If I was being serious in developing FriendsLive, I had to leave Facebook behind and that meant taking down several Pages promoting not just FriendsLive but also the Dordogne Travel Guide and Cruising Views! It also meant closing a Dordogne Group that had a membership of around 800! There was also a whole bunch of Developer stuff that Facebook use to link your Facebook presence to the internet! All had to go!
I decided that I would deactivate my account as a first step but not before I downloaded all the data Facebook held for me; Images, Comments, Likes etc from all the years I was on the platform… Impressive! It was time to click the button and it was done!
Over the next few days, I waited for the withdrawal symptoms to kick-in and if I am being honest, the addiction of having a look at was was in my timeline was there for a while but I knew that in the main, there was nothing there on a daily basis that I couldn’t live without! If I wanted to get informed about a given subject I was interested in such as the forthcoming American Presidential election, I would make a point of looking it up rather than rely on Facebook or someone on Facebook feeding it to me! So out of minor withdrawal symptoms came a sense of liberation and control!
Don’t get me wrong, there are some great Groups on Facebook where likeminded people can get great information but my overall experience of the ones I set up is that there are a lot of ‘Groupies’ out there that just get a kick out of joining groups and I wasn’t getting much out of them other than a continual demand of administering them for little or no benefit to me!
So, FriendsLive may not have the user-base as Facebook and it never will have but it feels more personal with interactions happening at a more meaningful pace and I like that! As Membership grows, I remain vigilant to blocking Membership from Companies and Spammers whose sole intent is to populate FriendsLive with the content that has ruined Facebook for me !
There is life after Facebook!
