I recently read Sarah Wynn-Williams book, Careless People. Worth it, loved the whistleblowing, it’s confirmed my beliefs, thank you deeply Sarah for having the courage to publish a huge part of your life story, and Facebook’s profoundly negative impacts on the world.
My main Facebook account had been deactivated for over two years. So no longer a useful tool, if anything it’s a reminder of deep battle scars it’s time to forgive myself and others for, completely, as the Lord has forgiven us.
Plus Janelle’s Ellanyze via a DuckDuckGo search was the final nail in that metaphorical coffin. So I’m not even the courageous first follower on this one.
Here it is, deletions scheduled, and so all but done. Hopefully there are no data breaches that slow down the 10 November 2025, 30 day deletions.
And yes, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t open myself to the possibility of going back many years from now. But for now, it’s just not a tool I find useful, or even that others around me ask me to participate on.
If you find me, for reals, you’re likely to find, according to my Margerison-McCann TMS Upholder-Maintainer profile, someone who does his level best to embody quality and integrity, an introverted person, who nevertheless spends much time with and cares deeply about other people. I sometimes struggle to show it, for example please forgive what others tell me is brilliant but I think is frankly quite fallible, memory & recall. So I genuinely appreciate real encouragement from humans, especially face-to-face, not virtually, though in writing, like the-pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword, writing, is also a wonderful blessing.
I’m not a Tiktok user. I think TikTok Sydney emailed and tried to recruit me last year, but it’s hard to know for sure, with so many scams floating around. From the mid-late 2000s, I have a handwritten card “King of Computers”, but frankly it was over a decade since I graduated with first class honours in Computer Science from UNSW, and I haven’t invested in the theory lately, prioritising when I was working in the industry, to just get computing plus human systems working well, systematically problem-solving and mentoring teammates to problem-solve until the result is high quality, rather than knowing how to derive technical things like merge sort is O(nlogn).
Instagram will probably go too, same basic boat – it’s a museum piece primarily used about a decade ago.
WhatsApp I’m less sure on, while I use and encourage Signal, perhaps the Meta FTC trial bears fruit and Insta and WhatsApp get divested and no longer under Mark Zuckerberg’s control and for his benefit? Though I’m probably living in a wishful fantasy land, it irks me, as WhatsApp is so heavily used by generally careful people who I care about, even though I’ve crippled its notifications to help limit my own engagement.
Nevertheless perhaps I’ll align better with my flexible personality and thus learn to let more of the small stuff go, if nothing else, it’s simply not my place to micromanage, so I get to see the forest instead of my historic perfectionist obsession with the deep details of metaphorical trees, as awesome as each tree is, I’ll give Steven Covey the final word on this post and some of the calls I’ve been making in my life recently:
Peter Johannes Schmidt 