First and foremost, I’ll get this out of the way: I abhor all commercial social media. I don’t trust them, I know users are the product, and - ultimately, I feel they’re nothing but a cancer on society.
But, I also have to acknowledge that, for one or two use cases at least, they seem pretty unavoidable.
For me, that one use case is Facebook Marketplace. Here in Australia, there’s simply no better alternative if you want to reach a large number of potentially interested buyers (or even buy some stuff yourself). The supermarket noticeboard is no more; the Trading Post was bought long ago and died on the vine; and Gumtree has devolved into a cesspool of nothing but scammers and fuckwits.
So, I use FB Marketplace. My FB account isn’t in my name, uses a throwaway email address, and has no followers or friends. It’s only a member of the local buy/sell groups that I’m interested in, and it performs no “social” activities (posts, likes, etc) at all.
Until now, I generally only use FB marketplace with a “clean”, dedicated browser on my computer, running in private mode and via a VPN. But, it means I frequently miss messages from interested parties when I’m away from my computer.
I also sometimes use the mbasic.facebook.com site from a private Firefox tab on my iPhone, but FB has just started telling me I need to use Chrome (no. fucking. way.) or Safari (maaaaaybeeeee?) after October 28th.
When I was on Android, there were a few wrapper apps that I was able to use but, so far, my searches for an equivalent on iOS have turned up nothing.
So, knowing full well this may lead to nowhere, I thought I’d ask this community: does anyone have a good, privacy-friendly way to use FB on iOS?
Thanks in advance for any useful tips or suggestions.
Someone else mentioned PWA. I think I’ll investigate that angle next. If a PWA doesn’t share any data from my device, it means I can use my Mullvad VPN whenever I choose to access it, and get pretty darn close to what I’m trying to achieve.
Or just use Safari. I use a browser for FB for years on my Android phone. Only problem is that when I try to chat it tries to install messenger unless I am in desktop mode.
On a Windows laptop it is easy to use with a browser, even chatting.
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Someone else mentioned PWA. I think I’ll investigate that angle next. If a PWA doesn’t share any data from my device, it means I can use my Mullvad VPN whenever I choose to access it, and get pretty darn close to what I’m trying to achieve.
Or just use Safari. I use a browser for FB for years on my Android phone. Only problem is that when I try to chat it tries to install messenger unless I am in desktop mode.
On a Windows laptop it is easy to use with a browser, even chatting.