Technology

And I've given up on Facebook ages ago. You should too.

The dev comments say a lot:

https://old.reddit.com/user/paintboth1234

No one helping the project ever said "uBO is living on a secluded isle". It's a public community FOSS project, for over a decade, monitored and contributed by every user and volunteer. Every site has been watching uBO for years. It's not new. And yes, if users do nothing to help, either on helping uBO's side or leaving the trash sites, and just give snarky comments instead, this will happen.

The message is clear to me; UBO devs are sick of a sick of a sea of users constantly complaining about imperfect Facebook blocking, who won’t contribute anything nor lift a finger to limit/adapt their own usage. They’re sick of slaving away fighting six-figure-salary Facebook devs, whose only job is to counter adblock, where UBO’s only compensation is more pretentious complaints.

It’s not a technical limitation, persay. It kinda a “Why are we doing this to ourselves? If you all want us to support Facebook, fine; we welcome PRs.”

Which is totally fair.

To me, it sounds like UBO could drop other overtly hostile sites, too. As they should.

Can't they just block facebook.com as whole and call it a day ?

U wonder what kind if person thinks "you know what, today I will go in an make the world a little bit worse than it was before"...I simply cannot understand how people are willingly working at a place like Meta.

Stop wasting effort and block all facebook ads with this one weird trick. Slop devs hate him!

I know a way you can never see a Facebook ad ever again.

This is going to attract more interest in using Facebook advertising to deliver malware, knowing that the attack surface will grow substantially soon.

Without ad blocking, Facebook will become a dangerous place to visit if not done so within some sort of sandboxing.

I get the reasoning, but this is pretty sad. My older parents are frequently more and more fooled by sponsored Facebook posts with some fake product they want to buy, then all of a sudden they have "YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN HACKED" notification spam that takes up half their screen. It's not to a ridiculous degree, maybe 3 times a year on average, but it's happening more often recently.

I use uBlock Origin to keep them safe. If this starts not blocking any ads, I'm not sure what else to do. Is Brave going to keep up?

"Get them off Facebook" isn't an option. They're old, and it's how they connect with their friends and get fulfilment. As disgusting as Facebook is, it's too far gone at this point, I can't take that away from them.

Has everyone forgotten about F.B. Purity (Fluff Busting Purity)? It's a browser extension that lets you customize the entire interface of Facebook. It's been around for 17 years and still works just fine.

I use it to remove not only ads, but FB games, marketplace, reels/videos, suggestions/featured content, FB Messenger, etc. I pretty much locked down my Facebook interface to only show me posts from my friends in the order that they were posted, with the latest at the top of my feed. Just like Facebook used to be before it started shoving useless content in your face.

The only reason I still have a Facebook account is because 90% of my friends, family, and contacts I've made over a lifetime of global travels, are all on Facebook. If I need to get in touch with someone, Facebook is where I'll find them. But I don't post anything to Facebook anymore; I rarely log on to it.

There isn't another social media program where I can find everyone I know without subscribing to even more junk. I won't use Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, TikTok, or any of the other corporate social media programs, and most people I know/knew in person don't use or understand the Fediverse.

Bluesky and Discord are as corporate as I'll tolerate, and I'm already on the lookout for replacements for both. I used to have a Mastodon account a decade ago, before the Fediverse was a common thing, but I have no idea what site I built an account on. I might have to just suck it up and rebuild my account somewhere else. And there are plenty of Discord clones out there, but none quite as functional as Discord yet...

Not that I use Facebook myself, but I think this was a misstep in the U block team.

All this did was tell the major companies out there that the only thing they have to do to make it so u block origins no longer works on their site is to make it extremely tedious for the team working on the project to make filters. So I expect that now that they've officially dropped support for Facebook, the other major sites are going to look at how Facebook is doing it, and they're going to adopt a similar systems

Yall still using that shit?

Why the fuck do articles like this keep using that Pirat_Nation Twitter account as a source? They’re a far right culture warrior who never actually links to the original reporting.

Let me preface this by saying that I am generally against AI and I hate LLMs being pushed everywhere, but I currently hate facebook and social media even more than AI.

I think that ad blocking might actually be a good use of a model trained to detect ads: AI models are "black boxes" and it would make it difficult for facebook to find out precisely how the detection works and workaround it. Imagine a tiny classifier running locally, whose only job is to look at a post html or resulting rendered pixels and detecting if it's an ad or not, and then generating the blocking rules.

It would be quite cool, because it would work on any website without an explicit list of ad-blocking rules that somebody needs to maintain.

Who is still on Facebook anyways?

But if you block ads on Facebook, then what will you read? When I accidentally go to my profile, it's a post from someone I actually follow for every 20 sponsored posts. It's a website to watch ads, then every once of a while your ad viewing session is interrupted by some real content

I mean why, it's not worth it. People who don't give a damn about privacy aren't interested in ad blockers—quite the opposite.

i don't like the "giving up the fight" framing.

Maybe they should stop providing this service for all the big players. people might actually leave if they suffer all the ads.

It's quite fine; who uses Facebook nowadays?

Should probably just block that whole privacy nightmare of a site, to be honest.

Seems like me finally closing my Facebook account this week was timed well.