Facebook → /dev/null

I've only put this off for 9 years. Sometime in 2016 I remember getting a congratulatory notification about my 10th anniversary on Facebook. I only remember this because it coincided roughly with my learning that I'd be a father. Somehow random memories around that time ended up sticking in my mind too.

2016 was also the height of Americans and bots and who-knows-who-else yelling at each other about politics on Facebook. The site had gone from something fun to... something else.

My first couple of reactions to the 10th anniversary notification were:

1. I can't believe I've been painting this company's fence for a decade.
2. I should get off this thing.

Cue the typical realization that my only way to contact certain family and friends was on Facebook.

So I just deleted the app from my phone but kept my account and scaled back my usage. I figured I'd ween myself off to a point where I could delete my account without personal disruption.

This ended up becoming the permanent status quo due to inertia (and more interesting things to think about elsewhere).

This is not a how-to

Facebook really sticks its claws in when you try to leave. I struggled to make sense of the dark UX patterns in Settings and "Connected Experiences" or whatever. There were several starts and stops over the course of a few weeks, so I can't really say exactly what steps to take to get your account zapped.

But here are a few things to look at:

Download your stuff

I don't know why I downloaded my stuff, but I figure if Facebook has it, I might as well have it too since it's mine.

My experience with the download feature is that it is failure prone. If you've been using for a long time, you may need to reinitiate the process a few times to get it to actually complete. Each time you try you may not know if it fails for a day or so. This means that if you want to take your stuff with you, you won't be deleting your account today. Eventually I got it.

My download unzipped: 3.7GB. You are welcome advertisers!

Disconnect your Meta apps

I don't totally understand what was going on here, so I can only say this in broad strokes: it seems like multiple Meta app accounts get rolled up into one single data cow for Meta to milk.

I'm trying to delete one account at a time, so I had to disconnect Facebook and Instagram in Facebook Settings.

Again, I'm not really clear on what this was or what I did, but it was a thing... that I did... that seemed necessary. Maybe.

Delete your Facebook developer apps

Maybe I should have put this one first, because if you're a developer who has built an app on Facebook, it seems like you need to delete or reassign those apps before they will let you delete your Facebook account. (This precaution on their part, I do actually understand.)

In my case, I had a number of demo projects on my developer account from 10+ years ago. These were all just for me and had not been used in a very long time.

Only after I deleted them did Facebook let me actually delete my user account. Before that, my account deletion would fail with a "Something went wrong" message, where I was immediately logged out.

Delete your Facebook pages

Same as the developer apps: you'll need to delete or reassign these.

Delete your Facebook account

Good luck finding where to do this! The help page was wrong. The Settings search doesn't turn up anything useful.

I wish I had noted where this was so I could share, but I didn't think I be writing a post about this, of all things. The location of this setting probably changes frequently though.

Today is going to be the best day of your life

And like that, my almost-20-year-old account is gone*.

*Where "gone" means queued for deletion for some number of days, then likely kept by Facebook anyways.

I was scrolling through some of the JSON files in my 3.7GB of data, and I stumbled on a post from 2010, doing some solid fence-painting:

If you've been waiting to read a guest blog post about what Facebook is, written by me, in Japanese, today is going to be the best day of your life

The post contained a Bitly link, which was long dead.

All we have is now.