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   I would often get feelings of envy or 
   dissatisfaction from browsing it... 
   ...comparing the best moments of my "closest" 
   500 friends, sometimes I come up short

No, not crazy at all! I've seen MANY people make similar observations and I have definitely felt this way myself.

It's totally sensible. How could a person possibly avoid comparing themselves to others, even subconsciously, and how could a single person's life ever compare favorably to the aggregated "highlights" of multiple other people? logically we know it's about as realistic as comparing ourselves to sports highlights on TV, but we still do it because it's a human thing to do.

For me the answer involved not really spending time browsing FB; I don't really read my "feed" much. I mainly use it to contact people.

I guess you could say I use it a bit selfishly: I post things on there more than I read others' posts. I don't think it's selfish in the same way that talking only about myself during a "real" conversation would be selfish, though, because nobody is forced to read what I say on FB. They can pick and choose...

Very much agree with it. Facebook is essentially a giant advertising machine, a friend advertising to other friends how great his life is (maybe not intentionally but still advertising). Browse through it long enough and often enough and you begin to feel envious of other friends.

My Facebook account usage consists of:

1. Clicking the occasional link from my best friend (one of the only people who posts interesting things)

2. Being invited to events and looking up the address

3. Posting cat/baby pictures from Instagram

And, of course, Facebook Messenger (the only reliable, functional cross-platform messaging system I've found)

Have you tried WhatsApp? How do they compare?

As with all messaging systems it doesn't really matter whether they're good or bad, it depends on who is using them. The "issue" with Facebook is that their Messenger can't be detached from Facebook, Timeline and all. They'd see that as a feature and not a bug.

You can continue to use Facebook Messenger without having Facebook installed, at least on Android.

Except with their mobile apps, where they separated Messenger from the main Facebook app, and everybody threw an enormous fit for reasons I'm still not really clear on.

(well, it's not really a clean separation since you still need a Facebook account and all that entails, but I still don't see how separating the two apps is anything other than a good thing)

For me it was one more application that's constantly pinging my location has access to all my data, and is actively feeding it upstream. Though I did keep hangouts (google voice and sms integrations), after facebook messenger and seeing my battery not make it through a full day (morning until I plug in at night), I removed pretty much all the social apps from my phone.

When I looked at my battery usage stats, the top offenders were facebook and the like, despite not even being used for days at a time. Now I use facebook through the mobile-web interface, and haven't looked back. The only apps I regularly use on my phone are the browser, mail, maps and hangouts. I don't have many others even installed (lastpass, authy), and my phone now makes it a full 24hrs+ before power goes off. (just got a new phone yesterday, so that profile may be different now).

My fit wasn't separating messenger out... it was having another app soaking up cpu/battery usage.

Sadly FB app suite is really crap on Android. Not that much on iOS though, since you can disable the access and background refresh.

Yeah at first the separation of Messenger was something I was irritated and confused by, but I soon realised it was actually a very smart idea, as it moves to replace WhatsApp, SMS, and any other messaging service in a way that was never possible with Messenger just built into the Facebook app.

> As with all messaging systems it doesn't really matter whether they're good or bad, it depends on who is using them.

What does that mean?

Hangouts has been losing messages recently for lots of people. That's bad no matter who's using them.

I've had a similar experience, though I deleted my Facebook account entirely after downloading my info.

I feel great about it. This might come across as somewhat misanthropic, but Facebook made it too easy for people I don't really like to interact with me. As it is, I stay in touch with the people I see in my daily life in my daily life, and for the handful of people who I live far away from and used Facebook to stay in touch with I just use email, text messages, and phone calls.