What are your experiences quitting Facebook?

First of all congratulations! You’ve made the right choice because now you’ll have so much more mental peace and free time to put to better uses.

What I suggest is keep your Facebook account deactivated, that way nobody will be able to see you so you won’t be wasteing their time either. You’ll still be able to use messenger.com and the messenger app.

Occasionally, say once a month, whenever you feel the need to spy on your friends, or lookup socal causes, log in but the immediatly deactiveate again and don’t come back for another month.

Yeah I think that might be a good start actually, to keep the messaging but remove the app. Because that is where I waste the most time. Then maybe over time I can try i move my conversations from Facebook to other messaging options. I will look in to that option more, thanks!

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Hi Pat!

Yes it is quite tricky, it comes with a lot of great tools but might be built on a model that I simply can’t support. Not having a smartphone would feel impossible at least now because my work and schedule is sort of depending on it but it is also something I’d like to try in the future. I’ll check out the site, thanks!

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Freja,

I loved your thoughtful contemplation.
This is such a strange time for us to all balance our personal “why” and then “how” we choose to engage, re engage, or disengage from any and all of these platforms.

For myself, deactivating and deleting, and then setting times and perimeters to engage and set a timer help me use the tools as opposed to feeling like the tools are using me. Just like any other set of goals I hope to accomplish, I put in what I need it for, and how long I will give myself to do it, and try to stick to that framework.

All of this is a matter of conscious awareness, in that you can make any decision and feel autonomous in your choices.

Look forward to hearing what works best for you.

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I’ve been experimenting with modified Facebook usage lately, and it’s been interesting. There are several parts:

  1. Unlike and unfollow, then don’t like or follow. “Liking” someone’s page or profile just increases their impression that they have a huge Facebook audience they shouldn’t walk away from. If I want to support a business, artist, performer, or cause, I should do something more active than “liking” it on Facebook. Those “likes” aren’t actually helping, they make me feel like I helped, but they don’t actually help anyone but Facebook.

  2. Don’t use the “like” buttons on posts. At all. If I feel like I want to show support to someone, it should be through sending them a message or calling them and being personal, not through some performative, counted social metric. It also affects comment placement in comments on public pages, because most-“liked” comments float to the top algorithmically.

  3. Don’t comment except to add information (like links to relevant, authoritative third-party content that pertains to a discussion—news stories, Snopes, etc.) or to contribute to an ongoing discussion in a context where the topic is explicitly about discussing something in an open forum—like this very thread is. Again, if I have something to say about a topic to a friend, I’m doing it over Messenger instead of in the threaded comments.

  4. Don’t share things unless they’re 1) something I really feel like everyone needs to see, such as current events/news or something urgent and community-related, or 2) really significant, beautiful, or life-affirming posts that will add to someone’s day. (This morning I shared photos taken by someone aboard the space station. It improved my morning to see it, and it’s not a funny meme or something trashing someone.)

  5. Hide ads whenever they show up.

One of the outcomes of this is that, with less ad content and only following the posts of people I actually know, there’s less fodder for the algorithm to offer whenever I refresh my FB feed, less novel content for it to mix in with friends’ posts, and so I see the same posts by friends more repeatedly, and with less and less in between. It reduces the pleasure of using Facebook, and makes it easier to walk away or put it down and not miss it.

Because I’m not liking or commenting on posts, less notifications appear about activity in posts.

Because I’m avoiding engaging in arguments on the platform, I’m less stressed and anxious about it, and don’t feel a need to go check and see if anyone’s either supported my argument (with “likes” or comments) or responded to it.

It’s also made it increasingly obvious how little standard-issue “social media” really adds to my life that isn’t basically a “feature” meant to make me more addicted to it without adding real value.

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Great points @joseadna! They not only work to improve your own dealings with FB, but help improve the network as a whole.

I would like to point to an earlier topic I created, stating that while FB has been ‘weaponised’, this weapon is also lying around to use for good purposes, such as the procedures you suggest. Here’s the topic: Idea - Turning the weapon around

Also read the article mentioned there by Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor turned activist, who joined up with Tristan Harris: How to fix Facebook, before it fixes us

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Hi Freja,

thank you for the clear and honest schematisation of pros and cons.

From my experience, I have quit Facebook a couple of years ago and I don’t regret it at all.

Maybe I’m a special case, but I got completely saturated and sick of updates from people I knew or anyway linked to since the creation of my account. I felt like a cloud that surrounded me every step I took. I started by hiding a lot of people, then unfriending them. At the end I realised I just wanted to leave all of it.

After quitting Facebook, I opened an Instagram account, without connecting with people I already know, but looking for inspiring strangers. I post there expressions of my passions (guitar videos, paintings, …), some pictures or thoughts, with proper hashtags in order to get more easily found by interested people. I follow anyone I like and I unfollow anyone I don’t like anymore, without even thinking a second about it.

In this way I got rid of the suffocating cloud and I can discover new good posts and people around things I love. I also looked deeper into myself, out of the usual confort zone, and I better realised who among people I know I really feel a connection with, without tricks and shortcuts, birthdays reminders, ‘send a hug’ and stuff.

Joseadna I think you have some great suggestions. I have actually started with the unlike process and it makes you realize how many stupid and irrelevant things you like when you are 15 haha. So hopefully my feed will change with that. The idea to not like but only write when i truly feel I can contribute is also a good suggestion. Especially since you pointed out that it gives me less notifications which scatters my attention. I’m already quite the passive user who usually doesn’t write that much so it is a small step to stop liking as well. Maybe doing these things will make it easier to quit completely because I still think I want out in the end.

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Thank you for your input! I understand how you use instagram and that is a feature about instagram that I can miss being a part of. I am also interested in art and creative content and that seems to be a good forum for it now a days. Being out of Facebook does not affect your social life in a negative way?

Let’s see in more detail what social life means:

  • Close friends: no need for a platform that does the link
  • Not so close friends: do I really need their updates?
  • Geographically far friends: I can ask for an email address, or a phone number and use WhatsApp to stay in touch
  • Social events: do I really need to be invited via Facebook or to get to know a good concert through what my friends know?
  • Social activities: Whatsapp groups are good for thematic groups to organize themselves (i.e. beach volleyball group)
  • Work/study: an environment where people outside Facebook are discriminated it’s not something where I want to be anyway.

Facebook is too big and totalitarian as social media, maybe because it was the first prototype… it aims to cover every aspect of your social life. Better some lighter medium like Instagram and WhatsApp (or Twitter?) to satisfy specific needs.

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If you think you need een online tool for Work/Study you could consider LinkedIn, @Freja.
Its good for professional networks and finding a job later on, and you get an interesting feed if you build it strategically. LinkedIn Groups - though limited in functionality - can be used to share information for projects, etc.

And - importantly - you might be able to convince your peers to use that instead of FB :slight_smile:

PS Both Instagram and Whatsapp are owned by FB, so just as totalitarian

I didn’t mean totalitarian in the meaning of ownership but considering the functionalities it provides.

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Like @joseadna I also started using the “tweaked FB approach”.

My steps were:

  1. I manually unfollowed everything and everyone last year. It was a time consuming process at the time because I really wanted to see an empty timeline and just get the feel of not having the FB feed to look at. I did this because I was always “caught” in the infinite scroll loop and I hated myself for spending hours scrolling mindlessly.

  2. After this massive unfollow session I achieved an empty feed. But it only lasted for a couple of days, because FB doesn’t make it easy for you to see every single page or profile that you follow. So I kept unfollowing additional stuff for the next couple of days.

  3. I included a handful of real life friends and family members in my “Close Friends” list so that I could at least view notifications when they posted something on the upper right bar. I live abroad and my family still uses FB to communicate with me.

  4. Since the FB algorithm insisted on showing me content (even though I had unfollowed everything, or I though I had) I decided to install a browser extension to block my timeline and replace the space with a daily quote.

  5. I kept a handful of groups I still used to share information. And this was the only section of FB that I checked regularly.

  6. I don’t use the “like” buttons. I only comment on group treads to share useful information and help people.

  7. I started to not miss FB. I felt that having to manually enter a group instead of receiving an automated feed with the updated gave me back control.

Today I wonder if I want to delete my account and the only reason I didn’t do it is because I get value from the few groups I am part of.

But I wonder if forums like this one wouldn’t be a better place to discuss and share ideas. I don’t like FB’s group interface. I think it’s messy and polluted. I think I prefer the old internet forum format without all these notifications and automated feeds.

Deep inside I hope that this the beginning of the end of FB. Somehow I am having nostalgic feelings about the old bulletin board systems :smirk:. Am I the only one?

I liked your arguments!

But I may have mixed feelings about not needing any digital platform to connect with people. I think the internet can be a great tool to share ideas and then organize face-to-face meetings. The problem is how the tool is made. FB is in its essence is a great idea but the execution is a disaster.

I agree with you that more specific tools like LinkedIn can offer a more valuable experience.

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Awesome list @ariadnemm! Thx for sharing. What was the browser extension you used? If it is open-source, I’d like to add it to https://github.com/engagingspaces/awesome-humane-tech :slight_smile:

I loved the “suffocating cloud” idea! That describes what I felt about FB and that’s why I silenced it and only use it to connect with some groups.

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I am not sure if its open source, but it’s this one: https://www.fbpurity.com/

Wow, it’s an ugly site, but well-documented (about the longest FAQ I’ve ever seen) :slight_smile:
Don’t think its open-source though too… but anyway, nice to have the link! Thx.

Found these possible alternatives too:

And there is also Facebook Demetricator (remove Likes, etc.) on Awesome Humane Tech

Yes Linkedin might be a good idea but it is a big step to get most of my classmates who I don’t think use linked at all to start to use that as means of communication. Sometimes it is the need of instant communication like “where are we meeting in ten minutes?” and then it is really convenient (though not so good) to use the platform which almost everyone uses. People usually don’t ask for each others numbers or mails but simply rely on Facebook to solve the communication for the group. I’d like for that to change but is would be a slow and hard process I think.

Yes I agree, you are dependant on what tool the others use for instant communication. That’s why it’s so hard to remove something already adopted, used and felt as natural (habit). So I suggest to use it only for this mere function, considering it simply as an old outdated tool you temporarily need, but without putting any ‘emotional’ attachment on it.