I get the reasoning, but this is pretty sad. My older parents are frequently more and more fooled by sponsored Facebook posts with some fake product they want to buy, then all of a sudden they have “YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN HACKED” notification spam that takes up half their screen. It’s not to a ridiculous degree, maybe 3 times a year on average, but it’s happening more often recently.
I use uBlock Origin to keep them safe. If this starts not blocking any ads, I’m not sure what else to do. Is Brave going to keep up?
“Get them off Facebook” isn’t an option. They’re old, and it’s how they connect with their friends and get fulfilment. As disgusting as Facebook is, it’s too far gone at this point, I can’t take that away from them.
I know a way you can never see a Facebook ad ever again.
But if you block ads on Facebook, then what will you read? When I accidentally go to my profile, it’s a post from someone I actually follow for every 20 sponsored posts. It’s a website to watch ads, then every once of a while your ad viewing session is interrupted by some real content
The dev comments say a lot:
https://old.reddit.com/user/paintboth1234
No one helping the project ever said “uBO is living on a secluded isle”. It’s a public community FOSS project, for over a decade, monitored and contributed by every user and volunteer. Every site has been watching uBO for years. It’s not new. And yes, if users do nothing to help, either on helping uBO’s side or leaving the trash sites, and just give snarky comments instead, this will happen.
The message is clear to me; UBO devs are sick of a sick of a sea of users constantly complaining about imperfect Facebook blocking, who won’t contribute anything nor lift a finger to limit/adapt their own usage. They’re sick of slaving away fighting six-figure-salary Facebook devs, whose only job is to counter adblock, where UBO’s only compensation is more pretentious complaints.
It’s not a technical limitation, persay. It kinda a “Why are we doing this to ourselves? If you all want us to support Facebook, fine; we welcome PRs.”
Which is totally fair.
To me, it sounds like UBO could drop other overtly hostile sites, too. As they should.
Yeah, I gotta say that while shit is looking pretty bad on the corporate producer side of things, this society/system has bred a ton of entitled consumers that think their desires are important to anyone that can make or do things.
Even if you’re paying someone for something, that doesn’t mean you can dictate what they do or how they do it. Or even that they need to offer you what they willingly offer others. There’s some people where no amount of money would make dealing with them worthwhile, let alone what they are willing to pay for special treatment.
But with FOSS, there isn’t even the incentive of money greasing the interaction. It’s just pure entitlement. No one owes you anything just because you’re interested in their project or skills.
Not that I use Facebook myself, but I think this was a misstep in the U block team.
All this did was tell the major companies out there that the only thing they have to do to make it so u block origins no longer works on their site is to make it extremely tedious for the team working on the project to make filters. So I expect that now that they’ve officially dropped support for Facebook, the other major sites are going to look at how Facebook is doing it, and they’re going to adopt a similar systems
I think too many sites run on Google AdSense (if it’s even still called that) for that to be a problem. If they give up on Google, there’s not much point.
Yep! I’ll admit, I haven’t read the news, but by what people keep talking about in comments, it seems that ublock said that the reason was how annoying it was to keep fighting against facebook, but if they had just said “yeah we’re dropping facebook’s priority, not enough ublock users go there for it to be useful to monitor their changes as frequently” it wouldn’t become that big of a sign for other companies to do the same thing that facebook is doing (also throws shade at how dead facebook is) but at the end of the day this has always been a fight of attrition and what fuels ublock is spite, and for people to have any of it they’d need to at least care about the product buried under the ads
Let me preface this by saying that I am generally against AI and I hate LLMs being pushed everywhere, but I currently hate facebook and social media even more than AI.
I think that ad blocking might actually be a good use of a model trained to detect ads: AI models are “black boxes” and it would make it difficult for facebook to find out precisely how the detection works and workaround it. Imagine a tiny classifier running locally, whose only job is to look at a post html or resulting rendered pixels and detecting if it’s an ad or not, and then generating the blocking rules.
It would be quite cool, because it would work on any website without an explicit list of ad-blocking rules that somebody needs to maintain.
No need to be defensive about your ideas like that. The ai craziness came from generative models that create synthetic data. Good old machine learning models have been used a lot to solve many problems and are a perfectly fine tool, that usually doesn’t even need so much hardware resources
This was a thing long before the AI craze: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9152669
AdGraph differs from existing approaches by building a graph representation of the HTML structure, network requests, and JavaScript behavior of a webpage, and using this unique representation to train a classifier for identifying advertising and tracking resources… We evaluate AdGraph on the Alexa top-10K websites, and find that it is highly accurate, able to replicate the labels of human-generated filter lists with 95.33% accuracy, and can even identify many mistakes in filter lists.
They made a Chrome extension, in 2020: https://github.com/uiowa-irl/AdGraph
But practically, it’s tricky because:
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It still needs to load and render the ads. Not undoable; Adnauseum does this, but its a much more performance-intense approach.
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There’s always the risk of unpredictably blocking legitimate elements.
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Image/text classifiers aren’t actually black boxes. Hence there were also adversarial measures against this… before the AI craze: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zubair/files/a4-acsac2021.pdf
At the end of the day, the whole point of uBO is to be lightweight and fast. You aren’t wrong about a machine-learning based approach, but its not really a fit for them IMO.
But.
I think a reasonable approach would be to have bots and agents generate adblocking rules, to be tested by humans, then shipped to users of various adblocking engines.
The engineering is far easier. Performance/latency constraints are minimal, 1 bot can maintain thousands of rules for millions of users, and it isn’t necessarily availible to reverse engineer, either.
Some adblock lists must do this, already. I know they already use some automation, but I don’t know the details TBH.
Very interesting! Thanks for the links and the detailed answer!
Yeah, even a well built agent is pretty resource intensive. Your hybrid idea makes more sense. People underestimate just how resource intensive AI is. Anyone who has built their own AI rig can tell you it is NOT a lightweight process that can conveniently sit in a browser plugin without being its own annoying obstacle.
Yeah. I’m all for local inference, but to be clear, you can’t have a local agenic LLM as a Adblock browser plugin.
It’s also massively redundant. Why not just run the agent once and ship the rules to millions of users?
Text and image classification models are tiny, though. That’s definitely doable in an extension, albeit not worth the performance cost, IMO.
Also, there are already browser forks built for agenic usage.
If you want, say, generate UBO rules to use, this is the way to do it. Not hacked in as an extension.
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It would make a good second (or third) layer of defense. The problem with it is that it’s reactive not proactive, so you need to download the ad first before it can decide to block it or not. URL blacklists are the superior option, but hard to maintain. The ideal setup would be a URL blacklist that’s automatically updated on the fly by an AI classifier so anything that slips through the blacklist gets ban hammered by the AI and added to the blacklist to prevent future wasted bandwidth. If the blacklist updates were shared the same way some of the ad blockers do currently it could be incredibly effective as it would be essentially distributed realtime ad blocking.
Honestly, I would use that even if it meant an additional gig and a half to two gigs of ram usage to run the browser. I’m already having to allocate one to four gigs for the browser anyway, so might as well.
This might lead some people to use the alternatives. I never had an account and I am just fine.
Can’t they just block facebook.com as whole and call it a day ?
I agree. Make a pop-up and tell the user Facebook is determined to monetize and track every moment they’re on the site. If they want to continue they’ll get an unfiltered experience and may God have mercy on their souls.
The perfect solution.
this shows a quite horrible example for the other tech big dogs. if they throw a small group of devs at the adblocker devs, eventually they might also win this.
a seperated closed source facebook oriented fork would be the best idea, since the enemy can see every bit of code of ublock.
Ad blocking is done client side in the browser, it’s impossible to hide.
You can obfuscate, but you can do that now.
Who is still on Facebook anyways?
My entire small town exclusively uses Facebook for everything from local gossip, to selling stuff, to even hooking up. All the businesses use it and the only way to get updates on local power outages or emergency notices is through it as well. I don’t use Facebook so it is a bit annoying.
I know you’re sounding edgy, but the answer is “a lot”. My entire family and I have probably a good 30+ friends that are active (weekly or more) on it.
I’ve considered containerizing it somewhere just for the sake of selling and buying car parts and ‘the like’, but I have no active intention to participate beyond that and family matters.
Fact is, I’d be fine if that was all Facebook was, that seems reasonable. It’s the endless patronizing propaganda, tracking, ads and arguing bots everyone takes issue with. If they just didn’t suck, they’d be fine.
That’s the only thing I use Facebook for. Ever since Craigslist decided to commit market share suicide Marketplace has been the go to place for buying used junk.
My family has learned that I am not on Facebook. I stay out of the loop. It’s nice and drafty.
Businesses, so many businesses have just a facebook page, no website or anything else. Want to know what or when the next band is playing or the nightly special, check facebook. 🤷
Most of the internet connected world. Allegedly they have 3 billion monthly active users.
Anything that has to do with local event information.
People selling lawnmowers and TVs from 2013 that still work.
Craigslist is still far superior
Craigslist hasn’t been relevant for years.
Ever since they tried charging for car listings they’ve been a barren wasteland compared to marketplace.
Senior citizens
Our parents. My mom is addicted, spends every spare moment endlessly scrolling. I tried for a while to get her off but you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. No shit she spent 10 straight hours on it once. Didn’t move at all, she is their ideal consumer.
I see several people claiming they just use it for marketplace, or whatever it’s called.
Does this website prevent anyone else from using reader mode on Firefox mobile or Fennec?
Fascinating. After reading your post I went back and tried it. When I tap Reader Mode, it switches over fro just a second or so and then switches back to the regular page. I’ve never seen that before.
And I’ve given up on Facebook ages ago. You should too.
I’ve also deleted WhatsApp when they changed their terms to some bullshit data sharing or something. It’s tough when everyone and businesses use WhatsApp as the only means of communication. Average person doesn’t even think about tech providers and we’re all worse off getting swept in the tide of ignorance.
Me as well been close to 10yrs, fuck zuck he should eat the barrel of his shotgun
He doesn’t deserve the same choice of ending as Kurt.
facebook? is that still around?
yeah it’s where you coordinate with local groups and buy/sell things
fakebook? is that still around?
Has everyone forgotten about F.B. Purity (Fluff Busting Purity)? It’s a browser extension that lets you customize the entire interface of Facebook. It’s been around for 17 years and still works just fine.
I use it to remove not only ads, but FB games, marketplace, reels/videos, suggestions/featured content, FB Messenger, etc. I pretty much locked down my Facebook interface to only show me posts from my friends in the order that they were posted, with the latest at the top of my feed. Just like Facebook used to be before it started shoving useless content in your face.
The only reason I still have a Facebook account is because 90% of my friends, family, and contacts I’ve made over a lifetime of global travels, are all on Facebook. If I need to get in touch with someone, Facebook is where I’ll find them. But I don’t post anything to Facebook anymore; I rarely log on to it.
There isn’t another social media program where I can find everyone I know without subscribing to even more junk. I won’t use Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, TikTok, or any of the other corporate social media programs, and most people I know/knew in person don’t use or understand the Fediverse.
Bluesky and Discord are as corporate as I’ll tolerate, and I’m already on the lookout for replacements for both. I used to have a Mastodon account a decade ago, before the Fediverse was a common thing, but I have no idea what site I built an account on. I might have to just suck it up and rebuild my account somewhere else. And there are plenty of Discord clones out there, but none quite as functional as Discord yet…
There’s also a Greasemonkey script called Clean My Feeds which gives the enduser sufficient control to curate their Facebook experience by getting rid of some annoyances.
There has been no release of FBP since January 2026, and Fernandez has not made any public statement as to whether he is continuing to develop FBP. Many Facebook features it previously blocked, such as intrusive ads, are no longer blocked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluff_Busting_Purity
Currently I am trying Nora as an alternative, per a Lemmy recommendation:
https://github.com/nonbili/Nora/
But honestly, I do not use Facebook, so I can’t speak to how well it works there.
Came here to mention F.B. Purity too, it’s pretty much the only thing that makes FB tolerable.
And yea, I only visit FB for some local community groups and pages, and to chat with family in Messenger. I only share articles on my profile maybe once a year, and stopped uploading photos sometime before the pandemic 😅 But sadly it’s still the most mainstream social platform in Europe.
Not available for android. Boo.
It works on Firefox developer just fine but then again I do not have an account just tested on a random page that was not account locked
I dont have the app on my android but access fb through the website. Would this work for that do you know?
F.B. Purity is a desktop browser extension, it only works on the website from a PC. It won’t run on Android devices, unfortunately. They’ve been talking about making an app for it for years, but they still haven’t made one.
This is going to attract more interest in using Facebook advertising to deliver malware, knowing that the attack surface will grow substantially soon.
Without ad blocking, Facebook will become a dangerous place to visit if not done so within some sort of sandboxing.
Isn’t it already a dangerous place to visit?
Considering that despite my grandfather having an ad blocker, he sees constant scams in their advertising. I would have to say, yeah, it’s already a dangerous place.
Honestly, I don’t understand why more companies don’t get charged criminally for the blatant scams they have in their ads because all of the FANG companies do it.
Those same companies have their stupid, shitty puppet in the White House making the legality of what they do a farce
