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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.
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