When someone deletes you on Facebook...

[MyFamilyBenAndSusan]

Or unfollows you on Instagram... has it ever offended you? Has it ever been someone you really liked or thought liked you? Or caused confusion etc? A colleague you always got on with perhaps. Or an ex you're not quite over yet.

Or does it literally not bother you at all. I am SO sensitive to this kind of thing, which is why I tend to mainly avoid it.

I periodically look through my FB friends and unfriend people who haven't interacted with any of my posts for a number of years. This is much less than it used to be as I had FB before I had LinkedIn so had "friends" on there who were really professional acquaintances.

I have also been removed in similar circumstances. It doesn't bother me at all if acquaintances remove me. People are a lot more privacy conscious than they used to be on social media, which I think is a good thing. I would probably be a bit upset if a close friend removed me but that's never happened to me.

I’ve had 2 friends delete me. One sent me a ‘goodbye’ message. She told me that I was highly opinionated. That was because I challenged her anti-vaxxing posts during the pandemic. I didn’t mind. Another friend, also posted a load of pseudo-science and I very occasionally posted a link to the correct scientific info. I realised one day that I was not seeing her posts any more. I was a little sad about that.

I deleted a close friend on social media because she kept on telling me that my posts were bad for her mental health. She was upset and sent me a messsge within hours to ask why and I told her that her constant complaints were bad for my mental health.

I’m probably one of those who’s ’always online’. But I use it for work related purposes (I’m self employed) and I’m in a lot of groups related to my line of work and contribute to them a lot. I find I can also pick up small bits of work from these groups too. I don’t always post on my own facebook page and can go for months without posting on it. That doesn’t mean I’m being nosey or snooping or being ‘creepy’. Just there are uses for Facebook that you may not have thought of. Facebook has become much more business oriented now rather than being all about personal friends and family like it used to be.

A colleague who I consider a friend unfriended me on Facebook so I text her and asked if I had done anything to upset her. She claimed that she didn’t know how it happened. I think she’d had a cull as there was a few people who were ‘accidentally’ unfriended. About 18 months later I got a new friend request from her which I accepted. In that 18 months we saw each other and messaged etc. it’s only facebook. It bothered me enough to message and ask the question but I was ok with not being Facebook friends because I knew we got on ok. Maybe she just didn’t like what I shared, who knows. I hate it when I get a friend request from someone I get on with but I’m not really interested in their life. I do tend to keep pending friend requests for quite some time. I’ve currently got 6 pending that I have just looked at and they can stay where they are.

A couple of times it’s bothered me seeing as they were what I considered friends. If it’s someone I haven’t spoken to in a long time or never see then it doesn’t bother me. Maybe that’s why I’ve been deleted on occasion. I do tend to wonder why 😂