[circularfoyers]

I feel like the suggestion to just delete your Meta account is unhelpful and even harmful in some situations. I know a lot of us in this field don't mind having a small social circle, but for us that struggle to even have that, or that the process of doing that, requires you to be as open and reachable as possible to make it easier to create or maintain friendships, this often requires having an account to use Messenger (I know regionally this may differ).

Being difficult in this way, when most other people, particularly non technical people, don't have a problem with this, in my experience significantly hurts your opportunities and limits the types of people you socialize with in real life, which I think can eventually be harmful.

[duzer65657]

I do some IRL activities where many of the participants use social media apps to coordinate and plan sessions. I don't have any of these accounts so while I do miss out on some of the casual things, I just show up and still get 80% or more of the interaction and all of thething I'm after in the first place: doing stuff.

You really can live without social media.

[tapoxi]

Why not just text people? Am I missing something?

[saila]

That works when you already have an established connection with someone, but it doesn’t work so well for making new connections.

I’ve deleted all my Meta accounts and other social media accounts and have lost touch with many people and find it much harder to meet new people.

Personally, I accept that tradeoff but can see how others wouldn’t (or can’t).

[nevdka]

There are a lot of group chats I'm not in because I'm not on messenger.

[amanaplanacanal]

Messenger is the only thing I kept my Facebook account for. I don't use any of their other products.

[m0skit0]

I don't know how old you are but I'm 44 and in my experience, you really should prefer quality over quantity.

[ryan_lane]

If your friends won't use something other than messenger to talk to you, they aren't your friends.

[patch_cable]

I don’t think it is so binary.

If there is more friction to communicate with me I expect to hear from people less often.

As an example, my friends that only use Discord and not SMS or Signal definitely hear from me less frequently. It doesn’t mean we’re not friends, but we do communicate less frequently.

[dlivingston]

I am not a sparkly special pretty princess. My friends are where they are. In the trade off between meeting people where they're at or doing something unique to me with friction to them, I know which one wins.

(note - this is snarky and I don't actually fully disagree with you)