Kill your Facebook. Seriously. You'll feel so liberated. And showing people pictures of your recent life when you meet them or email them is so fun and you get so much more attention and conversation out of it. Best decision of my life!
I realize now that I should have just shaped my use to fit my needs: unfriend or unfollow people I don't care to follow, write more messages rather than scrolling through the newsfeed, and join events and groups more deliberately. Deactivating was just an easy way to avoid the headaches rather than going through the work of curating what I wanted to see.
Now I actually use it to keep in touch with people I care about, rather than just pretend that's what I'm doing. I missed out on some things during my three years with Facebook off, and although I learned so much from having done it, I wouldn't do it again.
Since I weaned myself down majorly by curating the content severely for a while, almost no one had been griping to me about 'why aren't you on facebook?' when I stopped using it this last time. And I feel even less compelled to go back on. I enjoy having a sense of privacy, free time to do other things (I have that 50 minutes a day/whatever to do other stuff with now), and I think a better respect for the value of the precious time left in my life. I hope I never get drawn back in to using it.
What is the advantage of using Facebook to keep in touch with people that I'm missing?
Facebook also serves as an auto-updated contact list. If I update my email or phone number, many of my contacts won't have the new information. FB doesn't have that problem. In fact I can put my phone number and email on my FB profile and my contacts can optionally auto-sync that info right to their phones so it is always up-to-date. It's possible to be "friends" with someone but not "follow" them so you don't see their posts in your normal timeline but you still get their contact info. You can also make closed or open groups which are helpful for event planning and multicast messages, and "friend lists" which let you customize the reach of each post. I guess you could do that last one with email too.
Being able to easily react to any status that your friends post, and being able to comment on that. The email equivalent would be a separate email thread for each status update from each friend. That would quickly get messy.
And a big one for me is being able to create an event, and invite friends to it. Any updates to said event can then be communicated to all those interested without you having to make updates to a list of email addresses.
The fear of missing out? That's just one of the many addictive strings that Facebook tugs to manipulate you. The things that happen on Facebook don't matter. If something is important then it is far better to discover it outside of Facebook. In the end, nothing is that important.
There are other ways of keeping up with old friends and relatives. Listen to gossip from other friends and family. Keep in contact with them using email, telephone and post. If you don't maintain some link then they should be resigned to the past - until some event occurs to trigger a re-established connection.
Makes me think Facebook is like Reddit but with people you know.
In my own experience, that's just not true. Facebook has facilitated lots of social interactions for me that simply would not have happened otherwise. Some examples:
- I was doing an internship in Australia for a few months. I posted a picture of the beach on Facebook, an old friend from highschool whom I hadn't talked to in years saw it, commented that I should come visit her in Melbourne. I did, and we met and caught up on life.
- A friend of mine invited me to go to a music festival with her friends. She added me to a group message on Facebook that they were using to plan logistics, etc. After the festival, we continued using the chat to plan other social activities.
- Casual acquaintances that I met once or twice invite me to parties, etc.
Can these things happen without Facebook? Technically, I suppose so. Realistically, I think they would happen less frequently. IMO there's a big difference between Messenger/Events/Groups (facilitates a lot of real interactions) vs News Feed/Profiles (stalking other people).
It's up to us to define what friendship we consider real or not. Personally I find mystery an unpleasant waste of time.
> It's like being a super fan to an amateur musician - a one way street with occasional responses.
Huh? There's no asymmetry if you're both using Facebook.
> If you don't maintain some link then they should be resigned to the past - until some event occurs to trigger a re-established connection.
Screw your "should". Plenty of times I've found out via Facebook that someone was going to an event near me, or just had a common interest, and met up with them as a result. And that's been fun.
But also because I like being un-contactable by people I have known in the past.
Unfortunately, my sister got a lot of "what happened to your brother?" messages, but they have mostly stopped now.
Facebook still creeps me out.
I switched to only having Messenger installed on my phone. If I really want to visit the site, I do so through the browser, and I post once or twice a year. I also have an extremely small list of friends on their compared to most people I know. This has let me strike the balance between being able to contact people easily and not feel like Facebook is a daily part of my life.