When I made up my mind that I would be deleting Facebook, I've wanted it to be a rational, logical, and well-organized process. In nine years of pressing the "Like" button, I've managed to gather almost 2000 friends from all over the world. All of them are interesting and unique in their own way, and I wouldn't want to lose valuable connections just because of my ambition to stop supporting Mark Zuckerberg's mass-surveillance system.
That's why I've decided to take my time and send a private message to every individual friend in order to inform them about my intention to leave, as well as the ways in which they can contact me.
In theory, it's very simple: you write a general message, scroll your friends list, and simply paste the text in the chat box then press "send".
In reality, I have to provide individual private explanations about the reasons behind my decision. Some of my friends assume that I'm depressed and need help, others think this is just a phase that I will never really complete due to its difficulty.
What I know for certain is that I want to live without Facebook for at least a year and feel the difference. I'm also thinking about documenting my experience, just to see how my life changes when I'm no longer addicted to scroll a never-ending newsfeed and contacting somebody actually takes a little more effort as well as real intentions.
I like to regard this phase as my social maturation, as I'm moving on from shallow and meaningless interactions (likes, shares, and quick ironic comments which sometimes involve gifs) to a life where every human connection makes sense. It's something that my parents' and my grandparents' generation had, and it's more real and grounded in day to day life.
One important aspect that I've observed while sending messages is that there are plenty of friends from whom I haven't seen posts in years. I know who they are, most of them have attended university classes with me, and all of them have continued to post pictures or write content on Facebook. However, due to the ever-changing priority algorithms, I've never been able to see what they've been up to.
So, in a sense, trying to delete Facebook by actually making sure that you let everyone know where and how you can be contacted outside the platform is an entire process of discovery. You see how some friends have gotten married, changed their last name, and now raise children. You see that other friends have moved into a foreign country in order to pursue ambitious career, and you notice how others have drastically changed their appearance. And none of these events have appeared in my newsfeed: it was all filled with the stuff that I was most likely to appreciate through the "like" button.
Now that I think of it, it's all about recent likes in the case of both pages and friends: I remember liking some bands, then not seeing any updates unless the posts were promoted. In the case of friends pictures, I guess there is a threshold of "quality" (quantified by the amount of likes) which determined whether or not I'd see it.
Planning to miss out on Facebook makes you realize how much Facebook itself has made you miss out.
The company is notorious for always "optimizing" the newsfeed algorithms in order to display more "relevant" content that's tailored for the user's preferences. This might happen thanks to the rather basic economic model of Facebook: more screen time means viewing more ads, so they will do anything to keep you on the site for a longer time... even if this might involve radicalizing some opinions and creating echo chambers.
But in my case, I wish I saw more about each and every friend, instead of being flooded with the posts of a dozen I'm closest to. And I know that there is a "close friend" or "see first" button to tick on every friend's profile, but imagine taking the time to prioritize between 2000 profiles. It would take a lot of time and the result might end up being exactly the same or irrelevant in the face of ever-changing algorithms.
Would this egalitarian "show everyone's posts as soon as they appear" approach make me change my mind about deleting Facebook? Probably not. But I would have been richer and better informed as a virtual friend if I knew a little something about every person who became part of my digital life. Now I find myself realizing that I'm messaging people I used to talk to in person, but rarely ever exchanged texts via Facebook messenger (which also means that I haven't seen many of their posts). And the discoveries are truly fascinating – who would have thought that a high school buddy would make it so far? Or that a girl you used to date has moved to Italy?
Knowing these facts makes me feel more determined about completing the process of deleting Facebook. It makes me feel that I'm punishing the company for depriving me of some experiences and bits of information that I wold have wanted in my life.
At the same time, I find myself wasting a lot of time with this system of messaging each person and my efficiency is low. This might take a while, but I want to do it by the book and avoid the unpleasant scenario of disappearing completely, as if I've committed digital suicide. See the irony here? I'm spending more time on Facebook than usually just because I want to delete it.