New York Times’ tech columnist deleted Facebook last year. Here’s what changed (and what didn’t).

“When Facebook and its family of apps experienced a daylong malfunction last week, millions of people got a taste of what life would be like if the social network were out of their lives for good,” Brian X. Chen reports for The New York Times. “I can tell you more about that: I permanently deleted my Facebook account five months ago.”
“After being off Facebook since October, I found that I did not feel less connected and that my social life didn’t suffer, even though I was no longer seeing status updates and pictures on my News Feed,” Chen reports. “My friends and I continued making plans over email and messaging apps. So did my family. Same old, same old.”
“My wallet thanked me. I realized I was spending considerably less money on my usual guilty pleasure of buying clothing and cooking gadgets online because I was no longer seeing the relevant Facebook ads that egged me on to splurge. Over the past five months, my online shopping purchases dropped about 43 percent,” Chen reports. “For me, it turned out that without Facebook, there wasn’t much I really missed out on — except targeted ads.”
“Over the 14 years that I used Facebook, I accrued about 500 friends. Most were former classmates whom I had lost touch with,” Chen reports. “In my real life, I have about 20 friends I talk to on a regular basis. So when I finally deleted Facebook, the fallout was underwhelming. Those same friends kept in touch over iMessage, Signal or email. We still get dinner or go to the movies together.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:

See? You can live without Facebook, after all.