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.

What's wrong with iOS? I use Google-Android right now, which is arguably the worst possible choice. iOS seems to be a lot better for privacy.

Apple was part of PRISM so I don't believe anything they do about privacy is anything but for PR.

But as for why not iOS, it's more a choice of brand. I don't like apple products, they restrict to much for my taste.

Facebook's raison d'être is to be a reflection of your real life identity. In that way it is unlike all those other social media sites you mentioned. Sure you could use your real identity on those sites but it's not required and many people opt not to and it has no impact on their ability to use the platform.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I know black and white thinking is very appealing but we don't need to go back to living in a yurt in the wilderness just because facebook is a net drain on society. I've been participating on forums all over the internet for the past 20 years and it's been the catalyst for some of the greatest things in my life.

I wrote that, too: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/13/will-the-last-person-to-le...

what about github lol

i know you meant for that to be funny, but you are correct in a scary way. github has become _the_ place for sharing code and they (as you already have seen multiple times) have no problem in deleting or locking out repos when the first hit of a DCMA gets into their hands (without any verification to the legitimacy of the DCMA mind you).

The top comment on that story about google points out the main problem:

> 2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case.

Sure you can delete your account on reddit. They'll still track you as if you have one just like the facebook buttons or all those creative new tracking shit we regularly read about here.

In the end, you don't have to be an extremist. Just don't post everything and keep in mind that you are being tracked. This is the internet for you today.