John Oliver launches "Make yourself less valuable to Meta" website, suggests Signal, Mastodon, Pixelfed, and BlueSky as Meta alternatives
John Oliver launches "Make yourself less valuable to Meta" website, suggests Signal, Mastodon, Pixelfed, and BlueSky as Meta alternatives
John Oliver cited a 5000% rise in search queries related to leaving Meta and deleting accounts. Among the topics mentioned in the analysis, attention was drawn to early Facebook's naivete with regard to moderation requirements, the constitutional framework, and a history of governmental interference.
Oliver debunks common right-wing "cry censorship" talking points, as well as the objective difficulty of moderation endeavors, and how direct threats by Trump may have influenced Zuckerberg's turnaround.
Oliver went on to suggest Signal, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed as alternatives that "do not seem as desperate to fall in line with Trump". For those reluctant to completely ditch Meta, Oliver revealed a new site with step-by-step instructions to "make yourself less valuable to them".
The guide was a collaboration with the EFF, and includes settings' tweaks for Facebook and Meta, whose 98% of revenue comes from micro-targeting ads, the host previously cited, to increase privacy, and recommends Firefox, Privacy Badger, as "other measures" to take in order "to block advertisers and other third parties from tracking you".
The segment culminated in a mock advert, in which the new Meta's approach to moderation is coined as "Fuck it", and hints to racism, internet scams, and calls to genocide running rampant on Meta's platforms.
The clip reminds the origins of Facebook as a site to "rank college girls by hotness", and its implication in genocide in Myanmar, which was more thoroughly discussed in an Oliver's previous special on Facebook in 2018.
Love it, thanks! Just did it. The chosen domain may be a bit unfortunate though, I think, because it could be punished by many algorithms.
Good, glad it's getting some main stream attention. If more people start taking advantage of these settings and alternatives it's going to hurt Meta's bottom line eventually
John Oliver's show is doing amazing things, including the Drumpfinator addon.
What is that URL, though? I'm guessing I'm know it if I (happily) watch the episode?
Took a long time, but nice to see this topic getting mainstream attention.
Why don't stories like this EVER mention Lemmy?
Well, I get that Lemmy is an alternative social media, but it's not really an alternative to Facebook. Anonymous usernames, text-based posts, you can't follow people, Fediverse is somewhat confusing.. I'd recommend it as an alternative to Reddit, but probably not the website where boomers want to check up on their neighbors and friends
That's what Friendica is for
you can’t follow people
He said "Lemmy" but probably meant "Threadiverse", and mbin does support both the Twitter-style following user model and the Reddit-style forum model.
To use fedia.io as an example:
I dunno about piefed, haven't used it.
it's not an alternative to any meta platform
I guess the hate for Reddit isn't as great as for Shitter and Fakebook. (yet)
Because Lemmy is nowhere near as ready for primetime as other platforms.
Eh, Lemmy is way more mature as a platform than PixelFed is, and he mentioned that.
I think the explanation being in relation to what it's intended to replace is more likely. He doesn't care as much about getting people off Reddit as he cares about getting people off Zuck and Musk's platforms.
I think we're too weird and niche.
Clean cut kids do not find Lemmy very palatable.
I don't find Lemmy very palatable. I'm still here because I like to hear different perspectives. Lemmy as a whole seems to hate different perspectives, it's like many go out of their way to keep it closer to a hive mind. 80% of the world's people would not fit in here. I don't either, but I don't give a shit.
Not as many grassroots advocates. Even on the Reddit alternative sub the consensus isn’t lemmy somehow.
Not a very large userbase.
This is literally the answer lmao why are you getting downvoted.
I don’t want to get my hopes up but is this Facebook’s MySpace moment?
My personal MySpace moment for Facebook was 10 years ago. Best choice ever made.
MySpace was way smaller than Facebook, it wasn't even available where I am for most of its (meaningful) existence (I never had a MySpace despite being the exact target age range).
Nobody left MySpace because of enshitification
So much of Facebook is just automated accounts responding to automated accounts in order to milk gullible advertisers. If everyone logged off tomorrow, I don't know if Zuckerberg would notice.
i have certainly notices a SHARP downturn of new content being added to insta and facebook by people i actually know over the last few years.
All that seems to be left is AI Slop and ragebait. a venn diagram that overlaps considerably
I don’t think so. There’s no good alternative to Facebook that is worth leaving it for. When MySpace died, there was a significantly better alternative (FB). Even if people quit using Facebook regularly, they’ll need to keep it.
There's literally billions of people on Facebook, so probably not. But maybe it's a start.
*Billions of accounts. Hard to tell how many are real people and how many are just slop throwing bots.
Even better. It’s the fediverses Facebook moment.
Not immediately or probably for some years. Facebook's main problem is the fact its got an aging population and no young people joining. That's why Meta bought Instagram and is desperate to get their grubby paws on TikTok or force it to close down in the West.
I think internally, over the next decade, FB will start to die off organically as Meta put ever increasing focus on retention and young people.
Use Magic Earth or Organic Maps instead of Google Maps too. Neither will track you.
I've tried so hard but I don't think magic earth, organic maps, or osmand likes me
John Oliver for president ✊
He can't because he wasn't born here, but we could totally elect his wife and let him do the whole first husband thing while still advising if she needs it.
President Kate Norley and First Gentleman John Oliver.
You do know his wife is a Republican right? A proud Bush/Obama era Republican? They literally met at the GOP convention in 2008.
What is with liberals and playing fantasy games with politics? On the one hand liberals will say elections are important and have consequences and on the other they'll treat it like a game of putting in your celebrity faves without bothering to care about their actual views.
Who knows what Jon himself actually thinks given he married a proud Republican and the fact he's a TV comedian playing a character. For all you know deep down he could personally be a never-Trump Republican himself.
good initiative but uh what's up with that domain name?
There was a whole saga of him buying expensive rat erotica artwork at one point, which is a sentence I never thought I'd write.
sentence I never thought I’d write
🤣 🤣
rat erotica
aah thank you! now I can make sense of those last jumbled letters, quite the unusual word combination for sure ^^
Newsweek - The True Story Behind 'Last Week Tonight's' Rat Erotica Painting (archive link)
Is that why my rat erotica artwork started selling at such high prices?
Fucken hilarious 😂👏
Oh, he just had that lying around
His team over at Last Week Tonight pull lots of funny stunts like this and have made quite a few hilarious websites. I wouldn't be surprised if this one is featured on the next episode!
Edit: Hey look, it was! https://www.youtube.com/embed/nf7XHR3EVHo
Remember "Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption"? You can't get stuff like this in stores!
I think is some in-joke having to do with Facebook moderation. Or his typical goofassery with domain names. Can't help you there.
It's an in joke referencing some stuff he did in a previous season. I don't think there's any specific connection to Facebook.
The problem I see with this is that a Meta employee literally came out on Mastodon recently and revealed that non of these settings do anything and are false flags.
i like that people are leaving zucc platforms but why is that happening suddenly? did he do something exceedingly fascist? did i miss something?
Zuckerberg hung out with Trump at Mar a Lago and attended the inauguration, then got rid of Facebook and Instagram's fact checking, relaxed their rules on posting hate speech and discrimination, ended Meta's diversity initiatives, removed bathroom facilities at meta for transgender and nonbinary employees, made speeches in defence of Trump and expressed gratitude for finally being able to have "a productive partnership with the United States government", while removing communications channels for employees and threatening them with being fired if they talked to media about any of this. He has gone full MAGA.
This article covers some of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/technology/mark-zuckerberg-meta-trump.html
thats par for the course for facebook, no? they have always helped the fascists, in my country they literally helped elect one. they helped spread misinformation as if they already didnt care, and the diversity stuff feels just about the same brand of fake to me, so much hate in there.
beggars cant be choosers though so i guess im just glad people are actually mad this time.
He only now was able to catch up with all the news with Meta moderation from a month ago. He is only a couple weeks back on air.
He decided to kiss the ring. People don't like that.
Meta declared hate speech is free speech. Lgbt folks and allies started leaving in droves
AFAIK no, but it takes awhile for everything to sink in, and hosts like John Oliver only have so much air time.
The site doesn't suggest any alternatives though or am I not seeing that?
The alternatives were suggested briefly in the segment, not the site. Oliver pointed to the site those people who can't ditch Meta right now.
I’ve been wanting to try pixelfed but I haven’t figured out what to do: start my own for friends or join an existing one.
I heard there were some issues with a dev or something so I haven’t signed up for the original instance yet
I love the instance I'm on and it's fairly quiet. Come on in!
I just do gram.social. works good enough for me and my cannabis account.
I use https://metapixl.com as mine. Its active and reliable. Also, not having influencers polluting the timeline makes all of Pixelfed a really nice experience.
Try one of the existing instances. Pixelfed.social is probably a bad choice right now, as it's getting overloaded with new members and so importing from Instagram has been curtailed. The others at https://pixelfed.org/servers should be fine. If you later choose to host your own instance you can always move the data from your old one.
I've been using pixey.org for a year or so. No complaints
I’ve also been intrigued, but it seems like a harder jump to make than mastodon or lemmy. Like with twitter or Reddit I’m mostly interacting with strangers anyway, but I don’t really want my instagram to be photos of people I don’t know.
Would you try to get your friends to make the switch with you?
Yeah, that’s why I’m considering hosting my own, unfederated instance
My Instagram is full of fitness content (and good looking people tbh). Nothing comes even remotely close on pixelfed. No offence to federated social media, but we all ain't good looking :) (or suck at using filters...)
It's still a very long way off from taking over Instagram.
Correct me if wrong, but isn't there a law in the us that says, all us companies have to give the government access to all data without disclosing this information? That would rule out any us based companies for privacy concerns as alternatives atm.
You should expect any data hosted on a server to be accessible by the given government…and thanks to NSA you should expect any data that travels through the US to be accessible by their government
Privacy in this case is around the selling to advertisers
Why not just recommend adblockers? No ads, no revenue, no matter how much tracking.
Selling user profiling data is also worth money, even if you're not shown ads because of ad-blockers you bring value to the dataset by increasing it's size with useful demographic data.
It looks like they got that list of tips from the EFF, who created Privacy Badger. So it’s not surprising they only recommended theirs. I agree though that they should include uBO in the list.
For the masses maybe, but Signal & Bluesky ain’t it for a Privacy forum
How is Signal not privacy-friendly? It's the most private thing that can be called a "messenger app".
It is entirely centralized in the US—& there is 100% chance the NSA is tapped in on the metadata they can get a hold of. You can’t self-host. They have been hostile toward alternate clients & are very adamant you use one of the duopoly of Google/Apple mobile OSs as your primary device (screw you if you want to run an alternative OS or no phone I guess). There is a hole in the history for the server that leaves room for conspiracy theories.
Signal is adequate for privacy-focused normies, but does not deserve the pedestal it is put on which is why many folks more serious about the ideals instead of focusing on making concessions are skeptical of Signal. This isn’t a hot take or new stance.
I think the main red flag is that they are spending so much money. In 2023 they had 55m monthly active users and they spent $35m. The casual WhatsApp user that might switch to Signal is definitely not gonna pay for this so either Signal fans have to donate more or Signal has to start finding other monetization which if we look at other companies means selling private data.
(Also, half their spending is on hosting and they are not self hosting so a donation to Signal is basically a donation to Amazon and Google.)