Beating Facebook: Digital Minimalism in Practice

Back in May I got back on Facebook and wrote extensively about why I chose to do that and the parameters and controls I was going to use to ensure that it wouldn’t become a sink-hole. I recommend reading that first here:

Yes, but

But, while it’s true that

There’s so little content generated by my small friends list that my newsfeed doesn’t have much to show. It’s more like the old days of Facebook where you’d hit the point where you remember seeing the same content the last time you logged on and would know that you don’t need to scroll any further!

…Facebook itself still begs for your attention. While the content my friends are producing is fairly sparse, Facebook-the-company has no problem filling the gaps with ads, group suggestions, friends suggestions, reels, and anything else they designed to be ultra-attention-grabbing. Just look at all this junk!

And it makes sense. Facebook doesn’t want you to slim down your friends list to 70 people. They want you to have a zillion friends they can endlessly (selectively) feed you content from. But, even if you do slim down your friends list, they’ll find other things to barrage you with. Facebook only makes money when you’re staring at it for a long period of time. While I personally find this to be a hostile and awful business model, it is what it is.

Out of all of these forced-on-you features, Reels is definitely the worst.

Look, TikTok works. It’s the most addictive thing humanity has ever created. Seriously. It didn’t jump from zero to $66 BILLION in value for nothing. So it’s no surprise that Facebook wanted a slice of the pie and followed suit with Reels. It’s also no surprise that, aside from just copying the format (short, vertical videos), they’ve developed an algorithm to be just as gnarly as TikTok’s — prioritizing the most attention-grabbing, jumpy, short-format stuff as possible. Then they inject those reels nice and large into your feed.

The best part? You can’t get rid of them! You can’t opt out of Reels content. Ever. Reels will always be in your Facebook feed. They make too much money catching your eyes on them; they’re never going away.

So… even with a pared down friends list, there’s just too much happening on the Facebook dashboard that I don’t want. It’s frustrating.

But I found a solution. And boy does it work.

Purity

Turns out there’s a tool called “FB Purity” that was actually first developed in 2009. 2009! 15 years ago! This thing has been growing with Facebook year after year since. And 2024’s FB Purity is a monster.

Let me just get straight to the point and show you what my feed looks like now:

I blurred several elements for privacy but hopefully you can still see the gist here — there’s nothing but posts from my friends and the few pages I follow. No ads, no groups, no Reels, there’s not even a side-bar! Just a pure list of actual status updates from the few people I’m connected with. It’s beautiful.

In fact, it’s also sorted in pure chronological order — newest first. Just like Facebook in the early days used to be. Remember when you’d get to the content you’d already seen before and think “Oh okay, I got everything new then” and shut off Facebook then walk away? I have that back now. It’s incredible. I didn’t even know this banner exists:

It’s at the end of the chronological feed! As in, there’s an end to the feed! It’s Facebook like it used to be, but even quieter than that. It’s amazing.

FB Purity essentially strips away everything that Facebook-the-company wants to shove into your eyes so they make more money. Instead, you get a completely peaceful, simple list of updates from real humans. And, when you start seeing the updates you already read last time you opened Facebook, you realize it and understand there’s nothing new left to see. So you leave Facebook 🙂. Glorious. Just a short feed of actual things from my actual friends. No junk. This is great.

Facebook HATES This ONE SIMPLE TRICK

(Chuckling at myself for finally getting to use the “___ HATES THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK” headline trope)

Alright, but you might realize that Facebook isn’t exactly okay with this. FB Purity, in a sense, causes them to lose a lot of money. It strips away the things that fuel their advertising revenue. That’s not good for them!

There are two reasons why this system works and Facebook can’t / won’t do anything about it:

1. Nobody uses FB Purity, proportionally. Understand that there are estimated to be three BILLION Facebook users worldwide. Aside from how absolutely INSANE that number is, guess how many are using FB Purity? Well, we don’t actually know for sure (FB Purity doesn’t track anything, not even how many people install it), but I would guess less than 100,000 people. So that’s…. 0.003% of Facebook’s audience? It’s not even worth Facebook’s time to care.
2. Facebook can’t do anything about it. From a technical standpoint, every time you load the Facebook web-page, it’s like they’re handing you over a paper with a bunch of writing on it. That writing includes your friend’s status updates, a couple ads, some Reels, etc. — all the content on the web-page is on that paper. FB purity just acts as a bodyguard for you — using white-out to get rid of the junk on that paper before you read it. Since Facebook already gave you the paper and it’s in your possession, they don’t actually know this is happening at all. And they certainly can’t stop it. They just assume that you read the paper as-is — because most people do. Instead, now you see a cleaned-up paper with no junk on it.

So, to be clear, this strategy works excellently, cannot be stopped by Facebook, doesn’t make Facebook aware of what we’re doing, and isn’t a big enough thing for Facebook to care about it anyway.

There is no downside here!

Okay, How Do I Do It?

Alright, first of all, let me give you a warning. If you go to fbpurity.com you’re going to see a website that either looks like it’s straight from 2007, or looks like a phishing / fake website. I get that. It’s… not a very modern looking website. But it is the real website. And just to double-make-sure, yes, this is what I’m talking about:

You’ll also find that they’re using “FB” for “Fluff Busting”. This is because, while we all know that “FB” means “Facebook”, copyright lawsuits are a thing and they can’t actually say “Facebook Purity”.

Anyway, in terms of actually getting FBP installed, the process is extremely easy if you use Chrome (or Microsoft Edge) — just a browser extension. If you’re a Safari user (like me!), there are a few extra steps, but it’s not altogether difficult. Just go to the:

How to Install Page

And it’ll walk you through the steps. It’s so worth it to get to the other side.

If you’re one of my personal friends and have any issue with this, reach out and I’ll personally help you get it running on your computer. It’s worth it! If you’re not, leave a comment or drop me an email and I’ll do my best to help you as well.

Consider Supporting

Lastly, FB Purity is a totally free and open source system. It’s secure, doesn’t send your data to anywhere/anybody/anything, and I’ve read the source code myself. It’s one of those rare pieces of software that’s freely available for the common good and asks nothing in return… regardless of the hundreds of hours the developer has spent over the last decade keeping it up to date with Facebook’s changes and systems. The fact that it’s totally free is wild.

So please, if you do end up using FB Purity, consider supporting the developer. We all use Facebook enough to spend $5/mo (less than a Starbucks coffee…) supporting a tool that lets us use Facebook on our terms. Free software is awesome. With support over time, it’ll stay that way 🙂

Comments? Thoughts?

Replying to ...
Cancel

Full Name

Email

Comment

Please note: spam comments happen a lot. All submitted comments are run through OpenAI to detect and block spam.