A dream that was Facebook

I joined Facebook almost 19 years ago, in September 2006:

Facebook arrived at the perfect time for me, as the 'mature' replacement for the social networks of my high school years - Xanga, MySpace, and LiveJournal.

Geared towards my exciting new collegiate social life, Facebook functioned partly as a cool microblogging platform ("Kristofer is..." status prompts), and partly as campus stalking tool par excellence.

On Facebook, we revealed painstakingly-curated glimpses into our lives with status messages and pages upon pages of photos, mostly from parties or other social activities.¹ This era of Facebook was engrossing, fun, and most of all, socially meaningful.

Through my undergrad years, Facebook was a vital tool: the way we organized campus groups, arranged parties and get-togethers, and eventually how we gossipped and flirted, once messaging was added.

My use of the platform pivoted over 2007, as it slowly crept towards global adoption, and I found myself reluctantly adding my family members and co-workers as 'friends' on the platform.

By 2010, I recall tracking several disconcerting trends on Facebook, most grotesque to me being:

• People that I respected in real life kept getting caught in embarrassing fights in public posts and groups.
• "Appointment gaming" seemed to take over the platform (like, literally 'farming' users' time 🙃).
• My feed changed from a useful, chronological, and most importantly finite list of life updates from friends, into an infinite void that only wanted me to continue scrolling.
• My entire life network had joined Facebook, from acquaintances I'd not seen in years and in most cases would never interact with again all the way to potential future employers. I started feeling the impulse to prune everything potentially sensitive or revealing that I had ever put on the platform.

My use of Facebook continued sporadically into the 2010s. Although my overall experience on the platform was negative, it still managed to be useful at times, and anyways it felt like there was no reasonable alternative to life on & with Facebook back then.

Leaving

A few years back, I scrubbed my Facebook profile clean of sensitive information, literally deleting or marking private most posts and pictures going back to the beginning.

I then disabled my Facebook account.² The platform had long outlived its usefulness to me, and seemed mostly to function as a home for misinformation and bad-meme cesspools to trap Boomers and less online-savvy Gen X'ers in toxic usage cycles.

A native of the Web, I am fully aware that data wants to be free, and that literally anything I put out into cyberspace is liable to come back around to me at some point. Still, I hated that the presence of my now-defunct Facebook account felt like it posed a risk to me - perhaps less a specific risk of whatever compromising pictures or posts exist of me from 2007, and more in the vague feeling of risk from the aggregated identity exposure of literally the entirety of my adult life.

I left Facebook, and never found a replacement for the role it served in my social life circa 2006-2007. The closest platform that comes to mind is LinkedIn, but the way I use it for a specific purpose, which has me carefully grooming my public persona due to how that might impact my career prospects, feels more reminiscent of the Facebook of 2011 than of 2006.

Leaving (for good)

As an EU resident, sometime last year I was shown a pop-up with the option to unlink my Facebook and Messenger accounts.

I found the docs and Googleable info to be hard to parse as to the exact consequences of 'unlinking' the accounts. Whether it's malicious or just lazy compliance with EU regulation, Meta's ambiguous documentation and the threat of wiping my Messenger chat threads & contacts when unlinking with Facebook kept me from going forward, despite my desire to delete my Facebook account for good instead of just having it permanently 'disabled'.

This week, over a lunch break, I decided to take the plunge and unlink my Facebook and Messenger accounts, and see what would happen if I did so.

Decoupling: the journey

Here's the series of screens that it took to decouple Facebook and Messenger, a masterclass in making my desired goal as a user incredibly difficult to find, understand, and follow through with:

First, the overall guidance:

The first attempt at finding where to do this, on desktop web:

I have no idea where to find the unlinking steps in my Facebook settings 🤷🏻‍♂️

Could it perhaps be in my Meta account center?

Nope!

Perhaps I can find it on my iPhone?

Here it is! Under Privacy & Safety (because I'm safer without Facebook?)

Here's where it becomes very obvious that I'm about to essentially delete my Messenger account, as far as it is usable within Messenger. My next step after this will be to delete my Facebook account, so having the 'chats' in Facebook means they are about to be deleted as well.

Let's go!!!

My name is pretty unique, but from testing after this unlinking was done, it seems to be very hard for people to find me. Oh well, we'll just chat on other platforms 🤷🏻‍♂️

(Like Meta doesn't already have this information...and why is my exact date of birth and gender needed for an ad-free chat application?)

Let it be known, I HATE having to use pins, especially long ones. A 6-digit pin guarantees that I will need to write it down. Thankfully in 2025 we have secure password managers.

And, finally, the result, a void where my Messenger history used to be:

Lastly, as one final insult, I find I can no longer use the Messenger macOS app: