While I agree, there is a huge difference in impact. Facebook has more users, reach a way bigger demographic and has access to a much, much, much broader range of data. Not to mention is has instagram and whatsapp too.
It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.
The only ones that compares is Google.
But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder.
E.g:
- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.
- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.
- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.
- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.
- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.
- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.
That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.
Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?
So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.
However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.
I've had the opposite experience with DDG. While DDG itself resolves about 85% of my searches just fine, getting the hang of the !bang syntax has really elevated my search game without compromising a whole lot. I've been 6-months free of Google as my primary search engine, and see no reason to go back.
Insofar as other steps, I shut down my Twitter account (with a dictionary word username) last year as an experiment to see if I'd care enough to resurrect it before the account was deleted--a 30-day span. I didn't come back to check again for ~40-45 days, and I don't especially miss it. That was enough for me to realize how little value it provided me.
(Never really bothered with Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and the like.)
This year I'm looking into non-Google alternatives for my family's email and common functions (calendaring, etc). It's a slow slog in between a ton of other priorities, but the importance of decentralizing again is growing non-trivially.
Also, I plan to resurrect my blog/personal site for the first time in, spitballing here, about 8 years now. Putting my content back on my terms and reversing the tide in my own way.
It's two order of magnitude bigger than twitter, reddit, pinterest, etc.
The only ones that compares is Google.
But while I have no problem living without a Facebook account, living without Google is way harder. E.g:
- no hangout is the easiest. I hated it.
- dropping calendar was easy. It was not that good anyway. I missed the integration with a lot of 3rd party though.
- I leaved gmail. It tooks years and many problems with accounts came with it. The competitors UI are worse.
- I tried to leave gmap. But competitors don't have street view, shop open shedules or nearly as accurate traveling times. And waze eventually got bough by google. Maps.me is alright for when I don't have internet, but it's nowhere close to gmap for big cities if you have internet.
- I tried, very hard, to quit google search. Bing. DuckDuckGo.Qwant. They are ok. But I do hundreds of queries a day. Ok doesn't cut it. And if you are looking for result in another language than english, forget about it.
- now for the phone. Well, I won't go apple. Mozilla and MS are no longer here. I tried SailOS for a year. I don't recommend it. So android is what's left if you want a smartphone. I tried rooting, but it's dangerous, and takes time. So now I just avoid using a google account on the phone, which is, well, something at least. And make it extra hard to install apps.
That's a lot of trouble for so-so results.
Who else than a privacy savvy nerd is going to do a 10th of it ?
So to me, no facebook + ublock + no google account is like when I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. It's 80/20, but for privacy instead of sanity.
However, let's all remember HN is a niche, and that most people still watch tv, don't use add blockers and would not even have a though about personal data.