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Comment by vzidex | Hacker News Reader

A baby step you can take if you want to leave Facebook is to disable (I forget if that's the exact term, it might be deactivate) your account. This removes your access to the site, and hides your profile - while leaving the Messenger half of your account untouched: messages, contacts, etc.

I've done it before for mental health reasons, and found it really refreshing.

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For me the first step was to remove the mobile Facebook app. I used to scroll mindlessly while traveling and commuting, and once I didn't have the app on my phone, my time on FB dropped by like 80%. I also found it refreshing and I felt less stressed about missing something there.

I didn't need to do this to get the same effect. I just deleted the app from my phone.

Now I check Facebook maybe once a month and only for events or to sell stuff. I think it helps that I only ever used it on mobile to begin with. After being away for over a year the feed looks like a dumpster fire. I wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole. There is some genuine cases of people connecting on there no doubt but it's buried under a pile of anxiety inducing crap. And not the constrictive kind of anxiety either, the hollow kind.

I got rid of the app and I'm only browsing the mobile site in a incognito window, so I have to login every time. This added enough friction to stop the completely mindless browsing and scrolling plus it gave me back some of my battery life.

The next step for me is to remove Facebook from my password manager. Having to type a 20+ character password on a phone is definitely going to add significant friction.

Removing notifications and moving the icon to a folder on the 4th page of your home screen is pretty helpful as a first step too

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