Obviously Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the world and for good reasons. It actually invented what I call "the Facebook life", or a fake virtual life full of masks, fake friendships and happy moments that almost makes us hate the "real life" that we were suppose to praise and celebrate.

It hooked me for about ten years, until last August when I deactivated my account and the app from my phone also. I haven't found the delete account option and I am not really interested anymore in doing that, but I would love to be able to uninstall the app. Unfortunately I could only deactivate it from my Samsung device.

After all the years spent on it I did realize some changes happening in my life when not being "social" anymore in the old fashion. Some of them really enjoyable while others being kind of disappointments.

The first thing I noticed is that people don't know when my birthday is. Not referring to anybody that I had in my friends list, but the close ones. Usually when it was my birthday I would have some messages, phone calls or posts on my wall to congratulate me, but after leaving Facebook a lot of them "forgot" about it. I actually deactivated the Facebook account a few days before it and it was really a friendship test for some.

Something funny about the whole thing is that now I can eat alone. Not that I was eating with family and friends everyday, but very often I shared my meals on Facebook "as it was some trend" and of course the "bon apetit" comments never missed me. Now I pretty much have to say that to myself.

I wasn't a fan of giving too much details about work and current locations, but somehow they all knew through Facebook these details. It was like I had a virtual ID or an online journal to keep everybody update to where I am a what I'm doing and of course how I feel. Now when I meet someone they always have to ask that and of course what happened I haven't seen you online lately?. Guess what? I'm enjoying more the offline life and for a few months the blockchain based blogging platform which I'm using right now.

Almost as a must with Facebook came its messenger app that has its ups and downs. The good part about it is that you can video call anybody from your list anywhere, but the bad thing is actually the same. That you can get called from anybody at anytime, anywhere and I have to admit that sometimes I didn't want to answer to anybody calling me and couldn't say either that I was away from the phone since I was wearing the tag "online".

From the privacy point of view I can't "be collected" anymore since I have deactivated... whatever could be. I know that even if you don't use the app, but you still have it installed on your phone Facebook will collect your data as Mark Zuckerberg confessed. Thus I deactivated whatever I could and hopefully my digital is not archived anymore by Facebook. Now it's only Google on that mission.

Last thing that I want to point out is that I'm not a stalker anymore. I already covered the subject of stalking other people(even the ones you don't know personally) on Facebook and Instagram in a previous post so I wont get into too much details. I have to say though that I really enjoy finding new things about people without having to follow them on social media platforms everyday. Doing that by actual conversations. It has been also studied that this kind of behavior is a main trigger nowadays for depression and low self esteem.

Now I'm all into the Steem platform and I have to say that is really something. It is a bit addictive like Facebook was, but more creative at the same time giving me the option of expressing myself through this kind of posts more and interact in the online world more than I was doing with the others mentioned above. That's why I keep on steeming and never going back on the others.

Source of images:https://pixabay.com/

Thanks for reading!