Deleting social media with algorithmic feeds

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+---
+title: "Deleting Social Media with Algorithmic Feeds"
+date: 2020-11-03T06:01:51-05:00
+draft: false
+tags: [personal, social media, pleroma, activitypub]
+---
+
+### 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.
+