Time has flown by since I abandoned Facebook. Today it’s been a year exactly.

And I have to say there are advantages and disadvantages to no longer using Facebook. An obvious advantage is that I have more time on my hands that I would otherwise have thrown away using Facebook – watching memes, viewing videos, trying to keep abreast of things my most casual of friends were doing. FOMO in action. Instead I do use Twitter, but nowhere near consuming as much time as Facebook. A disadvantage is that I am rapidly losing touch with quite a few of my better than casual friends. And, obviously, it is difficult for me to post questions of a technical nature, that would previously have been responded to (and more often than not quite properly and proficiently answered) within a few hours at most.

A few days after the official Facebook your-account-will-now-really-be-deleted deadline I did try to log in. I was relieved to notice it was actually no longer possible, so I therefore had to assume my details were really truly gone. There was a certain degree of ambivalence to my relief though – it was, after all, also a bit like finding out an ex-partner had removed my contact details from her phone ;-).

After a few months not entirely bereft of regret, my feelings of cold turkey slowly wore off. Ever since the end of February, however, I have felt better than ever before. This is due to Troed Sangberg putting me in touch with MeWe.com. This is a fairly new social network that will not mine your data or track you, and in fact one of its advisors is the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I have befriended quite a few people there, especially friends of the, shall we say, technical persuasion. And I don’t post stuff about where I am and what I am eating there – things I used to do on Facebook but for which I kinda hated myself. Although web guru Frederic Poeydomenge has not joined yet, I expect the major disadvantage of being without Facebook to be largely compensated shortly.