It’s done. I have clicked on ‘delete account’ both on Facebook and Instagram. Of course, since Mark is really sorry to see me go, I have a month to rethink my decision before my profile vanishes like I’m a technophobic Thanos.
It hasn’t been easy; not because I had second thoughts, but because the platform put obstacles in the way: specifically, it insisted I was the only owner of a page I once co-managed, and that if I deactivated my account, the page would also disappear leaving a few thousand subscribers contemplating a tear in the space-Meta-continuum. I had to wait for the current manager of the page to have time to remove me before I could safely proceed.
I requested to download all my information since the beginning of time (2007 I believe), and Facebook informed me via e-mail that the request needed some time to be fulfilled, and that I would be notified via e-mail again when the data would be ready for download. Ten days later, no news. The minions putting these downloads together must have run out of virtual sellotape before dealing with my virtual parcel.
I asked for the download again, but I had to cancel the previous request, at the same time incomplete and expired.
The second time around it worked (I used Firefox instead of Safari, no idea whether it matters), and in a couple of days I could download a 192MB zip file containing all sorts of information in the form of HTML files (photos and posts - which are essentially links to who-knows-what: most of them are now broken -, but also a list of ‘friends’, of no-longer-friends, of declined friend requests, of people-who-once-thought-they-could-be-my-friends, and lots more of information organised in a lot of folders I haven’t looked into yet).
All of these artificial complications convinced me to delete my account instead of just deactivating it, as I initially would have done.
While the information request was ongoing, I alerted ‘friends’: two weeks ago I published my first post in two years or so - which will also be the last one for the foreseeable future - in which I informed them of my decision, and asked them to ‘DM’ me on Messenger if they needed an alternative way to keep in touch in the future, should they wish so.
Facebook being Facebook, I have no idea how many contacts actually saw the post, that I timed more or less around my birthday to maximise the possibility of someone accessing my (otherwise silent) profile.
Luckily, most of the people I really would like to be able to contact did ask me for an email address; a few more just sent their goodbyes (that’s fine, I work on an opt-in basis); others commented it would be the last time they sent me birthday wishes on the platform (or, implicitly, ever, because they don’t have another way to reach me).
I got in touch directly with a few more people I don’t want to lose completely.
One former real-life acquaintance (a very good ex-colleague) seized this opportunity to reiterate the message he has tried to push every time we have communicated recently: that I’m very wrong about the state of Meta, the universe, and everything, and that I should start listening to Joe Rogan, and that he hopes one day I’ll be able to ‘acknowledge The Truth’.
Until then, life will be a lot less Meta (as I mentioned on a previous occasion, I can’t afford to abandon WhatsApp too).
Feel no sorrow, feel no shame. Come tomorrow, feel no pain.
Except… a real-life friend asked me to book a restaurant to have lunch together on Sunday. I searched for this place on DuckDuckGo to find its phone number, and the search engine proposed a ‘card’ with the address and the link to the restaurant’s web page.
Which, alas, was not a website: it’s on Facebook.
So, I guess I will miss it a tiny little bit.
Until the Web heals.