How to kill your Facebook account without actually deleting it

Ever wanted to delete your Facebook account, but had good reasons why you couldn’t, but still really wanted to? Read on for what you can do. The goal is to stop using Facebook, break your ties to it and get the habit out of your system. To help you with that, there are a few changes you can make that are much harder to undo than to recover a deleted account within the allowed 30 days.

But why not #DeleteFacebook altogether?

I wish I could say goodbye to Facebook. But a few years ago I made an app that uses Facebook Login and pulls information from Facebook, so I need an account for that to work. There is no developer account without a regular account. I also want to keep an eye on what’s happening in Facebook in terms of features and design. Your reasons may also include:

• Memories. Facebook is not just your stuff, which you can download, but also photos of your friends and family, posts you liked or commented on, and so on. It would be great if you could take all of that offline in a nice and convenient format, but there simply is no easy way to do that.
• Contacts. All the Facebook friends you collected over the years — some of them you may only be able to get in touch with (or remember their names) through Facebook.
• Whatsapp and Instagram. In 2020 Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram will become interlinked. If you use any of the three, you will remain under the Facebook umbrella anyway.
• Curiosity about the future. Virtual Reality? Money transfers? Movies? Restaurants? Who knows what else Zuckerberg & Co. will venture into next. Whatever it is, it is likely to be linked to Facebook. What if in the future Facebook undergoes a massive reform and becomes something great? Who knows, here’s hoping, why not have some optimism.

Keep the account, retire the profile

This is the solution. Stop using Facebook without deleting your account. Don’t post, don’t like, don’t share, don’t comment. Take a vow of Facebook silence. Starve the beast. Disable notifications and break the habit of checking the feed — little by little, cold turkey, whatever works best for you (see tips below). Stay away and be free.

Don’t use “Log in with Facebook” any more — this will help against the spying as well— and change the login method on sites and apps you previously used it on. This way if you decide to delete your Facebook account after all, you will not have to worry about shutting yourself out of all these apps.

Staying away may take more will power than burning all bridges, but in the end it is better to be free of the desire to come back than to lack the opportunity.

Even more so because the opportunity to come back will always be there anyway. A deleted account can be recovered for 30 days, and after that you can still start a new one.

The tricks

Make your feed look like this — even if you have 5000 friends (see #3 below)

1. Uninstall the app. It’s the easiest way to quit opening it up. Log out if you use the website.
2. Disable all notifications, including via email. Except, perhaps, for private messages — if you do not have Facebook Messenger installed as a separate app.
3. Unfollow all your friends. Don’t remove them, just unfollow them. They will not be notified. This is easier done in bulk. Also, leave all groups or unsubscribe from updates. Now even if you do fall to the temptation to check your feed, it will be blank except for a welcome message from Facebook. Checkmate!
4. Hide or delete all your Facebook posts. This will clear your Timeline. If you are deleting, don’t forget to download fist. You will still be able to see all the posts you’ve hidden in the Activity Log and you can unhide them later if you wish. A clean Timeline will remind you to keep it that way in the future.
5. (Pro tip) Block “facebook.com” in your router config or operating system’s hosts file.

Make a statement

If you feel up to it, you can go out in style and declare your profile to be really dead by posting something like this, which helps to stay true to the commitment as well:

It especially pops if this is the only post remaining in your Facebook profile. Write anything you like, it takes 30 seconds to make online, I used this Codepen — or you can find more options by duckduckgoing “tombstone generator”.

Happy Halloween! 🎃