Just out of curiosity, what country would use Facebook for government announcements? That is fucking wild
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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I used to have a burner account and a program that logged in to FB with Selenium and converted certain "pages" into RSS feeds. It worked great when it did, but Facebook has a lot of measures against scraping, and I burned out trying to maintain this.
I don't know a way to read their content without an account, which excludes me from a lot of local events.
Which reminds me that rss-bridge has a Facebook backend that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't
I ended up making a burner account for this. I used a proton mail address and a plausible but fake name. My vpn kept getting flagged for special review where they, I shit you not, want you to send in a photo of a government ID. Eventually I found a VPN server that, for whatever reason, got passed this.
Then I spent 15 minutes hiding and locking every privacy setting I could find because I really didn't want to be shown to other people as a potential "friend".
I use the account just to monitor local emergencies and whatnot. An infuriating amount of local businesses and services only use facebook.
Dang, I tried a few times and gave up with Facebook. Guess I'll try again. I loathe how everyone uses Facebook marketplace. Rip Craigslist
I can skip over any business that only has a Facebook page. Plenty of choices out there...
What I can't skip is when a political candidate is only on Facebook. I can't count the number of times I was trying to research candidates for local election and found they only had their policies on a locked Facebook page. Infuriating doesn't describe it.
Plenty of choices out there…
Not for me unfortunately. There's a number of businesses with zero online presence. They maybe have a facebook page with one entry congratulating Becky's son Roger for graduating with the class of 2015, and that's how you find the phone number. It's like the 90s again, except there's no phone book now. I don't understand it. These guys must be making a living purely off the business they get at church.
The guy who dug my well asked why I decided on him specifically and I said, "Honestly? You're the only one who returned my call." I asked him why guys with a lease on a million dollar drill rig wouldn't return calls and he wasn't sure.
I really didn't want to interface with Facebook at all but, fuck me. I have to join the Ruritan Club, or some shit, just to find an electrician.
did you hear the latest from proton ceo? ugh
Yeah, disappointing.
Same question, but Instagram.
Sucks that a bunch of businesses think an Instagram account is an acceptable substitute for a website.
Proxigram
Is there any public instance that’s not blocked?
So far what I know are these Public instances. There is also another instance which was not mentioned in before link.
sucks for those businesses that they will never get my money. Seriously, if a business or individual does this, I completely disregard their existence immediately from my brain and never think about them again.
Tracking
We need to start letting people and organisations know that this isn't acceptable. I've been guilty of just using an anonymous account or letting it slide but having a mailing list is not much effort for example, honestly having a basic website is pretty cheap and easy.
You might be able to use the element zapper in uBlock Origin to remove the popup and overlay.
I have tried, the pop-up is indeed removed but the background remains gray and you can't scroll, there is like an invisible gray wall that can't be removed, and I have tried to activate the annoyance filters without any success.
sometimes the element picker can do a better job than the zapper