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| The truth is that FB has become very hard to abandon and while I see the occasional person leaving it... its way too practical and there is honestly no comparable alternative (except of WeChat in one single market on the planet). With practical I mean:
- a lot of social events, restaurants and everything not corporate lives exclusively on Facebook. Because creating and promoting and event or a small business there is easier than doing a whole website.
- a lot of websites use "log in with facebook" as the easier choice to have another 500 accounts on some ecommerce website you only ever buy something once...
- I have lived in a couple of countries and I love to stay in contact with people I do not see every day or even year. Before FB would I simply lose the contact to somebody who moves as often as I did.
That's just the most obvious ones...
Bottom line: GDPR rightfully pisses right into FBs business model. That must hurt and it should, because their business model is ridiculous. But they still have a huge potential for advertisers and are there to stay... even if they collect a little less data. If FB would do a bit better in their PR and react a little better to the critics... they could have dropped way less than they did. | |
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Honestly, I thought it would be harder to leave FB than it proved to be.
- So far it hasn't happened once that I have missed out on something because it was only on FB. I certainly miss out on things in general, FB or not, but what I don't know doesn't bother me, and it's impossible to do everything.
- I have so far not encountered an app/site where you MUST have a FB account to join. Even Tinder allows profiles without FB now. But it has made me think twice before opening certain accounts, and I've become a lot better at deleting/closing profiles when I don't use a service anymore. Not a bad thing, in retrospect.
- Friends are more complicated, as I have lived in 5 countries and have friends in several more. I had to grudgingly accept to keep WhatsApp, and I keep in touch with people using mostly sms, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal and Threema. Sure, I don't see the memes, the baby pictures, the perfect vacation reports and the kitten videos, but that's ok. People's lives are becoming so staged on FB that I prefer to stick to messages. And that way my friends are spared pictured from my own "staged" life (because nobody wants to show a less perfect life than their friends, right?!).
Took me several months of pondering, about 6 weeks of transition (f.ex. making sure that I had an address for every single friend, and making an assessment of who really was my friend in the process), one weekend to get it done (downloading FB's file on me and all) and somewhat anticlimactically, I haven't missed it once since.