One of the hurdles you encounter in leaving Facebook is figuring out what to do with all the content you’ve accumulated there over the years. If you have a blog, the answer is simple: move your Facebook content to your blog. But maybe it’s not that simple, because you still have to review all your old posts, decide which ones to keep, and then figure out where they belong on your blog, how to handle discussion threads, and so on. I’m going through this process right now, and here are some strategies I’ve come across that might be helpful:

  1. First of all, whenever you move an item from Facebook to your blog, give it a #facebook tag. That way, when you’re done with your Facebook exodus, you’ll be able to search the #facebook tag on your blog and see all the content that originated from Facebook. For example, here’s all the Facebook content I’ve moved to my blog so far: https://rudiseitz.com/tag/facebook/
  2. If you’ve been blogging and Facebooking over the years, there have probably been many occasions when Facebook stole the attention that you would have otherwise given to your blog. If you encounter a Facebook post from a few years ago that you wish you had posted to your blog at the same time, simply create a new blog post and backdate it. (If you’re using Wordpress, the process of publishing a post gives you an option to select a publication date, and that date can be in the past.) This way, you can retroactively return the attention to your blog and make it seem as though your blog had received everything you’d given to Facebook over the years. For example, I did this with my posts Summer 2017, Fall 2017, etc.
  3. When you come across a Facebook post that warrants new commentary or reflection, simply make a new blog post with your current reflections, date it “today,” and then quote the original Facebook post. For example, I did this with my first Facebook post, my most emotional Facebook post, my most satisfying Facebook post, and so on.
  4. If you have a lot of Facebook posts on one specific topic, make a blog post that collects them. For example, I made “anthology” posts for all of the music I had shared on Facebook, all of the photos of fireworks I had shared, and all the photos I had included in my 15 day photography challenge.
  5. If you have lots of odds and ends that don’t seem to fit anywhere else, just collect them together into a single “miscellany” post. Here’s mine.
  6. Throughout all of this, the main thing you’ll be losing when you move material from Facebook to your blog is the discussion that had taken place on Facebook. It’s tedious to try replicate a lengthy Facebook discussion thread on your blog, and you face the question of whether your friends want their names to be exposed publicly. What I’d recommend is that you pick a few of the most significant or memorable comments from your friends, and preserve those anonymously. In my Facebook Miscellany post, I opted not to include my friends’ names but to just say “Friend’s comment:” where I’m quoting a friend.
  7. If you find yourself blogging about Facebook and your own process of leaving it, you might consider adding all of these process posts to a dedicated category that could be named Leaving Facebook. Here’s mine (it includes this very post): https://rudiseitz.com/category/leaving-facebook/
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