Replying to @⁨ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩

Not to defend them too much but I’d assume that a lot of the employees are just trying to make a living. The department I’m working at was recently taken over and I have a mortgage and a kid so even if I morally disagree with some of the practices of my new employer I can’t just quit without uprooting the lives of my family.

It’s the same for the majority of workers stuck in big corporate jobs. The capitalist orphan crushing machine will crush all in the end. Not just the orphans.

Replying to an earlier post

I do not get the downvotes. We are not talking about wage slaves for amazon here (where it would obviously apply) but software developers for meta. They most likely have tons in savings they could use and with a resume that gave them the current job I really doubt they are out of options. The current job market is bad Im well aware of that, but its also not like FANG turned evil just yesterday. But in the end its also best to not fight among ourselves.

Replying to @⁨eldavi@lemmy.ml⁩

That’s not my narrative at all. What I am saying these people CHOSE to work at meta, hense are likey devoid corporate moral standings and would likely get swooped up by the next shitty company that wants to treat humans like profit cattle and since they’re STILL at meta, they would likely be okay with it. I’m not generalizing about high skill workers, I’m shitting on people who work at meta.

Replying to an earlier post

I simply cannot understand how people are willingly working at a place like Meta.

The same reason people are willing to napalm brown kids for Uncle Sam, a chance at a better life, price be damned. People will find a way to justify their life choices one way or another but it really comes down to wanting food and shelter. Yes, I realize that’s an extreme example but I hope you understand the point i’m trying to make. We live in a fucked up world that pits us against each other. When we fight each other, we’re too busy to fight our oppressors.

Replying to an earlier post

Do you really, honestly not understand it though? FAANG are the most valuable companies on the planet. They just blatantly bribe governments around the world (but especially the US) to leave them alone. Or they spend billions hiring lobbyists to protest it.

And the vast majority of their users obviously don’t care. Virtually everyone I know uses Facebook on a regular basis, and yet I don’t know a single person that uses the Fediverse. And when I tell them about it they act like I’m some sort of weird outcast or conspiracy theorist. People who don’t care don’t pressure politicians to fix it.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

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…

F.B. Purity - Cleans up Your Facebook ExperienceF.B. Purity - Clean Up + Customize FacebookF.B. Purity is a browser extension / addon that customizes and cleans up facebook from all the application spam and other extraneous information

Replying to an earlier post

Came here to mention F.B. Purity too, it’s pretty much the only thing that makes FB tolerable.

And yea, I only visit FB for some local community groups and pages, and to chat with family in Messenger. I only share articles on my profile maybe once a year, and stopped uploading photos sometime before the pandemic 😅 But sadly it’s still the most mainstream social platform in Europe.

Replying to @⁨cobysev@lemmy.world⁩

There has been no release of FBP since January 2026, and Fernandez has not made any public statement as to whether he is continuing to develop FBP. Many Facebook features it previously blocked, such as intrusive ads, are no longer blocked.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluff_Busting_Purity

Currently I am trying Nora as an alternative, per a Lemmy recommendation:

github.com/nonbili/Nora/

But honestly, I do not use Facebook, so I can’t speak to how well it works there.

en.wikipedia.orgFluff Busting Purity - Wikipedia

Replying to @⁨ramble81@lemmy.zip⁩

I’ve considered containerizing it somewhere just for the sake of selling and buying car parts and ‘the like’, but I have no active intention to participate beyond that and family matters.

Fact is, I’d be fine if that was all Facebook was, that seems reasonable. It’s the endless patronizing propaganda, tracking, ads and arguing bots everyone takes issue with. If they just didn’t suck, they’d be fine.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

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.

Replying to @⁨Supercrunchy@programming.dev⁩

This was a thing long before the AI craze: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9152669

AdGraph differs from existing approaches by building a graph representation of the HTML structure, network requests, and JavaScript behavior of a webpage, and using this unique representation to train a classifier for identifying advertising and tracking resources… We evaluate AdGraph on the Alexa top-10K websites, and find that it is highly accurate, able to replicate the labels of human-generated filter lists with 95.33% accuracy, and can even identify many mistakes in filter lists.

They made a Chrome extension, in 2020: github.com/uiowa-irl/AdGraph

But practically, it’s tricky because:

  • It still needs to load and render the ads. Not undoable; Adnauseum does this, but its a much more performance-intense approach.

  • There’s always the risk of unpredictably blocking legitimate elements.

  • Image/text classifiers aren’t actually black boxes. Hence there were also adversarial measures against this… before the AI craze: web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zubair/…/a4-acsac2021.pdf

At the end of the day, the whole point of uBO is to be lightweight and fast. You aren’t wrong about a machine-learning based approach, but its not really a fit for them IMO.

But.

I think a reasonable approach would be to have bots and agents generate adblocking rules, to be tested by humans, then shipped to users of various adblocking engines.

The engineering is far easier. Performance/latency constraints are minimal, 1 bot can maintain thousands of rules for millions of users, and it isn’t necessarily availible to reverse engineer, either.

Some adblock lists must do this, already. I know they already use some automation, but I don’t know the details TBH.

Replying to @⁨GreenBeard@lemmy.ca⁩

Yeah. I’m all for local inference, but to be clear, you can’t have a local agenic LLM as a Adblock browser plugin.

It’s also massively redundant. Why not just run the agent once and ship the rules to millions of users?

Text and image classification models are tiny, though. That’s definitely doable in an extension, albeit not worth the performance cost, IMO.

Also, there are already browser forks built for agenic usage.

If you want, say, generate UBO rules to use, this is the way to do it. Not hacked in as an extension.

Replying to @⁨Supercrunchy@programming.dev⁩

It would make a good second (or third) layer of defense. The problem with it is that it’s reactive not proactive, so you need to download the ad first before it can decide to block it or not. URL blacklists are the superior option, but hard to maintain. The ideal setup would be a URL blacklist that’s automatically updated on the fly by an AI classifier so anything that slips through the blacklist gets ban hammered by the AI and added to the blacklist to prevent future wasted bandwidth. If the blacklist updates were shared the same way some of the ad blockers do currently it could be incredibly effective as it would be essentially distributed realtime ad blocking.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

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

Replying to @⁨Pika@sh.itjust.works⁩

Yep! I’ll admit, I haven’t read the news, but by what people keep talking about in comments, it seems that ublock said that the reason was how annoying it was to keep fighting against facebook, but if they had just said “yeah we’re dropping facebook’s priority, not enough ublock users go there for it to be useful to monitor their changes as frequently” it wouldn’t become that big of a sign for other companies to do the same thing that facebook is doing (also throws shade at how dead facebook is) but at the end of the day this has always been a fight of attrition and what fuels ublock is spite, and for people to have any of it they’d need to at least care about the product buried under the ads

Replying to @⁨Pika@sh.itjust.works⁩

Companies absolutely can pay people solely to combat ad blockers. That will always win. Facebook doesn’t have a “system” other than always changing their system. Any company can constantly change how they display ads. The ad blockers are just always playing catch up until the corporation exhausts the volunteers energy.

If the solution is to get new volunteers to keep up the work, why don’t we have people willing to take on that role? Most people that have the know how arent using facebook anyway, so there’s no motivation from them.

Without legislature to enforce some rules on corporations, the ones with the money will always win.

Replying to @⁨Bazoogle@lemmy.world⁩

I’m not sure I’m understanding the point of your comment. It sounds like you are making the case that somehow Ublock origin announcing they are no longer blocking ads on facebook because it’s too cumbersome, somehow will not cause companies to be like “oh facebook figured out the ad blocking problem, what did they do” and then try to implement similar systems.

Yes more people could contribute, but you know what else would help the cause as well? Not announcing to the world the solution to break your product. They have now put in writing that the solution to making the “problem” their product creates go away, is to just make it super obnoxious/tedious for the team to try and find filters on. This is going to act like gas on fire and only cause more work for them than if they had just silently let the filters phase out and use the excuse none of the maintainers are on the platform anymore.

Replying to @⁨Pika@sh.itjust.works⁩

It’s not a matter of technical implementation, but a procedural one. It was never a secret, it was just too expensive and impractical to do. If you changed how you implement ads every single day, the ad blockers would have to change their rules every day. Just keep going forever, and eventually the adblockers won’t have the resources to keep up.

It’s like if a food truck driver was trying to operate without a permit. If they sat in the same spot every day, officials would see them and easily catch them. If they moved to different apots around town every day and repainted their truck, they could evade officials. That’s not a secret, it’s just that it’s more work than it’s worth. While not a great analogy for many reasons, the idea is that it was never a secret how to get past ad blockers. It was just never worth the money. You’d spend more money implementing the evasion than you’d get back from the ad revenue.

At this point yhey are probably using AI to do the job of adjusting ad formats, so humans especially couldn’t keep up. Perhaps AI could be used to counteract it, but that’s expensive to setup and keep running. A free software obviously can’t aford that.

Sure, they could have been silent about it, but they would still get reports about missed ads. There would be enough hubbub online they’d eventually have to address. Maybe this way they can use the attenion to get more contributors

Replying to an earlier post

This looks like the problem here isn’t a technical one, like how to best render a site.

The problem is that some of us (too many) have become dependent on hostile systems (machines + hostile owners + desperate humans willing to serve the owners in exchang for bread aka the employees).

The solution as I see it is twofold:

  1. Shift to friendly systems.
  2. Treat the relationship to a hostile system as a war, and properly prosecute that war.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

The dev comments say a lot:

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.

old.reddit.comoverview for paintboth1234The u/paintboth1234 community on Reddit. Reddit gives you the best of the internet in one place.

Replying to @⁨brucethemoose@lemmy.world⁩

Yeah, I gotta say that while shit is looking pretty bad on the corporate producer side of things, this society/system has bred a ton of entitled consumers that think their desires are important to anyone that can make or do things.

Even if you’re paying someone for something, that doesn’t mean you can dictate what they do or how they do it. Or even that they need to offer you what they willingly offer others. There’s some people where no amount of money would make dealing with them worthwhile, let alone what they are willing to pay for special treatment.

But with FOSS, there isn’t even the incentive of money greasing the interaction. It’s just pure entitlement. No one owes you anything just because you’re interested in their project or skills.

Replying to @⁨JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩

This is my pet peeve!

If they really have to use it, there are TONS of other tools to debloat Facebook, including checkboxes for extra filters IN UBO.

Did they lift a finger to even check?

Nope. Not even a freaking pinky. Yet they act like entitled subject experts in the comments.

This is my absolute trigger. If someone is gonna complain about something, at least do a cursory search about the problem instead of pretending like you’re omniscient.

But also, I understand that algorithmic social media (like Facebook, and now Reddit) has trained people to expect information to come to them.

If it’s not already in their feed, it doesn’t exist. The idea of “hmm, I wonder if anything else cleans up Facebook” didn’t even occur to them, despite how apparently existential the issue is.

It’s like the whole planet has forgotten how to seek knowledge out.

Replying to @⁨inari@piefed.zip⁩

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.

Replying to an earlier post

I don’t know if you saw this post yet, but at least somebody is maintaining a Facebook filter list. Hopefully that means you can keep using uBO in peace, provided the right lists are enabled.

piefed.socialAdGuard promises to keep filtering Facebook adsFrom [xcancel](https://xcancel.com/AdGuard/status/2087528424818495800): > The team behind uAssets, the filter lists used by uBlock Origin, says it…

Replying to an earlier post

“Get them off Facebook” isn’t an option. They’re old, and it’s how they connect with their friends and get fulfilment.

This is exactly the kind of mentality that Meta preys upon. Create a new community. Invite them. Invite your family. Invite their friends. There is no other option. As long as we continue to capitulate to them, they will continue to exploit their power to harm their users.

Replying to an earlier post

I swear this happens to me every single year, and I honestly don’t know if Facebook is intercepting my messages because I don’t know where the confusion comes from (aside my old brain not remembering the name of Facebook products):

“I’ll send you a text message with the address”

“I don’t see anything in messenger”

“What? what’s messenger? I’m sending you a text message on the phone. Look at your phone”

“I’m looking at the phone I still don’t see anything in messenger”

“What’s messenger???”

“I use it for all my messages”

“…and this is from Samsung?”

“No it’s Facebook”