Goodbye facebook.

I navigated through all the hoops to request deletion of my facebook account, and was told that the account would be scheduled for deletion on 9 July.  Taking care not to let any of the other apps I had ‘authorized via facebook’ log in over the intervening two weeks, I waited until the requisite date… and on the 10th when I tried to log in to check,  “The email address you entered does not match any account.”

Good.

Of course I downloaded all my data before kicking this off, and have already chucked everything from my Astrophotography albums up over at my photo subdomain (photos.galaxieman.com), with many of the other albums to follow suit, some public, others not.

Reasons:

I felt addicted to it.

I don’t like the hypocrisy of facebook calling out data usage abuses when they did the same thing themselves before, and bragged about it.

Even with the ability to just unfollow everyone who I felt was causing more stress than they were relieving, that felt disingenuous to me.

I realize this has been frustrating for some folks (specifically my wife), but I honestly haven’t missed it.

Pros:
Since I’m not then opening the trapdoor of the facebook rabbit-hole, I’m finding that I don’t wonder what happened to the last half hour quite so often.  Falling down the YouTube-hole is still a thing, but one less time-suck is one less time-suck.

I don’t feel disconnected from the world, despite not being plugged into the daily lives of my 300-odd ‘friends’.

I am significantly less worried about the ‘crisis du jour’.  Things are simultaneously not nearly as bad, and WAAAAY worse than people see on a daily basis.   But things that are actually bad vs. whatever BS The Media™ and the facebook/google/twitter algorithms are feeding everyone are legitimately wicked problems, and are sure-as-hell not getting solved on facebook/google/twitter.

Cons:
I haven’t gotten my picture albums up on the photo side of this site like I’d like to, because 2 and 4y/o.  This is honestly the most difficult piece of facebook to replace.  Having a place where people I had approved as ‘friends’ could just go and see pics of the kids/dogs/camping trips was a lot more convenient than the alternatives.  The smugmug folder system is not as user-friendly (it’s the same for me, I just upload.  The problem is for people who want to see the pics without having to remember another username/password or similar credential set…), so I’m still working on that.

That’s honestly about it.  The pictures piece is the most difficult to replace and was one of the most useful pieces of facebook.  Wasn’t worth staying for though.

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