I don't believe for a second you'd pay $50 per month!

Yeah you'd do it to prove a point. 6 months later, no way in hell.

You'd do it once and figure out that none of your friends have regular status updates any more.

Pay each of your friends $50 one per month, to switch to signal. Problem solved

You can ditch all that and talk to your friends (text them or call them or visit them) for almost free, actually. You can keep up with people without a middleman.

I believe you can get close to that with various Instagram mods for Android. They have advanced features like only show posts from followers and stuff like that. I switched to one of them after realizing the 5 second ad breaks I got were only there because I disabled personalized advertising.

> we like all the dopamine hijacking garbage

I basically don't use Facebook any more because of this. Opening the app shows me the most sensationalist, fearmongering and outrage bait content they can find. It's worse than news channels (I haven't watched TV for 20 years). I have auto play turned off, and every few months the setting gets turned back on.

The first few posts I see scrolling through:

- US adds mandatory tips ahead of world cup.

- Woman dies after being hit by Audi in city center.

- There was a huge queue for women's toilets at a tech conference.

- 50% off mattresses.

- Some influencer I don't follow bought 20 rolls of 3M tape from Lidl.

Do I still have friends, do they still post stuff? I only see them in the reels/stories section at the top.

The only reason why I still have Facebook is because of groups. It's the main 'groups' tool people use in my country, so there are various local groups I am part of.

What you need is the Stories feature in Signal, then donate that $49.99/month (or however much you want) to their foundation.

That was the premise of halloapp. I think it was $5 a month and encrypted like WhatsApp, and you had a feed only from your contacts. It was founded by a guy who worked for WhatsApp for a long time. Apparently it went under in 2024. I think messaging is just a commoditized service. People will not pay for it

Why? You are still giving up privacy. There is 0 reason to be using Meta products, let alone pay for them.

Did you check this out? https://isactiv.com/ - Private social network - exactly what you describe

I pay $50/mo for internet, this is some nice ragebait.

You can change the feeds with extensions or modded apps for free and ads are blocked by default in any good browser.

There is not a single subscription in the world I would pay more than $20/month for personal purposes, unlimited (and I do mean unlimited) LLM tokens very much included.

Meta offers it in EU: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/11/facebook-and-instagram-to-...

I’ve been considering it but I am not sure if it drops just ads or suggested posts as well.

> only my friends' status updates

I think that is the Feed's tab, though I have not used the blue app in a long time

I am surprised someone hasn't made a really nice equivalent to Obsidian for Mastadon and just released it for free on the app stores. I am sure one could host a very cheap mastadon instance on a low cost VPS

You can turn off political content in IG settings and additionally add hashtags/keywords to specifically filter out content that displeases you.

Nah once they know you can be fleeced for $50 per month, they also know there is much more money to extract from you. Their advertisers would be mad if they remove this juicy cohort of moneybags from their audience.

This is absurd. You're just asking for reasonable control over data that ostensibly belongs to you. Moreover, this minimum functionality was resolved years ago with RSS. That you'd be willing to pay so much reflects how well every tech company is doing at using tech against its own users.