I only plan to use it for messaging in a couple of sports teams and event invitations.
I’m willing to take a lot of measures as long as they don’t get the account blocked - no phone app, dedicated virtual machine+VPN to isolate from other internet activity, purchased fake phone number in signup, adding fake interests and life details. However, I won’t provide any real ID/photos, are these needed for signup?
Update: registered with a well-known VPN and an online purchased fake number. Added a couple of friends and made a few junk posts. Asked to confirm with selfie after 4 days, didn’t have any activity whatsoever during the last two days so it wasn’t as if I did any action which immediately triggered the check.
Those sports teams and events are using Facebook because they want your data.
I am friends with the captains of these teams and the people running these events. I’m not talking about big 1000-person things. These are groups of a dozen people who get no money or monetizable data from it.
Don’t be absurd. Of course they only use it because of the network effect. If that’s where their fans/customers are, then that’s where they will communicate. You think they wouldn’t communicate on mastodon if they had 3 billion users because they wouldn’t be able to scrape data?
don’t be naive. they’ll ignore platforms that don’t deliver detailed metrics on all their fans/customers, and pay premiums for insights that allow them to manipulate fandom / ticket purchases / merch.