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+---
+title: "Deleting Social Media with Algorithmic Feeds"
+date: 2020-11-03T06:01:51-05:00
+draft: false
+type: "post"
+tags: [personal, social-media, pleroma, activitypub]
+description: "About a month ago I decided to deactivate my Facebook account, and to uninstall Snapchat, Instagram, and Slide for ..."
+---
+
+### Algorithmic feeds are designed with a purpose, to make consumers behave in ways that they otherwise wouldn't.
+
+About a month ago I decided to deactivate my Facebook account, and to uninstall
+Snapchat, Instagram, and Slide for Reddit from my phone. I did this because I
+felt like I was not using the internet on my own terms anymore. I felt (and
+still do) that handing the power to curate everything I see over to black boxes
+such as the ones I listed was not healthy for me. As a consumer of algorithmic
+feeds, you are not allowed to view, let alone control the system that decides
+what kind of information you see.
+
+As an example, if you wanted to use Instagram as a way to show you content that
+makes you happy, the most you can do is aggressively suggest to the system that
+it should show you that content, by searching for it and following users who
+regularly post related content. For the last 2 years or so, I have tried to
+exclusively use Instagram for looking up dog photos, videos, and memes, and
+sharing them with a group chat of my friends. Despite this, I still would have
+content in my feed that did not align with my desires, such as political content,
+or other content that would evoke strong emotional responses from me.
+
+As an experiment, I didn't tell anyone that I was deleting the social media apps
+that I listed above before doing it. I wasn't sure what kind of response I would
+get from those around me for doing this, if any. The first person to notice
+anything was my girlfriend, who noticed that she couldn't see my Facebook page.
+I told her that I decided to deactivate my account, and that was that. To be
+fair though, I haven't really been using Facebook for many years, so I figure
+most people haven't noticed my page is missing. Snapchat on the other hand has
+been a little different. I didn't look into seeing if I could deactivate my
+account without deleting it, so my account is still accessible to people. I
+think this may have caused some confusion, since people might be thinking that
+I'm ignoring them. A friend of mine said that he sent something, and I told him
+that I haven't had Snapchat installed for a while now. Again, that has been that
+as far as my life without Snapchat.
+
+There is this idea that you need to have an algorithm to curate content for you,
+or else it will be boring. After using my own Pleroma instance as my primary
+social media platform since July, I can tell you first hand that you do not need
+to have a timeline showing content in any order other than chronological in order
+to have meaningful conversation. In fact, I feel like I have been able to have
+healthier discussions with people of different backgrounds, since I am not being
+artificially confined to my own bubble. I'm also in complete control over the
+content that appears in my feed. If I decide that I don't want to see content
+from someone anymore, if I stop following them, my server won't show me their
+content unless I look for it. My feed on Pleroma is strictly a chronological
+timeline of posts from the people that I follow, and that is great.
+