On October 21st I decided to leave Facebook for good. What looks like an innocuous act hides a web of emotional, political, social, and practical consequences.
The reason why I left is that I didn’t find it all that interesting anymore, in fact, it was getting annoying.
I would log in hoping to find engaging conversation, exciting news from friends, new people with whom to talk and work with. After some time I realized how excruciatingly difficult it was to find any of the former.
My feed was a mix of ads for stuff I would never buy (animal products), hatred (fueled politically or otherwise), and an obnoxious amount of shitposts of a single friend amongst about 200.
Moreover, I wasn’t really talking to anyone. My interactions with people were limited to likes and shares, a comment here and there and that’s it. I know that I had interesting friends that I would like to chat with. So why wasn’t I? How could leaving a social network help me… socialize?
Publicly announcing that I left the biggest social network of the past 10 years seems absurd. What’s so special about it? This absurdity makes it worth blogging.
In the following paragraphs I’ll dissect some aspects of the exhile.
Practical There’s many reasons why staying on Facebook might sound like a good idea, off the top of my head:
1) friends and family is there
2) ten years of my life are catalogued there
3) it’s how I find events happening nearby
4) it’s how most news reach me
5) some groups or pages proved useful to me
This is how I solved them:
1) I went through my friends list and contacted people I only had there to arrange a new medium of communication
2) thank you GDPR! Facebook gives you the option of downloading every activity you had on the platform
3 and 4) most news organizations or event promoters have an Instagram or Twitter account, so I simply added them there
5) there was one group it would have been fairly hard to live without. As soon as it left for Mastodon I followed suit
In two weeks no one noticed I’m gone. Sometimes I take a colleague or friend apart and say “so hey since I left Facebook…” and they snap “wait what? did you leave? when?”. It’s actually funny.
The more I stay out of that madhouse, the more I realize how priviledged I am to have that option. Some professionals simply need to have an account and couldn’t live without it. How could live outside of a website become a priviledge?
Political As of late I’m getting more and more annoyed about the pervasiveness of technology. Sometimes I practice Amish weekends (no computer, mobile, tablet etc. for a weekend) and I won’t deny that when I reached the decision to leave Facebook I had just read two Zerzan books.
My leaving Facebook, however, wasn’t some sort of protest. Some people assume that I left because of Cambridge Analytica or other concerns about my privacy. They call out my not being on Facebook but using Whatsapp or Instagram, two apps from the same company.
I know that since the ideal of the internet was sold in late 90s my data is not safe, I’m not that naive.
Emotional The decision to leave a place I’ve been for the past 10 years was certainly emotionally charged. I kept thinking about all the things that happened there: the long conversations with my current girlfriend when we just met, the first time I changed my relationship status, all the content that portray a sense of identity. The posts and chats could be saved, what’s not reported in the dump is the likes and shares. I remember one high school teacher I looked up to liked my posts a couple of times, he died about a year after that. That was my last link with him, “X Y liked this”.
Besides the lost mementos, I feel much better. My mood is up, my energy is up. I wasn’t a big Facebook user (I was logging maybe half an hour a day) so this change might be related to the next point.
Social I left Facebook primarily because I wanted to engage with people. That certainly worked. In the past two weeks I made more connections than in the past two years:
- I joined a group of Haskellers and we’re having a hackaton this weekend!
- I’m chatting semi-regularly with old friends on Whatsapp
- I had small chats with other people on Instagram (I don’t think I had used the messaging feature before)
- I went to the library and actually talked to a human being
Regarding events around me, well, I live in a small city. If something is going down I can read it on the local billboard. If there’s a concert at the pub I’ll see the flyer on my way to the train station. For bigger events in other cities, I can just google for them (e.g. vegan festivals) and note it in the calendar. For tech conferences I either rely on colleagues, Slack, or Twitter.
What I might be missing is news from the local commuters group, but the noise ratio was pretty high there too.
As I recount the networks I’m on right now (Twitter, Mastodon, Goodreads…) I do feel like I miss a soap box. That’s primarily why I decided to revamp these github pages.