When I got on Facebook a year or so ago, one of the first people I Friended (or maybe he Friended me) was a good friend/rival from high school. We exchanged a couple of messages and occasionally commented on each other’s post.
I realized the other day that I hadn’t heard from him in quite a while, so I went to look him up and found out that he’s not on my Friend list any more. I searched for him and he didn’t come up in the FB search (although he has a really common name and I didn’t look through them all). I went back and looked at our exhanged messages which are still on my message page, and his name is no longer linked to anything, it’s just text.
I’m just curious if he quit FB and deleted his account, or if he stealthily de-friended me. If the latter I’ll have to rack my brain to figure out why.
When one person defriends another on Facebook, the person defriended is not notified. You can’t tell from the evidence you have if your former chum defriended you specifically or eliminated the account.
My stepdaughter used to use her personal FB account to promote her photography. She would indiscriminately accept all friend requests, of which there were many on account of many of the pictures being of hot chicks. A few months ago she decided that was unwieldy, so she set up a separate account for the photography business and announced on the personal page that she was defriending all the people she had never actually met and directing the people who just wanted to see the pictures to the other account.
It sounds like you have been both de-friended and blocked. If someone just de-friends you then their name still appears next to any messages they may have sent you. If they have blocked you then it is as if they don’t exist.
Several people have done this to me. I used to worry about it but now just shrug it off. It’s their loss.
First rule of Facebook: If you don’t notice when someone’s statuses stop popping up in you feed, you shouldn’t be offended if they defriend you as a matter of housekeeping. Don’t overthink it.
Yes, if **Skammer **is no longer able to find this guy via a search then he wasn’t simply defriended. The other guy either blocked **Skammer **or deleted his own account. There’s no obvious way to tell the difference while logged in under his (Skammer’s) own account.
**Skammer **could get a friend to search for this guy on Facebook and see if they can find him, but if the other guy has a common name this could be a pain and I wouldn’t recommend going down that road anyway. If there’s no obvious reason why he would have wanted to block **Skammer **then it’s probably best to just assume he got sick of Facebook and deleted his account.
ETA: FWIW, if this guy did block **Skammer **then that means he also cannot see or search for Skammer’s profile anymore. Just to reassure anyone who might be afraid that someone had blocked them but was still keeping tabs on them via Facebook.
His name still appears; but it’s not a link to anything.
Another piece of data: I looked at some of our mutual friends’ Friends lists, and he’s not on any of them either. Although I guess if he blocked me it would still look that way.
I’m going to assume he deleted his account and get on with my life, because I can’t for the world imagine why he would go through the trouble to block me.
I had a friend who recently quit Facebook. All her posts on various walls and groups are completely gone, but her private messages are still on my account, just without linking to anyone. So the way to find out is to find a group/wall/event where said friend would’ve posted and see if the posts are still there. If not, then the friend is off Facebook.
It may not be possible to tell which he’s done, unless you can get your hands on someone he’s still FB friends with who’s willing to rat him out. Or, you know, asking him.
Not being able to search for him could mean either that he’s deleted himself or that he’s set himself as unsearchable to (everyone, everyone but friends, everyone but two guys named Sarah, etc.)
ETA: Note that he could have “blocked” you by virtue of screwing down his privacy controls really private, and you’re just one of the masses he’s gone invisible to. Many people do this after having an unpleasant experience being found by someone they didn’t want to think about.
I used to have a FB account as Skald Rhymer. When I got rid of it, because I didn’t trust FB to truly delete it, I changed all the information in it to nonsense outright lies, including the display name. I don’t think a Google search will do anything useful at this point.
What I mean is, if you’d been my FB friend and wondered why I was no longer showing up on your list, you’d get nothing useful from a google search. I turned all the info on the account to nonsense, then broke all connections to everyone, then discontinued the account.
I think it would be a good assumption that you had closed your account or at least that you had discontinued using Facebook. You wouldn’t go through all that just to unfriend a single person. If you still were maintaining some Facebook friendships, you wouldn’t want to nonsensify all your information.
I’m not 100% sure this is the case. You may still be able to see him in the mutual friend’s list.
But if you suspect he blocked you, save the urls to some of these friends’ facebook pages. Log out of facebook and visit the pages of the mutual friends. Look through the friends lists and see if you see him. Since “you” are not logged in, the facebook block won’t apply. If you still don’t see him, he has likely deleted his account.
Wow, no one has suggested the obvious? Just log out and search for him. Or, better yet, open some of your mutual friends’ pages in another tab, log out, and then refresh them. You’re almost certain to find at least one who didn’t hide their friends list. Look for him there.
Finally, there’s always the possibility of creating a throwaway account, but that may be more than you want to do.
That’s silly. Feeds are pretty useless for actual communication. And it’s easy to not notice someone in particular even if you have, say, 50 friends. Far more important is whether you’ve communicated at all recently. If I were the other person I’d wait at least a couple months. And, even then, I advise against defriending anyone you will see in person later. Heck, if you are friends in “real life”, I suggest giving them a heads up in some form.
You must be posting from that alternate Earth where I am not paranoid. See if you can find copy of WKRP season 8 dvd box set while you’re there, wouldya?
I don’t trust Facebook to respect my privacy because FB routinely doesn’t. But I didn’t have much informattion there anyway. Still don’t. I marvel at people who actually post their phone number in their profiles, for instance.