Hacker News Reader

Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of a browser plugin that would filter out all posts that I haven't subscribed to? In theory it should be possible by grabbing my list of friends (and, optionally, of the pages I liked). In practice, I expect Meta implemented an aggressive scheme to prevent that and further confuse FB users.

View on HN

Personally I want to filter out all the "recommended" posts, but if you look at the raw html you'll see that they aggresively obfuscate the structure to make this sort of thing difficult.

When somebody built a tool to clean up your feed, Facebook sent them a cease and desist then banned them for life:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...

I have found that the “log out” button works pretty well for that purpose, and is roughly the same experience I would get if I had such a plugin.

I had a greasemonkey script that I wrote to remove certain posts from my timeline. However, based on how often it broke, and more importantly, how it broke, it was clear Facebook was actively combatting scripts like that. FBPurity is a centrally maintained version of that, but I still found that getting updates from my friends was just not happening - it relies on FB showing you those posts (interspersed among the ads and other garbage), and they weren’t doing that. I have also culled down my friends list over the years, as acquaintances showed themselves to be unrepentant assholes, so there’s just less and less I was missing out on in the first place. I still have messenger on my phone, but I’ve disabled notifications so I only check it on my terms, and that has been working pretty well to remain connected with the people I really care about staying in touch with.

You don't need a plugin. Facebook offers a feed which is just friends.

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

On the web, you access it by pressing Menu → Feeds → Friends. Words on mobile and desktop browsers.

It would be relatively good (except all sponsored posts...) the problem is it gets reset after I leave the app.

This is not only fairly hard to find, but in my experience, it also only shows you posts from the last three days. So if you don't log into Facebook at least every other day or so, you'll miss things.

fbpurity.com works quite well for me on desktop, on m.facebook.com, it does not.

It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com