PieFedHow to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads | TechCrunch
techcrunch.com/2025/01/10/how-to-delete-faceboo…
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ExtremeDullardI certainly hope a majority of Fediverse operators will decide to defederate Threads. I always thought it was important not to help Zuck grow his walled garden for free, but now it's clearly a matter of decency.
Decency or even legality. If Zuck knowingly hosts hate speech, you don't want that federated onto your platform or you can be sued, too.
MyOpinion
roblaI've been looking for an alternative to Facebook that I could recommend to non-tech-savvy relatives, but I haven't been coming up with many compelling options. I posted on DailyKos ("Alternatives to the 'F-word'?"), but it seems that BlueSky was the only popular option (which is really designed to be an alternative to Twitter rather than Facebook). Do y'all think that BlueSky will become a bona fide alternative to Facebook before the mainstream public gets religion regarding the Fediverse?
TCB13I love how journalism is all garbage, even the one around technology. It just took a bunch of declarations and suddenly Meta/FB is the target to avoid and cancel. As if there weren't many more and much better reasons to NOT use those platforms than this simple and expected political realignment.
AatubeCome on. The last time searches for deleting Facebook trended this much was in 2012. And even then, they posted pretty much the same thing but for just Facebook in 2022.
The Cambridge Analytica thing happened in 2018. I think the point is that Facebook has been a bad platform for awhile now and these recent articles don't do justice to their history and appear extremely inflammatory as a result.
Yeah, and 1. Even in 2018 there was only like 25% more searches compared to the 2012 and 2025 peak of 100% more 2. TechCrunch covered #deletefacebook when that happened anyways 3. 2012 was “The Year Facebook Finally Tried to Make Some Money”. I don’t see what people mean by “not doing justice”, as TechCrunch seems to be covering how to delete Facebook when people want to delete Facebook.
Yeah. I don't disagree with that. But I think it's rather more about (from what I can see in the original comment) not the techcrunch media coverage, but the idea that techcrunch runs lots of articles about meta and Facebook, not all of them aimed at the problems with the platform and there is no cohesion (in each of these posts), explaining each time they have before given info on leaving Facebook and the important events that lead them to do so.
The article doesn't really start off with a "haven't we been here before", or anything acknowledging what came before. Perhaps that's their complaint.
dexa_scantronYes, I only respect journalists who never update their opinions or recommendations given new information. Everyone needs to use psychic foresight to determine the best takes and then never ever change them. Meta was always exactly as bad as it is today. /s
Supreme Commanders of a few nations have that proverbial red button to delete anything (customizable selection of what to delete, too). You just have to get in contact with one of them, call them for a cup of coffee. Ask them to rid you of that problem.
I deleted mine many years ago, 10/10 would recommend!
Real question is, how can I uninstall Zuckerberg...
That requires an adjuster
a special adjuster that andy has left at the office...
Don’t stop there:
Luigi isn’t a second rate character anymore.
Mario is the black sheep of the family now
Mario needs to step up
Gizmodo's post on this has the most honest title: A Lot of People Are Searching for How to Delete Facebook and Instagram, and We Would Like Their Clicks
LOL! They’re not even pretending to be a news outlet anymore.
(Let’s see how many people miss the projecting by saying I’m missing the “joke”.)
Woosh
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The only thing keeping my meta account alive is Marketplace. Unfortunately, it’s much busier than Craigslist in my area.
Facebook has become a dirty flea market for me.
Same. I live on an island and the only way to sell anything is on two fb groups. Craigslist is there but half the time you get people on the big island and have to take a ferry to sell. I’m thinking of starting a small website/app, not sure it will take off though.
If you cant get people on craigslist, the most well known fixed rock of online classifieds...I don't know that your app will take off. OfferUp and the other one also tried to knock out marketplace and failed.
Offerup, letgo, mercari, etsy, there's a million online 3PMs. (3rd party marketplaces). Refine the idea or scrap it. This guys right.
One can hope it turns into a flea market. Off the side of the hideway everyone passes but few seldom go.
Yeah the world moved from Craigslist to marketplace before I did. I found out the hard way when nothing was selling.
One thing I like about marketplace is you can view someone’s profile to see if they are an actual human that lives near you.
Marketplace needs to die, it's got most of the downsides of craigslist except for making it super easy for prospective purchasers to spam "still available?" Ad nauseum
Put pressure on the group owners to pack it up and move the group elsewhere. Where the group goes, they’ll follow.
This is the problem I've run into. I wanted to stay as part of a social group I'm nominally in, but that group's only presence is on Facebook. And the group admins don't want to move somewhere else because a) it's change, and b) there aren't many other options as good at managing such groups.
On a related topic, does anyone know of a good Federated alternative to Facebook. Or at least an alternative that's less ad-riddled and more privacy-conscious)?
I looked around online last night and all the articles out there suggested things like Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter as Facebook alternatives, which are wrong on so many levels. I'm not that bothered about getting an alternative myself since I barely used FB anyway. But being my extended family's tech support, I keep getting asked about what good alternatives are out there. I'm finding nothing, but I'm likely missing a good Federated option.
I haven’t used it in a long time but I think Diaspora is intended as a decentralized FB clone.
https://diasporafoundation.org/
I’m not sure if it uses ActivityPub or its own thing. It’s been around for awhile so it may predate ActivityPub.
i deployed a Lemmy instance to use... not sure if there's anything better
Also Facebook Groups for obscure things, Facebook Marketplace, and even a lot of local political organizations primarily use Instagram
i tried to avoid it and deny it forever but facebook marketplace has really destroyed craigslist. so lame
I just had a successful transaction on Craigslist today. Don't give up the dream!
I've barely used mine for years. Deleting it is feels much more satisfying and final.
Unfortunately it has been demonstrated through whitehat research that simply deleting your old account is relatively useless. They have shadow profiles of users based on probabilistic data. For example, say your spouse with her decades old account keeps making posts about what you ate on date night, your trip to Cabo, or worse yet she posts a bunch of pictures of her, you, and the kids. Facebook makes a shell profile based on this conception of "you" and begins aggregating all the info it can about this person.
More over, every time an acquaintance of yours gives their FB app permissions to access their contacts (to suggest Friends or whatever) if your contact info is on the list, FB now has your real name, your email, your mobile phone number, etc. You never opted in, but it doesnt matter - other people are opting you into FB data collection all the time, unless you literally don't tell anyone your real phone number or email address.
Thanks, I Hate It
I don't think that most of the lemmy crowd needs this info to beginn with...
But we may have friends and family members asking about it
And surely we would be happy to help if asked.
Deleted everything Meta related in 2022. I have no regrets. Zuck can Suck it
Has he contacted you yet to schedule a time to suck it?
Sucky sucky
You need to block all their domains/IP ranges too otherwise they’re still profiting from profiling you across apps and websites.
Or install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ for the less tech savvy / lazy
Unfortunately, unscrupulous companies can build shadow profiles that bypass cookie and storage based isolation techniques like this.
Your browser gives off a lot of information. See here for some of the information they can use: https://amiunique.org
You're best off blocking things with uBlock Origin vs something that just isolates.
That feels like the opposite of deleting your account or blocking them
At the router. That is where I delete it.
Where's the article on how to profit off of racist idiots on Facebook?
Make a red bubble store and sell political slogan T shirts. You can easily make a couple hundred a month just doing that. “This is Trump Country” shirts have been doing insanely well since November.
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This is a reference I haven't seen in YEARS.
Damn that takes me back.
I had to look it up myself, but it appears to be divorce advice (hit the gym, lawyer up, delete facebook)
I think this started on reddit in like 2010 or something. Solid joke in this context.
I agree, good reference
No, you hit the LAWYER and gym up.
Sadly I cant delete WhatsApp because eveyone in my country uses it :c
Pffft! This is soooo 2015.
I turfed FB in 2015 as well (didn't bother with the other stuff).
But now I'm worried I deactivated it and didn't delete.... I cannot remember.
If it's just deactivated-- I wonder if it's better to just leave it a greyed out graveyard, than to reactivate it just to delete. I feel reactivating would give it more information even, as I would be on a different device. It's been dead a decade.
What do people suggest?
Its deleted by now. However since you didnt request your data deleted complying with EU and California laws, its still very much there.
Do it! Delete it.
fuck!
i made a filter with words "zuckerberg" and "meta" but not "facebook"
Unfortunately, I'm keeping mine to make a pipeline from there to actual content on Mastodon or BlueSky. But I basically put a URL in my bio and push a photo once a week.
I deleted my FB account years and years ago, and AFAIK it has never broken into my house and forced me to look at it. But of course Bonespurs takes office pretty soon so I guess nothing is certain.
Is the process different from it was in 2015?
Now you must sacrifice your first born.
accountkiller.com
I did a year ago over their censorship. I don’t miss it.
If it wasn’t for Marketplace, I would be off Facebook entirely.
But I am not on threads at all, and only get punted over to Instagram with reels that appear on my Facebook account.
Oh hey, good reminder. The one upside to the fact that my FB account continually revived itself while I was using my Quest 2 is that now I can delete my account (for the last time, I hope) as part of a widespread protest instead of a one-off annoyance.
Become a master hacker who can access their servers? Probably super illegal, though.
Is it good to know that there ís still person in this world doesn't rely much more on social media even though that is the biggest mainstream in this world.
Is this @technology?
I only use it for messenger. And only then because it still has chat bubbles. There are many better messengers. But they don't have chat bubbles that draw over other apps.
I haven't posted on FB in years.
On Android, all messaging apps have bubbles.
Signal has chat bubbles
Anyone that still has these accounts hasn’t been paying attention the last few years and is part of the problem. I doubt many CURRENT Fb, Ig, Threads users will change their habits.
Dumb fucks
For those who need the context.
https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/
How to "delete" them? Words really have no meaning anymore.
It's short for deleting your account, data, etc.. People ommit those words for a long time now, like "Do you have Lemmy?" or "What is your Mastodon?"
Tldr: u cant
In the UE we have the GDPR.
I often vpn into Europe to make gdpr request lol.
TL;DR Only if you misunderstand the intent of the word "delete".
In the sense of getting rid of the sites themselves, sure, that'll never happen.
And in the sense that once you're known to them you'll never be forgotten, at least not without a massive lawsuit that you've little chance of winning, yes.
But you *can* ask Meta to delete your account(s) and everything visibly associated with you to the point that you no longer have a presence on any of their sites, and that's what this article is about.
One of the reasons Meta has been creating fake AI-based accounts is because so many people are doing this and they don't like it and want to make it look like their sites are still active. Which is an excellent reason to delete your accounts, even if they weren't also doing a bunch of other heinous things.
And you *can* delete the apps from your phone. You should delete your accounts first though.
Virtue signaling 😁
Nah, Facebook and Instagram are the worst. Facebook is some ad riddled, AI slop, filled late stage capitalism hellscape. Worth not using just for mental health.
I quit all social media except for Lemmy, and I have to say it's been great. Especially getting off of Twitter.