If you were on Facebook but finally decided to quit using it, please tell me the good and the bad of it. Please don’t link to internet articles instead of telling me your personal experiences, and please don’t post “Well, I was never on it to begin with!” missives.
I quit Facebook in 2020. I just got sick of all the pro Trump BS that people were posting and got tired of arguing with them. (My sister in law was one of the worst.) The downside is that I had a lot of connections with old college friends and was no longer able to keep up with them. I miss that part but overall I think I’m better off having ditched it.
If you’re tired of all the suggested crap that fills your news feed, there is a way to just see the feed of your friends. On the desktop, use Feeds on the left and then select Friends. I’m not sure how to do it on mobile. That will show just the posts of your friends rather than all the suggested stuff.
You can deactivate your account rather than deleting it. Deactivating it will just disable your profile. You can still log back in, but other people won’t be able to see your profile. Other people will see your icon as grey. Deactivating can be useful since you may still need to lookup links on Facebook or see pages for community groups. If you’re not logged in, those pages won’t always work properly. It’s a little hard to find the page to deactivate/delete your account. I keep a bookmark handy so I can easily re-deactivate my account after logging in to look up something: https://accountscenter.facebook.com/personal_info/account_ownership_and_control/deletion_and_deactivation/
I’m very happy I walked away from FB. I don’t miss it. I no longer have to deal with a bunch of drama from high-strung relatives as to why I didn’t comment or like their posts. And I don’t have to see all the stuff they are complaining about all the time. Facebook was fun at first when people were sharing what they were enjoying and what made them happy. Now it seems it’s just everyone complaining about everything all the time. It’s become a cesspool filled with negativity and posturing. I don’t need more of that in my life. I get my fill of that right here on the SDMB 
Quitting is easy. Simply don’t log in. Removing all your data is quite another matter. They don’t make it easy.
Pros & cons as Shoeless points out. But if you really want to keep in touch with a person you don’t need Facebook to do it - or maybe you’re not as close ‘friends’ as you thought you were.
Other than verifiable posts from friends the site isn’t much more than falsified rubbish anyway, especially now that AI is a thing. And of course you’re being tracked every step of the way.
I didn’t get rid of Facebook, but I unfriended everybody (if you don’t have the heart to do that, just unfollow) and now I just follow pages on history, fitness and baseball that I find interesting (a lot of old timey videos). You can cull your feed - part of it is to actively delete ads/pages that don’t appeal to you.
That’s not to say that there isn’t still junk, but it’s less offensive.
I’ve not myself, as I’ve too many older relatives in the UK who it’s the only means of staying in touch day-to-day. There is no way I’m convincing them switch (not that there is an alternative really, the way Bluesky is swap in replacement for Twitter)
A lot of my friends have and for the ones I’m not close to anymore just means we are not in touch anymore
One group of friends I was close to in San Francisco (tech savvy types) set up a discord server which actually worked pretty well, in fact its quite a good middle ground between a Whatsapp group and Facebook. I’ll post pics of my kids on there, and I’ll never do that on Facebook. But that’s the exception.
If there was a “like Bluesky but for Facebook” I would push hard to get my extended family to get on it. But there’s not
Following up on this for a moment, even though it isn’t what OP asked for: there is an extension called F.B. Purity that allows you to take much more control over your feed, so you don’t see stuff you didn’t ask for. And @Moriarty’s approach of unfriending or unfollowing all individuals, if there are interest groups you want to follow, is also a good way to get rid of much or most of the aggravation.
This is very true, and there’s no way around it. I haven’t quit Facebook, having taken the above steps instead, so I comfort myself with the idea that the folks tracking me aren’t getting very much for their efforts.
About five years ago I just stopped using it. I didn’t unfriend or unfollow anyone, or disable or delete my account. I just stopped going there. I occasionally look in, and every year people send me birthday messages that I won’t see for months or longer.
The good? It’s obvious, really. I’m not wasting time, getting caught up in the latest recreational outrage or hoax going around the Internet, reading about the vacations that the grandkids of some forgotten work colleague took, etc., etc., etc. And I’m not having news about the latest horror from the criminal Trump regime forced down my throat every other minute. Talk about turds in a punch bowl. I can learn about that shit when I’m so inclined in a more controlled fashion here, and in the news feeds I’ve set up.
The bad? Well, among my 300 friends there are a handful of truly remarkable people whose achievements, insights, and creations across the past five years I probably would have enjoyed seeing. But not knowing about them, I can’t say that my life is worse for missing them in order to avoid all the shit I would have had to wade through to get to them. It’s the choice I made, and I don’t regret it.
Just walk away.
I have a facebook account for the sole purpose of finding information for local restaurants; in particular, their opening hours, telephone number, and daily specials.
My facebook account is not in my name. Nobody in my area even has that name. I did a google search on the last name once and the only entry was for someone who was a noted psychologist or something similar about 100 years ago.
The only other person who knows the alias I used is my sister. And I’ve never posted anything on it or anywhere else using that name.
I have regretted one part of it – that I didn’t use a completely different, but valid, spelling of the first name.
I joined FB because my kids were posting there regularly. Only one does now, but I still like to see his posts. I have never seen a MAGA or even Republican themed posting but I get Democratic ones regularly. I’m not sure how that came about. I also get sometimes longish (I have to click on the see more button) of genuinely interesting people. A recent one was Tim Berners-Lee, builder of WWW. These are mostly very interesting. I also get regular mathematics-themed articles, some very interesting, some fatuous. Here is a recent example. Find a positive integer n such that n^3-1 is 16 times a prime. Turns out there is a unique solution. Anyway, I find it interesting and nothing there insults my intelligence, so I will stay with it.
I was a daily Facebook guy for years, but I stopped completely a few years ago when I noticed I was almost invariably aggravated whenever I logged on. Too much pro-Trump stuff from people I previously respected, and I found I couldn’t ignore it.
My mental health has improved since then.
This is close to my experience. I never thought, “i will quit Facebook today”. I just stopped logging on. And since i quit, I’ve been there about 4 or 5 times, usually when a friend tells me, “so and so died, and his partner posted about it on Facebook.” So i logged into Facebook, and read the obit, and offered my condolences. And then a browsed for a little while. And instead of seeing stories posted by my friends, Facebook showed me a bunch of random stuff that it thought i might like, interspersed with a few posts from friends. And i thought, “this isn’t what i joined Facebook for”, and logged off, and didn’t log on again.
I missed some things. My high school class organizes reunions on Facebook. There was a Facebook group for wooden jigsaw puzzles that i enjoyed. There are some social groups i only see one a year, and don’t keep up with in between. But it’s a net win. I don’t feel outraged by the latest whatever. I don’t run into as many people who are wrong on the Internet that i end up arguing with.
A lot of my friends have switched to private discord groups to keep up, so those are the ones i keep up with. 
I rarely go on FB and never have, but I keep it around for the occasional connection. I try to keep everything on my terms, so on my smart phone, I make sure the FB app has NO access to any of my phone’s features. I also log out from the app on the occasional time I use it. It’s not like quitting, but let’s me control at least something.
And I agree it is a shit show - if it were ever shut down it, would be a favor to humanity. I wouldn’t miss it.
Deleted it about 2.5 years ago. One day I had the realisation that I was seeing very little actual posts from actual friends… it was just endless scrolling through ads and whatever weird posts the algorithm thought I wanted to see. The impact was less screen time scrolling through a bunch of crap I hated looking at anyway. Kept instagram a while longer, but then I realized that had turned into the same thing and deleted it as well. Wish I had deleted them both sooner. The only social media I use now is Strava, which is no ads or nonsense, literally just (running/hiking/cycling route) posts of my friends
When blsky came out I switched over and stopped opening FB for a couple-three months. What I found was that I was surrounded by people who agreed with me. Very dull. Nothing I said was of any use at all because I was preaching to the choir. I want to be helping those who have been fooled open their eyes.
I went back.
I had no problem quitting Facebook. The only reason I joined was because a good friend sort of badgered me into it. We both belonged to a particular friend group, members of which had all been online since the late 80s. They had coalesced into a Facebook group. So, what the hell.
It took about 5 minutes for me to get hinked out by how much personal information was freely passed around. I participated very little, then deleted my account a couple of years ago.
The friends I want to hang onto already know how to contact me via personal email or by phone.
I don’t miss anything about Facebook at all.
Agree. I wish BlueSky worked more like FB, since I never learned to use Twitter.
This might not follow your rules, but I used to work on an onine casino, almost everything as a “free service” on Facebook with the plan that we would advertise our real casino. Get people hooked, then switch to making profit.
As I did not want to spam my friends and family, I created multiple Facebook accounts under various pseudonyms so they could be friends (not all were friends of each other, but a reasonably complex structure)
My only “real” account, that I used to keep updated, was another fake one, in this case, in the name of my dog. Unfortunately he is now deceased, so no more updates.
Technically I did not quit, I just don’t visit.
I like Facebook but my high school friends from the 90s think of it as tertiary to other boards like LinkedIn. So I have an account but only go on once a week.
I used to be a really active Facebook user, posting witty / interesting / deep stuff just about daily and basking in the warmth of likes. It was also really nice to see what my friends, scattered over the globe, were up to. When we met IRL for the first time in three years, one such friend said: “It doesn’t feel like there was any gap between us two, thanks to Facebook!”
All that was years ago. I have all but stopped visiting FB. The idea of sharing my curated inner and outer life with a bunch of people has lost its appeal. I still had interest in what my friends were doing, especially projects-wise, for inspiration and such. But at some point, political stuff not initiated by my friends started to infiltrate my feed, and it was glaringly obvious that the FB algorithms tried hard to engage the ever-less engaged me, varying between putting really offensive right wing memes in there, and when that backfired, switching to liberal clickbait. That was it for me.
These days, I practically never post anything on FB, and I check my feed maybe six times per year’. On those occasions, I often scroll the feed some, but the enshittification invariably leaves me angered, and I leave. Some people I know are only “available” through FB, so that’s a loss that sometimes stings a little.