This post first appeared on aud.life

A year or so ago, I left Facebook. I didn’t just delete the app from my phone; I deleted my whole account. I made the point of emailing close friends and family and letting them know ahead of time that I was planning on ditching out. I gathered email addresses and phone numbers so that I had other ways of contacting folks.

Kin’s stayed on Facebook, of course, and he’s kept me up-to-date on the kinds of things that seem to be posted only there: pictures of kids, birth and divorce announcements, job updates, vacation photos, new pets, and the like. I don’t feel like I’ve missed much – on an interpersonal level.

What I have probably missed is traffic to my stories. Paying attention to social media – for better or worse – has become another part of the “work” I do as a writer. And Facebook drives a lot more traffic than does Twitter, which up ’til now has been my social network of choice.

There are a lot of reasons I left Facebook, most of which involve issues of privacy and algorithmic control. But now that Twitter is introducing the latter, I’m feeling much less loyal to a platform that has already left me thinking about abandoning it a lot in the last few years due to harassment. I mean, if I have to play with social media in order to promote my work and if the reach of my work is now increasingly dictated by algorithms beyond my control or scrutiny, then why not utilize Facebook’s bigger platform?