If you want a more narrative view of this whole thing, check out the blogpost I wrote about the whole process. Otherwise, see the bullets below.
Here are the steps I took:
- Downloaded my facebook data. This comes with a lot of data. Most importantly, all the photos I had uploaded to facebook over the years, organized by album, and a list of all my facebook friends. Initially, I unchecked some boxes in the facebook data, so I hadn't downloaded the list of Apps and Websites I used facebook to log in with. I eventually went back and grabbed those.
- Posted on facebook about my plan, announcing I'm starting a small (personal) newsletter, and giving a two-week countdown to get my affairs in order.
- Parsed the HTML file of my friends list. This HTML file is probably the least-useful way they could have provided the list of my friends, but with the help of rvest and SelectorGadget I was able to find the right elements to get a data frame. [Edit! I missed the option to dowload your data in JSON format, which is much easier to parse than the HTML. This would be my recommended method.]
- Made a google sheet of my entire friends list, as an accessible place for the data.
- Went through the entire list categorizing how I knew people and how much I want to stay in contact. (This took several days, as I had over 600 facebook friends!)
- Exported my friends' birthdays from facebook. Facebook has changed their settings, so it's no longer easy to do this. But, mobeigi has a python script that will do it for you. As he warns, using this script made facebook temporarily suspend my account because of suspected security issues. I was able to get back in.
- Downloaded all the photos I am tagged in. There were methods available on the internet using Python (see, gnmerritt, jcontini, and KatyaRuth), but none of them worked with the current version of facebook (I think Facebook likely changed their API to make it more difficult to scrape this stuff). I'm not a Python person, so it was hard for me to debug what was not working about them. I wrote my own code using RSelenium to do the browser stuff. It is highly inefficient, but it works!
- Made sure the Apps and Websites I used facebook to log in to have alternate modes of access.
- Go through my google sheet again and make sure I have other modes of contact for the folks I want to stay in touch with. [Didn't do a great job of this, but it's time to let go!]
- Actually deleted my account!!
- Parsed the birthday .ics file to save just the birthdays of people I want to stay in contact with. (I don't need 600+ birthday reminders on my calendar!)
- Ordered prints of favorite photos from Spoonflower, organized them into a photo album.
- Cleared cookies from my work computer, home computer, and phone
- Wrote a blog post about my entire process
- I'm still going to be active on Twitter. I have a LinkedIn account. And, for right now I'm keeping Instagram. I know Instagram is owned by facebook, but it just feels like too much to delete IG right now. Baby steps!
- I'm starting a personal newsletter to send updates to my friends and family. I'm using TinyLetter for this.
- To keep up on local events, I'm planning to pay closer attention to local arts publications, like the City Pages in the Twin Cities.
- For events I'm hosting, I'll continue to use Paperless Post to invite folks (I haven't used FB for event invites in a couple of years).
- Mostly, I'm going to be emailing, texting, calling, and talking face-to-face with my social network!