I deleted my Facebook and here’s what happened

Not a damned thing.

Nothing bad at least. Unless you count typing facebook.com a few times a day
when I was trying to avoid the things I should be doing.

Time heals all wounds though 😉

With that, I have never considered myself addicted to Facebook. In fact, I went
as far as using the News Feed Eradicator extension for Chrome/Chromium so that
I could avoid all of the stupid that Facebook has to offer.

I can’t recommend that extension enough.

But at the same time, since deleting my Facebook, I no longer need to have that
extension installed. In fact, dropping said extension opened up the door to move
back to Firefox as there was not an equivalent extension a while back.

So why did I delete?

Probably seems pretty conveniently timed to be jumping on the bandwagon with all
of the recent privacy shit going on with the Facebook. Truth is, I’ve always
been aware that I’m the product and I’m not shocked by anything privacy-related
with Facebook.

Thing is, I have been contemplating this for years now.

Thought is, the smaller my online footprint is the better. It’s less for me to
have to maintain and the best way to ensure your privacy is to not be putting so
much shit out there.

What has always pissed me off is that even with my own ability to have self
control and refrain from telling the world every fucking thing going on in my
life, my lovely wife still posts stuff and tags me in it.

I already have lost control in some ways but it’s a ton easier to cope with it
when I’m not getting alerts about how I’ve been tagged in a photo or some stupid
video that I’ll more than likely never read

But the real question is, do I have FOMO since deleting?

Not really, but I do wonder how much I’m going to miss out on in the long run.

There are people that have only ever communicated with me via Facebook and I
suspect that most wouldn’t seek me outside of Facebook.

Is what it is, I guess.

On a professional level, as I’m currently shaking the trees for some side work,
I wonder how many opportunities I’m going to miss out on because they were
posted to Facebook and no where else.

Side note, I’m opening my book of business for the first time in a while, so if
you have a project, feel free to get in touch.

Okay, but this is probably just a phase, are you going to come back to Facebook?

Honestly, probably not unless a few things happen to change in the future.

Specifically, I am very interested in being able to have an account on Facebook
that is SOLELY a developer / page admin account that I can use for Facebook apps
and administering pages.

In addition to deleting my person account, I also deleted a few Facebook pages
that I had for some projects. One of those pages have over 25,000 likes and to
be perfectly honest, that was more painful to delete than my personal profile
was.

If Zuck could decouple the business side of Facebook from the social networking
side of things, I’d probably be the first person to sign up.

In my opinion, it’s been the biggest missing piece to Facebook for people that
still want to conduct business but don’t necessarily want to be harassed by
their school mates that want to know if they want to play some stupid game.

Josh Sherman - The Man, The Myth, The Avatar

About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.


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