I Deleted Facebook and so Can You!

Hello, friends! In today’s post I wanted to talk about deleting your Facebook account. Not just deleting the app from our phone, but deleting our actual account. I did this January 24th of 2025. And I am NEVER going back. First, I thought I’d detail why I decided to do this, then how to practically go about deleting your account, and then what a Facebook-less existence looks like in 2025. Let’s jump in!

I was generally a very casual Facebook user, oftentimes deleting it off my phone for months and only checking it on my laptop. I kept it so that I could stay in touch with people I didn’t see regularly, like family from out of state, old coworkers, and people from high school. But that had gotten me thinking — do I really need to stay in touch with HUNDREDS of people? Ultimately, I decided no!

So, what did I do?

First, I began to go through ALLLLL of my Facebook photos, because the majority of them were only available to me via my Facebook pictures. I didn’t have them saved anywhere else. This process took weeks. I was fairly deep into this project when I realized I could download whole albums at a time, so once I found that out, I was able to speed up the process quite a bit. For me, it made sense to download then delete so that I was able to better keep track of which I had already taken care of. I also made sure to go through all of my old statuses and deleted as I went on so that I was able to screenshot any that I wanted to remember. This comes in handy if you’ve had conversations with loved ones who’ve passed away that you want to be able to remember.(I will also note that before I started this process, whenever I would get a “On this day” notification, I was deleting most of the things I had posted on that day. I had been doing that for years, so I really wasn’t left with a whole lot to go through as far as statuses went.)

Once you’ve completed this, you can move on to the next step. What I did was make a status saying “Hello, all! I’m deleting Facebook in one week. If you’d like to keep in touch, please send me your phone number and/or follow me on Instagram.” This way, people have some time to see your status and reach out to you if they’d still like to keep in touch! You’re also able to reach out to anybody that you would like to keep in contact with as well.

After a week, you may now delete your Facebook! The feelings that you have may be different depending on if you have other social media platforms or not. I do not use Snapchat or X (I deleted it back when it was still Twitter) or Tik Tok, so my social media useage is pretty small and once I got rid of Facebook it got even smaller.

Something that you can do if you feel like your loved ones are missing out on your life updates, is (granted they have an Iphone or an Apple device) you can start a shared album, and that way you are able to mass share things but it’s still not via social media. This has been a HUGE help in staying in touch with family.

And now, my thoughts post-delete… I do not miss Facebook one single bit! I feel no less connected than I did before deleting it. And it freed up so much time that was spent just mindlessly scrolling on Facebook. I would recommend this to anybody and it’s a fairly low-stakes situation. You can always create a new account if you feel like you miss it.

Another perk that may initially seem like a con is that you are delightfully out-of-touch. If there’s somebody that you haven’t seen for awhile, when you do visit, you have so much more to talk about! You don’t know all of these random details about their day-to-day life — you’re able to actually have a wonderful in-person catch up! It’s so fun! You’re able to actively learn this information instead of passively as you would if you learned about it online.

And that’s that, my friends! What are your thoughts?

XOXO,

Mattie Mae