA which I aslo was forced to use. Occasionally other sites (usually public administration, but also bank or utilities) require the phone number.
So far the number of spam calls/SMS it's extremely low vs the e-mail spam I receive or the telephone spam I hear other people receive