I deleted by Google+ account(s) recently, as well. I have several Twitter accounts with no tweets. I'm thinking of sanitizing my LinkedIn account soon.
It's not that I'm anti-social (well, maybe); I am just one of those elder geeks who once dreamt of truly federated services under one's own control.
> a G+ account was forced on me again
To be clear, a G+ account is a Google account. It ties together all Google properties. Just seems bizarre to use these and consider G+ as being forced on you - it is just your Google account. One doesn't need to actually use the social features provided by one's Google account.
What the world needs is a club for anti-social people, to (mis?)quote Ashleigh Brilliant.
I very much share your perspective. I never bought into the Facebook madness, tried G+ very briefly under my real name, then decided that wasn't a good idea. I've since withdrawn virtually completely from it though I may use it to help promote my writing elsewhere.
One thing I've found as I look to alternatives is that much of the infrastructure for a federated system already exists. Blogs, RSS/Atom, image hosting, and a very few other pieces, would pretty much make it come together.
A slightly better integrated messaging infrastructure is the primary missing bit (though there's no reason why any of the existing tools, including Jabber, AIM, or IRC, couldn't cover much of the ground).
And I'm not knocking Google for its technical execution. G+ was very well engineered (hrm: why am I referring to it in the past tense), phenomenally stable (I saw one push which broke the site in 2.5 years), and at least on the server end, performed well (the client side is another story, and I'm having to free browser memory far, far less often having left it). In terms of UI/UX and social factors ... I really found the site left a great deal to be desired.
Facebook leaves the account deactivated for a week so you can ponder on your choice, but if you don't do anything, it was my understanding that the account gets deleted.
I shared that optimistic dream for the internet back in the early days, but I think we've figure out how to make money off it now and that's going to be its undoing.
Usenet is free, doesn't provide any value anyone could easily monetize, and allows interaction with other users. That's about all I want from the Internet these days anyway.
http://www.accountkiller.com/en/
alternatively, you could give http://www.howtoleavefacebook.com/ a try