I finally did it! I deleted the biggest waster of my time for the past dozen years, Facebook. I still have 30 days to log back in and keep it. I don't plan on doing that.
There were some advantages to being on Facebook. I met a lot of great anarchists, voluntaryists, and other freedom minded people around the globe that I probably wouldn't have. The person who got me here on Hive is one of them. I even got to meet a few of these "Facebook Friends" in person when they visited Las Vegas, which was very cool. I hope some of these people find me on other platforms, which is almost every other one besides Facebook and Instagram. I can be found on MeWe, Parler, Flote, Twitter, Diaspora, and even MySpace. I suppose I have some updating to do on all of these platforms.
But these advantages of Facebook have been eclipsed by the disadvantages. I really didn't need to reconnect with so many people from high school. I didn't hang out with most of them then, let alone even think about them. So I sometimes wondered why I was spending time interacting with them now. Being that I live in a city far from my home town, Facebook was a great place to keep in touch with friends from "back East". However, I slowly discovered a lot of these acquaintances were actually morons with horrible opinions. I'm sure many of them thought the same of me when seeing my posts. Is following someone on Facebook actually keeping in touch? The few who do post details about their personal lives only do it through a filter of their lives being perfect, which they are not. My friends who actually have more perfect lives (i.e. they are wealthy) never were on Facebook, which tells me a lot.
I used Facebook more for spreading ideas, articles, videos, etc. rather than a journal of my personal life. I occasionally received compliments in private expressing appreciation for what I shared. But how many of my 1260 "friends" even saw my posts in their news feed? Although I know I've changed the minds of a few people for the better, for the most part I didn't. People don't change their minds very easily, especially when presented with evidence, facts, reason, and logic. I was also using Facebook as a news aggregator, but I just subscribed to the email lists of the sites that publish my daily reading.
I never particularly minded Facebook using my data to sell to advertisers. After all, I was seeing ads for products that I may actually use, and it was the trade-off for access to the site. I was much less comfortable with the way their algorithms kept me on the site much longer than I should be (probably thousands of hours!), feeding me things to get me upset, while feeding others my posts that get them upset, prompting an argument in the comments that accomplish nothing except waste my time. No one wants to think they're a victim of any sort of mind control, but the evidence shows that anyone on Facebook is being manipulated at least to some degree.
When Facebook announced that they would essentially be censoring content (as of Oct 1) I decided it was time to go. What's the point of sharing something only to have it taken down? More importantly, posts that I want to see from others could be censored. I followed enough interested and interesting people to get alternative news and opinion in my feed. I don't need Facebook to just see the mainstream narrative. Their "fact-checkers" are a bad joke, just there to suppress anything going against a narrative that is being pushed.
For years I've been hoping for a more decentralized social media platform that isn't basically a government data mining scheme like Facebook. I'm confident the market will eventually provide one that is adopted by the masses. But there are enough viable alternatives for now. Facebook has morphed into something I don't want any part of. They say if you aren't paying for a product, you are the product. I'm not going to be Facebook's product any more.
