Elon showed me that I can just delete my account

Sorry, still no astronomy this month. Instead, I want to write about some big personal news.

I deleted my Facebook account.

Am I a little late to the party on this? Kind of. But this was a hard decision to make. I’ve been on that stupid app for 20 years. I joined when it was just for colleges and universities. I covered Facebook for my college’s student newspaper when we got it. I was in the ecosystem. It’s how I kept in touch with several friends. But over the past several years, Facebook had started to lose its utility. Still, it was hard to actually press ‘delete.’

The confidence to finally take the step came from an unlikely place: Twitter. X. Whatever.

Twitter, at its peak, was honestly amazing. Text-based, which I always prefer. Easy to follow experts and real journalists. I could actually follow current events on Old Twitter. Then Elon bought it and it went downhill shockingly fast. Now, by all accounts, it’s just a hotbed for the extreme right-wing.

Even so, during its descent I still had a hard time letting go of Twitter. But then I did. I didn’t delete my account, as such. I just locked it down and made it private so no one could take my handle. But functionally, I don’t use Twitter/X anymore.

I was worried that I had become too dependent on it and that I would miss it too much and I would go back. That hasn’t happened. It was actually very easy to let that shit go. You can just delete you account and survive to tell the tale.

Facebook is, admittedly, a bit different. My friends list was not full of fascists and Nazis. There was still some utility there. But not enough. I was constantly feed AI slop and ads. Most of my time on Facebook wasn’t used interfacing with friends. So I decided it had to go.

I miss Facebook more than I miss Twitter because it was ostensibly filled with people I like! But it isn’t like social media is exactly safe nowadays. I’m a millennial. I know how my friends and I used to connect in the pre-social media days. I know we can go back to it. It will be more intentional and meaningful.

Of course, I am not without social media accounts. I remain on Instagram and Bluesky. Instagram, especially, feels hypocritical of me. It’s a Meta product, after all, subject to the same questionable privacy decisions as Facebook. Instagram, though, still has utility. In many ways it’s like Twitter used to be, but with pictures. I follow friends and journalist and experts that I trust.

The difference for me, it seems, is usefulness. I’d love to be able to take a very principled stance, but the fact is that I use Instagram for myself and for work. Bluesky has not quite replaced Twitter, but it does scratch and itch.

I would love to go back to a pre-social media world, but at this point it’s not possible. The best I can do figure out what works for me. But I also think it’s useful to remember that social media is a tool that should be useful. If the companies want my data to sell, they need to at least continue to be useful. If they cease to be, I am free to delete my account.