A bit more than a month ago I scheduled my facebook account for deletion. It’s now gone, along with messenger. I hadn’t used facebook for anything more than doomscrolling and the occational news about what’s happening where I live for a long time.

There are many good reasons to leave facebook, some more obvious than other:

  • While facebook has some features to protect against abuse, these are hardly ever used for that purpose, and instead they are used to silence those with divergent opinions.
  • Facebook’s owners have shown many times that they don’t care about the public good, power is much more important to them than to provide a useful platform.
  • The general enshittification of Facebook.
  • If you have a facebook account, you can be tracked in many places on the web.

What really tipped me over the edge though, was that when I opted out of having personalised ads, I instead was forced to have an ad-break every now and then (this is the case on Instagram as well btw, where I still have an account for now), giving a feeling very much like the black mirror episode.

Effects of leaving

The general family chat with my brothers, parents and in-laws runs through messenger. However, my parents tend to call when they want something, and I can obviously text my brothers.

What I already feel like I’m missing out on, are contacts with people who aren’t exactly essential, but where my main source of contact with them have been facebook. I will miss these small updates.

Get in touch

There is contact information on the about page.

Addressing the hypocrisy

Now, I’m aware that keeping a whatsapp and instagram account doesn’t exactly make sense if I want to break free from the metaverse (lol). I’m likely to keep whatsapp due to its widespread utility use when I go abroad. When I was in Peru, whatsapp seemed to be the main communications tool.

As for instagram, it’s likely just a question of time. I guess I could post my food and DDR images on Mastodon instead. It’s a huge time sink.

I’m open for suggestions for good things to use instead of the tech giants’ offerings.