
Ask HN: Why doesn't Facebook let you filter friends by current city/state? - anderspitman
I&#x27;m sure it has something to do with money but I can&#x27;t figure.
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reustle
It does, just search "Friends who live in New York" or "Friends who have been
to Berlin". I've noticed they disable/enable the feature every few
months/years, but overall it still works. It has never worked for me on
mobile, though.

I just searched and it returned a list titled "My friends who live in Berlin,
Germany (see more)"

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dredmorbius
This is a peculiarly common missing feature of online social networks,
including several I've been closely associated with..

My suspicion is that it would tend to reveal the thinness of actual coverage.
That outside a few hubs (mostly major costal cities), the social graph is
quite sparse.

It might also enable advertisers to bypass paid advertising targeting, or
(especially for ad-free networks) attract spam. On Mastodon, sex-worker-
friendly nodes spam the hell out of locality-based hashtags to the point that
default instance blocking is required, and sex work seems particularly prone
to this. Location is secondary only to intent. Excessive legibility can be a
vulnerability.

The principle alternatives seem to be local or personal groups, though those
are weak substitutes.

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sherlock_h
This function would be one of the last remaining things I’d use on FB (the
others being marketplaces & messenger - I disabled the news feed a while back
and don’t use FB on mobile).

Unfathomable to me. I’d really like to see who of my friends are in a given
city so when I go visit said city I can reach out and say hi. Don’t really
understand it either

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notlukesky
Privacy is clearly not the issue as that is the antithesis of their business
model.

Maybe it has to do with the fear of creating theoretical travel stalkers???

But logically there is no reason not to do it.

Facebook had this available in their early days by city etc...

just like they even showed your friends and their tally by school even.

They removed both filters over 9 years ago.

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anotheryou
they had what they called "graph search" and i guess it just showed too much
of how creepy Facebooks dataset is.

You could e.g. search for female friends of friends that are single and living
in X

Here you can see a bit of the UI, but it worked with natural language in the
search bar, too: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-journalists/how-
jour...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-journalists/how-journalists-
can-use-facebook-graph-search-for-reporting/543504605661558)

