Ah, The Good ole Facebook News feed that is fed by friendships.  When you add a new friend on the platform, it immediately also clicks the “Follow” option.  This is when you begin to start seeing peoples posts on your feed.  You can choose to follow certain people,  without friendship, but the posts you see will be determined by whether or not it is public.

I am curious as to what happens to my news feed when I unfollow all of the friends, groups, and pages that I’ve collected over the years.  Will it provoke me to spend less time on the platform?  Will I end up commenting less on the posts of others?  Will my news feed, basically be blank?  I’m not sure, so I am going to try it for ten days, and see what happens.

Late last night, I attempted to unfollow all 652 of my friends.  It was tedious, despite the application that they give you to mass unfollow.  You know that circle that shows up, when the page is loading?  Well, it kept searching and searching for people to bring up into my feed once I had the bulk of my friends unfollowed.  Faces of people I haven’t seen in a long time, and some faces I didn’t even recognize popped up with posts.  One by one, I would go to their page, unfollow, and refresh.  Once they were all gone, groups and product pages started filling the feed.   One by one, I unfollowed those as well.

My news feed currently appears with my post about this experiment on top; a notification from an event that I am invited to, suggestions of people I may know,  an advertisement from FB trying to get me to pay for a boosted post for one of the groups I manage,  another suggestion of people I may know… and then it stops.  It says “There are no more stories to show right now.”

Ok.  Now what, right?  Do I feel like “checking in on anyone?”  No, not at the moment.  Well then, step away from it for now.  Okay, easy enough, right?

Any other day I would be scrolling the news feed for a few hours before I sat down to write or paint.  Today I saw the blankness staring me down… so I came here to write this.  We will see how the rest of the day goes.