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Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

I left Facebook about two years ago now. I nearly immediately lost contact with all of the people I'd spent my time with in the city (outside of work). I don't chase them down for other reasons, but it is striking how much it supplanted everything else.

After returning an old work phone I'd made the mistake of not copying all of their numbers over. I moved elsewhere within the city, and so I don't run into them in the neighbourhood anymore.

I really enjoy not getting sucked into checking it and getting 100 notices about people who are friends of friends of friends. Life feels more at a healthy pace, even if it feels like I have fewer friends. I didn't like the constant FOMO it generated -- that for some reason I needed to either be the most expressive person on FB, or always chase other people's posts and doings. It's not for me.

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I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or checking the only group (fantasy sports) that is active. I also can still use messenger for those few people that prefer it.

I deleted the app because of the FOMO feeling that I was getting and now it's basically gone. I can still access it, but I check Facebook a maximum of once a day, minimum around once a week.

Maybe that's the happy medium for you, but for others, the happy medium is emailing, calling, or texting your friends to set up a dinner party or a round of golf, making sure to call your folks every week or two, and not worrying too much about those whose only effort to spend time with you is having clicked a button months/years ago.

If you don't communicate with the people, you can unfriend them.

I'm only on there for messenger now - calling is expensive when your friends are in different countries, and while texting is mostly free these days, it costs money when traveling. Email... People just don't check it as much anymore. So you're left with messenger.

If you are going to unfriend them, you may as well not use FB at all.

My wife's happy medium is, basically, to not login until a close relative or friend (usually her mother) phones and tells her there's something there to check; and at that time to batch process the latest events in her wall. This way she still is in contact with everyone she cares about, but it only eats a couple of hours of her week, at well defined blocks of time.

>I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or checking the only group (fantasy sports) that is active. I also can still use messenger for those few people that prefer it.

The service goes out of its way to make you install the app too, which I find annoying. The mobile site doesn't actually allow you to check your private messages without installing Messenger.

Really the only thing I use it for at this point is for invitations to events, notices when bands I like are performing, and the like. But every day it seems like they make it harder to just be an intermittent user of the site.

I too don't use the app, but I use https://mbasic.facebook.com, which allows messenger use without an app.

Good to know! I had just trusted them to redirect me to a non-gimped mobile site.

My happy medium was disabling notifications and putting the icon in a subfolder (iOS) so its not apparently visible.

The lack of visibility prevents me from opening the app out of habit, but its still there if I need to check a certain group or event.

I removed it from my phone, blocked it in my browser my only way to check it now is with my phone browser ... I still have the heinous facebook messenger app installed.

but much like you the FOMO is gone, but so is a lot of anxiety. I can focus on things that are more important ( reading is my new hobby) and spent more focused time with my family.

Lately, I am more and more going to free events in the "nearby events happening now" space. Somehow it's the ad-hoc nature of it that really fun.

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