help request

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/3mFvz0h

here’s a thing, i’m too ADHD at the moment to sort it out, maybe I can crowdsource this to the Internet.

My niece, and apparently some of my other sister’s kids too but IDK which of them, uses a program that is apparently Facebook Messenger but for Kids, somehow, and she has it on her tablet and uses it all the time to video-chat with Grandma and with various of my sisters and with her cousins.

So I’m being pressured to install the Messenger app so she can do this with me. And I would like to. But I remember when Messenger was first announced, all the privacy-watch types were like Oh Big Yikes that is a nightmare, so I said to my Facebook friends “hey I’m not going to install or use Messenger” and a lot of them were sort of shitty to me about it and then I was absolutely correct, it came out that FB was entirely inappropriately using Messenger to spy on people in these wildly ought-to-be-illegal ways, and I was vindicated, and then nobody ever recognized that and everyone still uses it but I’ve never allowed it onto my phone and I only use Facebook on my computer in a Firefox container I keep locked down?

anyway.

Is there a way I can put Messenger into some kind of Firefox-like container on my phone, so that I can use it to video chat and then fucking banish it when I close the window so it’s not fucking listening to me all the time? No I know I’m not that special but I fucking hate Facebook. But that’s the program my niece has, and I would like to be able to communicate with her, especially in the current situation.

I have an Android phone and haven’t installed Firefox on it yet but that’s only because I’m lazy. And I know I could research this but I’ve been procrastinating doing that and I’m realizing it’s because I’m not sure where to start, and anyway if I can do the someone-else-asked workaround hack on my own brain to get this going, that’d help a lot.

(Also, like, never having used Messenger but having received fucktillions of Messenger requests thru Facebook, is there a way to stop the people you knew in junior high from seeing that you’re on there and sending you weird fucking forwards about We’re Such Great Moms and shit, because they’ve kept such good touch with you over the last thirty years that they don’t realize you don’t actually have kids, lolsob.) (Your picture was not posted)