I supported the Facebook exodus … until my birthday rolled around

Last month was my birthday, and pretty much no one remembered. The social silence was a distinct departure from the old days when I’d be woken at dawn by ricocheting messages from everyone I’d ever met.

Despite the quiet, I didn’t take the lack of well-wishes personally. In my younger years, I would have worried that I’d gone from darling to outcast overnight. But this year, I understood a deeper truth about the phone lying still in my pocket: this birthday lull didn’t represent my fall; it represented Facebook’s.

As more people leave Facebook, remembering birthdays has become harder.

Anyone who isn’t a Boomer sharing election misinformation or AI images of Jesus can tell you that Facebook no longer holds the cultural position it once did. Despite more than a third of the global population still using the platform, the social media behemoth has struggled to retain relevance among young people. In 2022, Pew Research reported that in less than a decade, the percentage of teenagers using Facebook had fallen from 71 per cent to 32 per cent, while teen users of Instagram and Snapchat had increased substantially.

Deeming the platform cringe, Gen Z has largely fled to TikTok and YouTube, while Millennials – Mark Zuckerberg’s generation and Facebook’s original key audience – are also migrating from Meta’s more chaotic platform to the more soothing (and superior) algorithm of Instagram.

A lot has been said about what this culture shift means. Yes, it speaks to a growing distrust in vampiric tech monstrosities (or at least an alliance to different monstrosities). It also reflects growing anxieties over data harvesting, and the fact there is a lot of junk on Facebook now. But whatever our reason for abandoning ship, the impact of breaking up with a technology that many spent the majority of their lives tethered to is stark.

I joined Facebook in high school. Most of my friendships have always existed in this liminal online/offline space, and until a few years ago, the bulk of my personal photographs and communication were housed somewhere on the platform.

For at least a decade of my life, there was hardly a single party I attended that wasn’t initiated with a red notification bubble invitation. And it was where I celebrated, and was reminded of, the birthday of every person I knew.

During my personal Facebook peak – AKA my early 20s in the early 2010s – forgetting a birthday would be almost impossible. Checking my account compulsively, I would be prompted to celebrate my “friends”. It didn’t matter whether they were family or a distant acquaintance, I did my civic duty and wrote “Happy birthday legend!” on their wall before the day was through.

To have a birthday on Facebook was affirming. But it was also often annoying. At first, the wave of well-wishes was sweet. But by lunchtime, when everyone had shared the same dead-eyed platitudes, it began to feel a little empty. By dinner, it all felt less like birthday cheer and more like spam.

Despite the emotional labour of feeding the Facebook birthday machine, those reminders kept me on the site longer than any other feature. It allowed users to outsource remembering someone’s birthday, and made us all look like good people who really cared in the process. Long after I made my profile private, I’d still check each morning to see if I needed to text anyone. But over time, even this habit has fizzled.

I rarely miss Facebook. I can live without being tagged in 400 blurry digital camera pictures every weekend. But when I jolt awake at 3am realising it was my mum’s birthday the day before, and I missed it, I do lament what was lost. Facebook stole a lot from me – primarily time and data. But it also robbed me of the executive function to remember anyone’s special day.

Eventually, a few people did remember my birthday this year. No one wrote on my wall (is it still called a wall?), but they did text and call instead. With each “Happy birthday”, I marvelled at their memory and asked how this crystal of information had formed in their brain. Some remembered my star sign and worked backwards from there. Others knew that my birthday was just after Halloween. One person had written it on a physical calendar. Uniting all these messages were intimate details that pinned us together.

And despite the reduced volume of well-wishes, I felt more loved this year than I ever did on Facebook.

Wendy Syfret is a freelance writer based in Melbourne.