Facebook without the Facebook

April 22, 2014 7:10 AM

Facebook is about to drive me nuts but it's the best way for me to stay in conctact with family and friends. What I need is like a power-tool for Facbook, some sort of front-end or standalone app perhaps?

I would love to be able to filter for and against certain keywords, but more importantly would like a very finegrained control of what I see from various people. Ideally in a more overview-friendly way than the groups and lists functions work. I would love something that let me right at the DB level do shit like:

Uncle Bob: show me status-updates with more than five comments or ten likes. Show me pictures he uploads, but not ones he links to or shares.

Philippa: Show me everything except shared links with the following keywords money, children, finances.

You get the idea perhaps. FB took the cake today by taking up feedspace with my friends commenting on *their* friends status updates. I really don't need to know it's their cousins birthday. Also, where's the button to stop showing me new comments on a status that I neither liked nor commented on.

posted by Iteki to Technology (6 answers total)

this only addresses your last question -- if you click the little down arrow at the upper right of a newsfeed item, you can select "I don't want to see this."
posted by i_am_a_fiesta at 7:25 AM on April 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

This doesn't DIRECTLY answer your question, but if you have an iPhone or iPad you can download the Paper app. (There is no iPad version, just the iPhone version embiggened.)

Since I downloaded it I've found Facebook to be a MUCH more enjoyable experience. It filters everything in your timeline according to topics which you can arrange. The first page is status updates from people you follow, in order of most recent, with things like shared memes and other internet stupidity filtered out. The following pages (or "cards") consist of popularly shared links organized by topic, such as sports, comedy, world news, politics, science, etc.

It's actually kind of hard to explain, but I really suggest you download it and give it a try. Again, it doesn't do what you're asking exactly, but it makes the FB experience a lot less annoying.
posted by Brittanie at 7:33 AM on April 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

Facebook Purity is fantastic and very robust. You can definitely whitelist/blacklist by keyword and hide most features that you don't want.
posted by susanvance at 7:43 AM on April 22, 2014 [7 favorites]

I use social fixer which allows filtering the feed, hiding page elements, formatting to single column. It doesn't do the fine grained "show if there are 10 comments" thing, but it's a big improvement over the default facebook offering.
posted by 26.2 at 8:05 AM on April 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

Came to recommend Facebook Purity. Gone are the ads, spam, shite, basketball during March Madness, anti-vaxxer woo, and anything else that makes me stabby. Cannot recommend it enough, and encourage others to send the developer a few bucks because FB has been really epically shitty to him.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 8:37 AM on April 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I did try using the "I don't want to see this" to train it, but it felt terribly mean, it was all "do you want to send Sarah a message telling her why this post is "annoying or uninteresting"?
Kind of gathered it was more for pages you like or brands.

Pretty clear concensus on this. Can I use both Purity and Fixer?
posted by Iteki at 1:29 AM on April 24, 2014