Well, I’ve just unsubscribed from Facebook. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time and I decided that instead of a New Year’s resolution, I would bring a solution to an ever-present hovering cloud about my Facebook account.

I feel free, but not as free as I could since I didn’t permanently delete my account. I left myself the option to change my mind, although I doubt that I will.

Facebook “asked” why I was leaving, and the following reasons came to mind:

  1. I don’t really use it. I never post photos of my kids or my vacations or talk about what I’m doing.
  2. The reason I don’t do this is because I’m basically a private person. When I want you to know what I think, I write a post on my blog which I gladly share publicly.
  3. That is why I had a Facebook page for this blog, that I used to publish new posts. However, Twitter is more effective and more immediate in attracting readers to my posts.
  4. All friends are not created (or maintained) equally. While I chose to share my content only with friends, some of my Facebook friends are really acquaintances. I guess I was too polite or too wimpy to ignore/reject their friend requests. It bothered me to think that the content I was sharing (even if not much) was being seen by people who were not really friends
  5. I thoroughly dislike when I’m joining a new service to be prompted to “sign up with Facebook“. It really makes me feel exposed, that someone knows exactly what I’m doing. Of course, this is probably true even if I’m no longer on Facebook, but we get really good about ignoring facts.
  6. Speaking of facts, stories about 40% of people getting their news on Facebook,  fake news permeating the site, and algorithms determining what one sees depending on one’s politics are all too disturbing for me to ignore.

I realize that this decision will affect some traffic to this blog, hopefully, not a lot. You can always find my blog posts here or at Twitter through links. I also realize that just depending on Twitter is risky as it always seems on the brink of bankruptcy and no one wants to buy it. Oh, well.

That is, however, not the reason that I’ve also started writing on Medium, described as a hybrid between Twitter and WordPress with more exposure. I’ve written two posts there and I loved the experience. It is extremely easy to use, free of widgets and plugins and all those blog things that make you feel dumb most of the time. It also allows you to publish posts to Twitter.  I’m not yet sure how I will manage having two blog platforms. For example, I started writing this post there but decided it would be better to publish it here. Perhaps, shorter posts (but longer than 140 characters) will go there, and even longer posts here. Perhaps I will end up moving this blog there (as soon as I find out how to do it).

Time will tell.