On August 25^th/26^th Facebook banned me for 24 hours for re-sharing a picture of cuisine art: shaped as male genitalia muffins.

A Friend or a Follower of mine reported this picture, because /s/he felt offended. And the report was considered valid, so I got banned for 24 hours. This is sole Facebook right, since this is their meat-mincer where we post, with their rights. We are all the meat there, the product being sold, so we all have to obey.

Since I was reported, it means I bothered someone. So I’d also like to apologize to the one(s), who felt offended. People are different and have different sense of humor or aesthetics, so everyone has the right to judge by his own mind, and to report whatever they find offending.

However, I also have the right to choose my reaction. And as my response to the Facebook ban, I’ll do the following:

1. I’m moving all my virtual presence to other social networks (in this case: Twitter and Google+) for 24 weeks (that’s one week for every hour I was banned from Facebook)
   1. If you really care to read my stuff, you’re more than welcome to add me there (if not already)
   2. If you decide to stay in Facebook only, that’s your sole right and I accept it.
2. During this time, I’ll uninstall all Facebook applications on all my devices and I’ll add facebook.com to my hosts file, pointing it to 127.0.0.1 (i.e., no Facebook updates will be visible for any application).
   1. All Facebook mail in all my e-mail accounts will be reported as Junk.
   2. Any Facebook integration in this blog will be turned off. Sorry, my fellow Facebook commenters. I know it is/was more convenient for you, but Facebooffline means facebooffline everywhere! Or at least at the places and services I own. If you comment via Facebook, it means I cannot reply, and I can’t stand that 🙂
   3. I’ll try to convince the members of my family to do the same for our home network: to effectively put Facebook into oblivion, if accessed from our home network. This has very small chance of success, maybe simply because my wife is reading my blog once per month, while she’s reading Facebook 10 times per day. However, I will try it anyway.
   4. I’ll not be available to any Facebook-related messenger.
   5. If you need any Facebook-related help or advice, please look for it on another place, as Facebook does not exist for me at this time, neither do I exist for it.
3. Most of my “status updates” will be posted on my blog instead. Since the blog is linked to Facebook, these may/will appear here too. Because of misconfiguration of the system plugin (and I don’t care anymore for fixing it, at least not for the coming 24 weeks), they’ll be visible to Facebook Friends only.
   1. If you care to follow me, please add my blog to your RSS feeder of choice (I recommend Feedly).
   2. If you were following my blog before, please be warned there’ll be more updates now, as WordPress supports the “status update” type of post, which I may decide to use.
4. The Friends, who care to stay in touch, know my IMs. The ones who don’t are welcome to ask. Since I won’t be on Facebook for at least 24 weeks, I won’t be reachable on Facebook messenger.
5. I accept the fact that I’m turning from one of the biggest Facebook fans in your friend list, most active Facebook users and most passionate Facebook influencer to practically zero. I’m sorry, but sometimes life sucks. So does the Indian guy, who blocked my account for a muffin’s picture. Or the sense of humor of the one, who reported it on the first place.

If the 24 weeks facebooffline trial is successful and I survive physically and mentally without Facebook, I may take decision to delete my Facebook account. Or I may decide to keep it, I have not yet decided. Or I may return as it was. I do not know yet, time will tell.

Please do not think that I feel myself like a Social Net Giant, without whom Facebook will inevitably die in flames. No, no, it’s rather the opposite. I believe the opposite: no one cares about my crappy presence there. With or without me (or every single one of you, let’s be honest) Facebook will keep existing. They’ll keep pushing their anti-penis-muffins rights to everyone and they’ll sell us even better afterwards. I, however, start to think that it’s me who’ll be much better without Facebook, so I’d like to use the today’s reason to start a therapy!

Because if I cannot keep myself out of Facebook for 24 weeks, I may really need to start a therapy, because… well… I guess you got the idea!

That’s all, Facebook folks. See you again on/around February 11th 2014… maybe! Have a nice life, everybody! (that’s the message I used to use, when I was Face-blocking someone, for good).

Image stolen (because they even forbid even normal “Save As”) from QuickMeme.com
 These people never learn!