Dear all of my acquaintances who I have on Facebook,
Yay, now that Facebook does one way following (aka subscribing) I don’t have to feel bad about unfriending people. In other words, if you suddenly find I am not your friend anymore and are sad about the lack of posts, you can subscribe to me as a human. We don’t have to be friends, isn’t that great?! My profile and everything is already all public, so hopefully this will actually encourage more sharing between all of us. I am happy about this, and you should be happy too, not offended. Don’t be offended. If you say interesting things I will subscribe to you as well. If we haven’t spoken in years, either we clearly weren’t that good of friends or else it means we need to catch up. Not mentioning any names here, you know who you are. This is a step in the right direction Facebook, and I’m sad it wasn’t around a little bit sooner. Additionally, if I unfriend you on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like you as a person, it just means that I don’t feel like friend is the right word to describe our relationship. Acquaintance is more well-suited to the types of interactions we have, and I will view our relationship as such. If you want to be more than acquaintances, that is absolutely great and we should talk more. I’m not a sociopath (I don’t think), although feeling like I have to say it does make me wonder :). I am also not going to feel bad about this, I’m just being honest about how I feel. If I would not describe us as friends, but still feel like you have interesting things to say, I will totally subscribe to you, even if you don’t subscribe to me. And I have left messaging on Facebook completely public, so drop me a line anytime.
Again, and I cannot make this any more clear, being friends on Facebook is not the real meaning of friendship to me, it just allows us to show the world that we are friends and lets us stalk one another unabashedly. And I have been of this opinion with no alternative for far too long. The subscription model will absolutely change my life forever, and I can live free of guilt not being YOUR Facebook friend. Real friendship is what matters most to me.
Thanks to everyone for reading this, and for some of you, this will very likely be one of the last posts of mine you read. For those of you who wish to stick around for some fun times even though we’re not that close, I’m game if you are…
Subscribedly yours,
Rob
Ps. Another thing I just realized…Facebook chat is the only thing which would keep a friend who I never see but still want to be friends with, so you have that going for you!
Pps. If we’re already connected on Google+, you will get bonus awesome human points and I will feel less bad not having you on Facebook 🙂 You know who you are…
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