I’m leaving you FB. It’s you. But it’s also me.

Ever since the departure of Robin Williams, I have paid more attention when a comedian has something serious to say. @BillMurray "verified" has been quoted saying the following:

Social media is training us to compare our lives, instead of appreciating everything we are. No wonder why everyone is always depressed.

I wanted to find the source of the quote. No offence rhealthylivingsolutions. I stumbled across two Twitter accounts that both appeared to be Bill Murray. One account exploited the Twitter display font. Two uppercase i's rather than two lowercase L's. Then I found an article listing Bill with 7 other celebrities that have never joined Twitter.

I'm leaving you Facebook. It's you...

This is the path we travel when we read something on social media. We question if what we read is true. At least we should do. The World is holding Facebook accountable for enabling the sharing of misinformation and the sharing of our information. I'm not the only one to complain about the number of notifications from the Facebook app. Many empty notifications designed to bring us back into the platform. I recently spent fine tuning the notifications. I turned off push notifications for different Facebook groups I belong to. One by one I switched them off while telling myself that I'll check each of these groups in my own timing. But I also found myself thinking that actually, I probably wouldn't. I started to question the value of belonging to those groups, recounting how much time I spent in them, contributing or receiving value. My more valuable discussions occurred in responses to posts from friends. But even then, I rely on the FB algorithms to show me posts from my friends. If I scroll through my feed for a short while, FB prioritises what it will show me, mixed with automatically curated advertisements. I have to scroll much further to see posts from other friends. I'm sure there are friends posts that I never see.I was impressed by Facebook video. Live events are still ahead of the competition in respect of live chat and sentiment expression. They also have strong capability in 360 video publishing. My interest in Facebook video was one thread that held me in the platform. But I began to evaluate a more personal aspect of my relationship with Facebook. Envy.

I'm leaving you Facebook. It's me.

Returning to @BiiiMurray's quote, Facebook makes me feel envious. It distracts me from the goodness in my life, the very same family and friends that are posting. We're all guilty of presenting our best side on social media. Look at where I am, who I'm with, what I have, what I'm doing. This in itself isn't a bad thing. However, I end up comparing myself to other peoples lives and I don’t feel good about it. I know that a full grown adult should be able to filter these feelings and focus on the good in my own life. But I find with FB that I don’t. Perhaps I'm weak minded. Though my friend's posts are surrounded by ads that reinforce messages, I need this and that. I could be doing that there. Like Bii said, it can leave me feeling depressed and most certainly distracted from all the things to be thankful for in my own situation.I could explore these feelings further and write more about it. Perhaps I will after a detox period. I'll continue using Twitter. You'll still find me blogging. I'll keep creating video content on YouTube and Periscope. I'll maintain an Instagram and Messenger account. I'm still active on LinkedIn. I still value these platforms as sources of information and the connections to contacts.

Don't sign into websites and online services with your Facebook account.

If you have similar feelings about Facebook and thinking of leaving, start by looking at how many other online services you sign into using your Facebook account.

• In the Facebook app, visit Settings and Privacy > Settings > Apps and websites.This is where you manage websites where you have logged in with Facebook. It might surprise you how many places you have done so.
• Some of the services may still be important to you. I was logged into the following services:

Spotify

Netflix

Strava

Feedly

Waze

Disqus

GoPro

For each service, I visited their page and used my email address to perform a password reset. This allowed me to set a password for the first time. I logged into each service with my email address and new password (carefully saved in LastPass). Lastly, I used Facebook Settings to remove the active session for each app.I recommend going through this exercise anyway. Use email address and a unique password for these services. Don't take the convenient route and log in with Facebook. You should know that they get a whole lot of information about you in return for providing an authentication service.[wpvideo LTdHaaQ1 ]