As Harley Davidson has learned, you can't lean on an aging population long-term, as they tend to stop aging.

Sure, but the internet is global, and a majority of the world doesn't live in Europe or the US. Large populations are still coming online.

This isn’t necessarily to Facebook’s advantage. Everybody I know in Asia is all over TikTok now. They’re not deleting their FB accounts but they spend a lot less time there.

There's a lot of late 20s early 30's that grew up when FB was coming up that won't leave anytime soon.

As MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster learned, that’s not a guarantee.

I mean as a 30 something who knows their evil, that’s what I use it for too.

I’ve gone to close my account a bunch of times, but for so many old friends it’s my only link to them, I could not bring myself to do it.

I haven’t closed my account but I deleted the apps and only access it via web, on a computer, and only when I need something specific from it. I’ve logged in maybe 3 times all of 2021

You can recreate your social graph at any time by telling it your phone number, or email, or friending the same people.

Any app is doing that and will find other friends on that app with shared contacts. You can even do it in a future FB account.

With that knowledge it is easy for me to delete FB account, even if there are active group chats there.

I mean there’s also 15 years of memories going back to me in college. There’s sentimental attachment there.

Then download your data

I always do download + delete

It's not about the data. The data's the least important part. It's about that data's connection to the other people. That can't be downloaded.

Your social graph already is that data. It doesn't need to be downloaded as it is regenerable.

This is basically what I did. Downloaded my data, said "message me on Signal/iMessage/SMS, here's my phone number" and deleted my account.

I haven't missed anything, and friends/family that lost my phone number usually reached out to someone else to get it. They also don't mind using other platforms to get in touch with me.

Surprisingly, my mother formed a Signal group with my extended family and that's how we chat now. She's not exactly tech savvy, but found it very easy to use.

I don’t share my phone with the 500+ people in my FB network, and vice versa.