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.
I was about to post something similar to your reply. But OP says this, which is a reasonable explanation why they need (not want mind you) to use Facebook:
As for iOS, OP said they abhorred commercial social media. They said nothing about their feelings towards abusive monopolistic OS platforms, so I assume they're happy in their Apple prison.
The sad part of this story is that fucking Zuckerberg managed to make himself unavoidable in Australia apparently. That's the real takeaway from OP's post.
Facebook Messenger is the default messaging app in Australia too. If you tell any someone that you’ll message them, you mean you’ll find them on Messenger. If you have their number it might mean SMS, but probably not.
Really? That's not been my experience at all. In fact, the default for most Gen Z kids (I have two of them) is either iMessages on the iOS platform or Snapchat.
Yeah, younger generations use snap a lot more. When they want to interact with older people though, Facebook Messenger is the go. I don’t know any workplaces or community groups that use Snapchat to communicate with everyone, and not everyone has an iPhone, but getting on the work Messenger chat group is almost mandatory at every place I’ve worked at in the last ten years. My kids, who are Gen Z, have the same experience.