> He explained that he > deactivated his account Both deletion (no more account) and deactivation (the account sits waiting for you to come back) are available, but Facebook goes out of their way to lead people to deactivate rather than delete. I could not even find the deletion option in Facebook's settings. I had to get there from an external link in a support thread. In addition to making it hard to learn of the deletion option, they are vague about the details of the deactivation option. It's clear that they don't want you to delete your account. I wonder if there is some legal reason they have to have it as an option at all.
> Personally I am still thinking how to properly get out of FB. I still have > some people there who insist to remain stupid and to communicate only > through FB. They would never check their emails any more. Shortly before I deleted my account entirely, my only usage of Facebook was to log in once a week and respond to the messages sent to me through Facebook even though I had told friends that it was not my preferred mode of communication. It turned out to be quite easy to get them to stop. I deleted my account, and they were forced to contact me by email or text (received by me via XMPP). That would not have worked if they had instead reacted by never contacting me at all. Fortunately they are better friends than that. Everyone's situation is different, though, and Facebook has a lot of power, so just deleting the account might not be an option for everyone. > Same > with Gmail, Youtube and what not. Gmail was a little easier to get away from. My old Gmail address forwards everything to my new one, and I respond via the new one. Gmail will see these incoming messages until people gradually learn my new email address, but does not see my responses or the rest of the conversation... unless of course the other person uses Gmail in which case it doesn't matter, but its better than a situation like Facebook where we can't even communicate without using the same platform. YouTube, for me at least, has been the trickiest to avoid. Before I came to my senses, I let myself come to rely on YouTube to access music, which is particularly bad because I'm a musician. I now avoid youtube.com and only access YouTube through avideo and youtube-viewer, but those don't work on videos with DRM (the number of which seems to be increasing) and does not solve the larger problem of my depending on Google to access information.
