The technology powering bitcoin could help improve Facebook in the future, Mark Zuckerberg has said.

As part of a commitment to help fix the site over 2018, its founder said that he would look into the use of new technology to stop it being quite so centralised.

One of those technologies is bitcoin, he said, in an ambitious post that suggested Mr Zuckerberg is taking to heart the claims that Facebook is broken.

11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Show all 11 1 /11 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Clean up your News Feed Most of us are Facebook friends with some people we don’t actually care about, and there are several ways to keep their updates off your News Feed. The easiest option is to head to the column on the left and open News Feed Preferences. From here, you can prioritise friends, unfollow friends, refollow friends you unfollowed in the past and even block specific apps. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Change ad preferences You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer. Just open Settings and select Advert Preferences. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Manage notifications You can get notifications about pretty much anything on Facebook these days, and that can be seriously irritating. Choose what you do and don’t want to be notified about by going into the Settings menu and selecting Notifications. You might be surprised by the number of sections you have to trawl through. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Save data Facebook automatically plays videos in your News Feed, and that’s a problem if you aren’t on a generous data plan. You can change this by going to Videos in the Settings menu and disabling autoplay. On the app, there’s feature in the left-hand column called Data Saver, which also does this, but reduces the size of pictures too. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Reorder your News feed You can choose to order the updates that appear in your News Feed by time or importance. Just hit the three buttons next to News Feed Preferences on the Facebook site and choose between Top Stories and Recent Stories. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Download your data Facebook lets you download all of the immense amounts of data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a lot of information, which you’ll want to get your hands on if you decide to quit the social network. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Find nearby places Nearby Places is actually a really handy tool, which lets you quickly find and research things like restaurants, hotels, museums and nightlife hotspots around you. It lives in the left-hand column, and also shows useful information like customer ratings, prices and distance. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Find free Wi-Fi Similarly, Find Wi-Fi is ideal for when you’re bored, running low on data or lost. It shows you all the places in your vicinity that offer free Wi-Fi, so you can head over and either relax or get some work done. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Save things for later Facebook’s ideal for killing time, but every now and again you’ll stumble across something you’re interested in right as you need to put your phone away. Fortunately, you can save posts for later by hitting the arrow in the top-right corner and selecting the Save option. Everything you save goes straight to the Saved section in the left-hand column. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Control tags When people tag you in posts or pictures, they don’t have to automatically appear on your profile. You can switch on Facebook’s Review Tags feature by going to Settings and Timeline and Tagging. 11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed Delete your account To permanently delete your Facebook account, you need to head to Facebook’s Delete Account page. The site can take up to 90 days to process account deletion requests, but once your account's gone, it’s gone. You can deactivate your account instead, by going to Security and Login in the Settings menu.

In a long post on his own site, the Facebook founder said that he recognised that the problem with the internet is that it is becoming too centralised, and controlled by a few huge companies that include Facebook itself. That was in contrast to people's vision that the web could be the perfect way of distributing and decentralising power, he said.

"A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people's hands. (The first four words of Facebook's mission have always been "give people the power".) Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force," he wrote in a long post.

"But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it."

In order to counteract that, he would look at bitcoin and other technology, he said.

"There are important counter-trends to this – like encryption and cryptocurrency – that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people's hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I'm interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services," he wrote.

The mention of cryptocurrency is likely to be at least partly a reference to blockchain, the technology that powers new kinds of currency like bitcoin. That allows information – like who owns what bitcoins – to be distributed across a range of computers, rather than centralised in one specific place.

Numerous technology experts have suggested that blockchain could have revolutionary impacts far beyond its use in cryptocurrency and bitcoin. It could be used to store whole different kinds of information, for instance, in a way that would be controlled by no specific company like Facebook and so theoretically be free from its influence.