Reflections on a year without Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp

Just over a year ago, I exported all my posts from Instagram and Facebook, then I deleted all my accounts.

It wasn’t a decision I made lightly or quickly, and when I look back on my social media presence since that time, I can see how I’ve come full circle. I joined Facebook “early,” but took a few years to post regularly. The same happened when I joined Twitter in 2008. This pattern continued until I joined Pinterest.

I want to reflect on the past year, but let’s start with some context.

A brief history of my social media use

I logged into Facebook for the first time about 19 years ago. It was 2007 and Facebook was still invite-only. I could have joined as a student, but since I was taking CE classes, it never even occurred to me to use my school email for it. My passive approach back then was in stark contrast to my impatience just a few years later to get onto Instagram, Pinterest, Ello, and other apps that have been and gone over the years.

Pinterest was probably the last social tool I was truly antsy to get my hands on. When I finally got in, I was underwhelmed and one of the only people I knew who just didn’t care to use it. But I was also a social media consultant, so I made an effort because it was important to my work.

Eventually, I figured out how I wanted to use it and spent about a year or so pretty regularly using and even liking it. But it didn’t stick. I haven’t thought about it in so long that when I looked up the Pinterest Wikipedia page to confirm when it was launched, I was shocked to see they’ve had a new logo since 2021. I mean, most of my shock is that the new logo isn’t even good, but I didn’t know it had changed because I haven’t been on the app in years since I deleted my account.

My business has evolved along with my use of social media

While social media is part of the work I do with my clients, it’s not the primary focus anymore. I don’t stay up to date on every change that happens. I don’t have alerts set up to track edits to their terms and conditions anymore.

These days, I’ll probably see you in person long before we interact on any social platform, and LinkedIn is the only social platform I use for professional reasons. This is intentional. I believe we will all be better off if we re-examine and reset our relationship with these sites, but that’s a discussion for another day.

The deceptive ease of passive connection

When I was a kid, my dad often talked about his beliefs about friendship. He talked about the inner circle being very small, with no more than five people who are your closest friends. The next level of relationship is friends, but not close friends. They’re more plentiful, but you can’t have too many because we don’t have the mental or emotional energy to support that level of friendship with more. Anyone outside of that band who you’ve met and know in a somewhat superficial way are acquaintances. This group can be pretty large and include dozens of people.

Funny enough, my dad might have been onto something since a similar social structure was proposed by Robin Dunbar in the 1990s, and I’m pretty confident my dad wasn’t following the work of a British anthropologist back then. The big difference is Dunbar put a number on it.

I became aware of Dunbar’s number through discourse about “Facebook friends.” I don’t think the 150 number is a hard and fast rule because there are few of those in humanity. But the Facebook-imposed limit set to 5,000 friends was and is astronomical, though I saw a number of folks complain that it wasn’t enough. I was always conflicted and uncomfortable with friending everyone I met. I did it because I was conforming to norms.

Ultimately, all you can do with such a large number of “friends” is have passive engagement that includes occasional reactions and superficial comments because you can’t truly know the vast majority of that many people. This struck me as disingenuous a few times when someone I was “friends” with commented on my posts and I couldn’t remember who they were or how we got connected, even after looking through their profiles. Their comments usually gave away that they didn’t actually know me, and I would make note to disconnect.

But that passivity is so easy. It makes you feel like you’ve stayed in touch with people you might not otherwise have any contact with. It makes it easier to find all those high school classmates you lost touch with and see what they’re doing. After attending my 10-year reunion, which happened before we all gathered on Facebook, and wasn’t well attended. I didn’t attend my 20th reunion and only realized as I was typing this that the 30th was last year and I hadn’t thought about it once.

Ultimately, what I realized this past year is that I’ve moved on. I live in a different country than I grew up in, and the distance from the people I was friends with in my childhood has meant we’ve all made new connections. I enjoyed seeing occasional posts about their lives, but I don’t have the same connection to them anymore, so it doesn’t mean what it might if we were still actively in touch.

The problem with passive connection is the lack of substance. When I realized this, it wasn’t long before I started pulling back from using most social media. It came around the same time as important critiques of these platforms started, and I stuck around, but I often resented that I felt I had to.

What has the last year been like?

I can describe it in a lot of ways: a relief, refreshing, freeing. But the truth is, I rarely think about Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp anymore outside of gratitude that my data isn’t feeding this particular arm of the techno fascist beast anymore.

Before I get into the past year, please note: I don’t buy into the idea of social media addiction, phone addiction, or much of the other fearmongering that’s used to fuel moral panics about technology. You can probably find many, many sources of information that say the opposite, but I highly recommend following the work of Mike Masnick at TechDirt and Taylor Lorenz at UserMag, who are doing a great job of covering these topics with important context about the policy backlash that will drastically impact the internet as we know it. These “diagnoses” are not officially recognized, and it’s pretty alarming to see how many mental health providers online talk as if they are.

Anyway, I share that because just months after I quit Facebook, I was diagnosed with pretty severe burnout. I don’t think it was caused by social media because I wasn’t using it enough. The burnout was a symptom of so many other things going on in my little corner of the world and the world at large. I spent much of the past eight months focused on my recovery. And, even if they didn’t cause my burnout, I’m sure that eliminating Meta apps from my digital world helped.

It’s been an adjustment to let these apps go, though not as hard as one might guess, even in the context of my business. The vast majority of clients have come to me from referrals. With that in mind, it was much easier to delete those accounts without feeling like I was sabotaging myself. Now, I’m all in on a more traditional approach to marketing that’s not heavily dependent on creating content for social media.

Most of the time, marketers like me don’t want businesses to put all their lead generation hopes into one channel, but word of mouth is the most powerful channel and it’s also one that you could actually nurture to ongoing success without focusing on much else.

Social media needs us more than we need it

Back in the days when I was building social media strategies and then coaching my clients on how to use the various tools, I was still encouraging them to bolster the digital assets that they own and control, specifically website and email list. Social media is included in the “owned media bucket,” but the ownership and control is limited. We’re contributing content to platforms that want our user generated content so they can deliver eyeballs to advertisers and make money.

In the 19 years since I began my social media journey, I’ve watched the evolution of business use of social platforms: In the beginning, they were deeply skeptical until they saw the numbers and cost per lead. As Cory Doctorow covers in his recent book, Enshittification, in which he outlines the three phases in detail with many examples. The phases are:

1.     Good for users (the brief period of no businesses on social apps)

2.     Good for business users (the golden times for the business community)

3.     Bad for all users (where we’re at today with so much tech we use)

We all know we’re in phase three, but the ease of passive connection and the fear of losing leads keep us coming back. The reality is these platforms only have power if the user base keeps showing up and they’ve built them with that in mind, so it’s not easy to leave.

As I said last year, and I mean it still, I don’t expect anyone to quit based on what I say. There are valid reasons to keep using apps from companies like Meta and my personal choices aren’t a judgment or indictment of anyone else. My only hope is for the decision of staying to be well thought out and that you’re keeping a plan B in mind as you do.

A little over a year ago, I clicked to delete nearly 18 years' worth of posts and pictures on Facebook, about 15 years of Instagram and whatever I had in Whatsapp (which wasn’t much).

I have never once regretted it because I don’t need social media—and that feels powerful.