I've deleted myself from Facebook (and from a couple of other platforms)

A couple of days ago I decided I had enough with the vast majority of social media platforms, and after who knows how many years, I’ve deleted my Facebook account. This post might end up a bit chaotic, but I will try to write down a couple of thoughts that you might find interesting.

I’m not any less of a nerd than eariler, but I have a bad taste in my mouth about the way the technology we use everyday went. Some things objectively became worse, and I can’t shake the feeling that in this great technological march, our human relationships have degraded. There is a feeling of falsehood, a hypocrisy that I sense around stuff like Facebook. Theoretically, there are the so many friends and acquitances on that platform you can contact; on certain degree, you can even see into their lives - but ultimately, it feels as if this actually made our chances to really get in touch with each other worse. With those platforms, we ended up with a mutual little lie. As if liking each other’s post, or writing a poor comment would be adequate for caring about each other. At the same time, the real feeling of being connected fails to materialize.

For me, it would be essential to work on building real connections in the real world.

I have problems with social media in general, but it makes me even more worried when it comes to Meta’s platforms. Meta, one of the largest tech companies in the world, gets more than 97% of its income from advertising. Every website, every application they build is for serving one ultimate goal: to make us use their stuff for longer, so they can show us more and more ads. Their business depends on turning us into addicts, and sometimes, we are deceived to believe that for some reason, we have to participate on those platforms. BTW, it’s so interesting that around 2000, I remember we used to talk about being addicted to computers and to the internet, but nowadays it looks as if we’ve completely let that concern go. Even though our reality that I see everyday is arguably worse than what people were afraid of back then.

For this step I took, I was heavily inspired by Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism book. He’s explaining everything I could say in great detail, and he also provides a strategy on how to decide about what technologies to keep in your life. It’s kinda funny how reading his well-calculated, sensible approach had an effect on me, where I ended up feeling that I don’t want to participate in such things anymore at all. So in the end, I did something much more radical than what he recommends.

Here’s how I evaluated the platforms that I used to use:

• Facebook: trash.
  • All the people who need to reach me have some way to do so. Worst case scenario, this website is fairly easy to find, and it has at least 3 usable ways to contact me.
  • I don’t need it for any professional stuff, that’s what LinkedIn’s for.
  • For Marketplace, there are plenty of alternatives.
  • Messenger was a bit harder, but in the end, it’s not that great of an instant messaging tool, especially if you consider Telegram or Discord.
• Instagram, Threads: also trash, including my artist accounts.
  • I didn’t use Instagram seriously anyway.
  • Threads seemed to be a lovable platform for me for a while, but exactly because of this, it was very easy for me to get way too into it. There was a period of time when I invested a great deal of energy into it, and if I fall back into this, it will certainly eat up my time that I could use for much more important stuff. (I don’t say I didn’t have a couple of interesting discussions from this adventure, but the overall efficacy was very low.)
  • I don’t think that as an artist, right now my biggest problem would be short form video content for social media platforms. I would much rather need to focus on getting some music done, and caring about those platforms would just slow that down. I made a decision that, if I make it that far, I would much rather try some alternative, more personal ways to promote my music than to jump into the short video rat race.
• I used to have a TikTok account as an experiment, but it’s definitely not a platform I would want to invest into, so: trash.
• I can imagine working with long form video at some point, but I would rather stick to YouTube for that. Anyway, this is not going to be an active topic for a long time.
• I left my Reddit account intact, for now, it seems I can use it in a focused and useful way.

So, I’ve left every service operated by Meta. It’s a good feeling.

What I really need to focus on is this website - my own. I have a lot of ideas about what to share. Now I believe I will be able to focus on it a bit better. I will try to follow the principle of taking my own stuff, my own platform seriously in the first place, more seriously than others'.

I don’t know whether I can express this well enough, but… I feel much more lighthearted because of this change. It feels like I got the control back.