Disconnecting from Facebook

About 5 months ago I moved away from Whatsapp (owned by Facebook) to Signal and today I moved away from Facebook itself. It has been on my to do list for a while already. Watching Zondag met Lubach this week gave me the final push to put my Facebook account removal at the top of my to do list. Arjen Lubach even created a Facebook event (quite funny) called "Bye Bye Facebook", which was scheduled for yesterday evening at 20.00. He stuck to his word and removed his own account. What made it funnier was that his event was not very easy to find using the search function, which usually works fine.

After a quick online search, I found the official help page "How do I permanently delete my account?". It refers to a "Download a copy of your info" page, which I did first (since generating this download might take a while). After having received the download link via e-mail and having downloaded my information, I followed the "Let us know" link to really remove my account.

The account removal dialog:

And the confirmation dialog:

The top of my timeline (this morning). Strangely enough my "Bye Bye Facebook" post went missing. I'll just "assume" this was because I put a link to an event in there, which is in the past...

Now I just have to wait 2 weeks and my account should "permanently" be deleted. Disconnecting from Facebook seems like a big deal, but really isn't. I still can be reached IRL (In Real Life), by sending me an e-mail or by messaging me (using Signal) or calling me. For reading news I still rely on my ttrss instance, luckily I've never used social media for that purpose.

If you are craving the social media experience and want privacy (yes, the two can be combined), I suggest you try (or look in to) the following:

• diaspora
• GNU social
• mastodon
• friendica

They all offer the ability to join an existing instance or create one yourself. I'll be creating several for my friends and family, if they want me to ;-)

Tip: look through the details of the 'data export'. It creeped me out quite a bit. They were nice enough to make it easily readable and even made it into a simple website (index.html)