Stepping Away From Social Media

A couple of years ago, I made the — at the time — difficult decision to quit social media. I had Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and accounts for platforms I never even used like Threads and Bluesky. Facebook Messenger was my go-to for staying in touch with friends and family, and Facebook itself filled any spare moment I had.

My turning point

Slowly I started realising I felt angry every time I opened Facebook. The content was not there for me — it was there to make me angry.

What made this click was something that happened during the FIFA World Cup. I opened what I thought was a harmless image showing the lineup for the French national side ahead of an upcoming match. Most of the players had African heritage, which was not even noteworthy at the time — I was just looking at who had been selected. Over the next few days, I was bombarded with far-right “migrant crisis” posts and videos about how “Paris has fallen,” apparently because Black people and Muslims live there.

It was then I realised the algorithm on Facebook was not serving me what I wanted to see — it was actively fanning vitriol and trying to make people angry. Maybe the hope was that I would argue in the comments that it was fear-mongering or that someone already inclined to agree with the posts would comment about “how terrible things are getting. Or that a normal person — someone like me, who just wanted to see the lineup ahead of a World Cup Match — might not be able to see those posts for what they are and become radicalised by it. All of it feeds the same cycle.

I decided I didn’t want to be part of it. I like staying informed about politics and what is going on in the world, but continuing to do so on social media meant contributing to an algorithm that is literally tearing society apart.

The journey that followed

Being a programmer by trade, I was probably more susceptible to the rabbit hole that followed. I got really into privacy and security — I bought a used Google Pixel so I could install GrapheneOS (a security-hardened Android ROM), set up a home server and started self-hosting my photos and media so I wasn’t storing everything with big tech companies, cancelled my streaming subscriptions, and after a few years on a MacBook, made the decision to go back to Linux full-time. (I’d used Ubuntu for a while after Microsoft forced me onto Windows 8, then switched to Mac around 2018.)

I began closing all my social media accounts, with the exception of YouTube. GitHub is now also on that exceptions list, though for a while I was self-hosting Gitea as a replacement. Messenger was the hardest to leave — my family and close friends all use it. I tried to push everyone onto Signal, but ended up reluctantly meeting in the middle and settling for WhatsApp. It keeps me on Meta, which isn’t ideal, but it has more desirable features and less distractions compared to Messenger and it let me finally close my Facebook account.

One thing I found after leaving social media was that I felt out of touch with the news. As horrid as the algorithm is, it does provide a continuous feed of what’s happening in the world. My solution was to set up an RSS feed and use an app called Feeder on my phone. It has a social-media-style layout, but I control what appears in it. That’s the setup I’ve been using ever since.

Closing thoughts

Leaving social media has had a genuinely positive impact on my life in many ways. It made me less dependent on the subscription model that has become so pervasive in our society — the kind that gave rise to phrases like “you will own nothing and be happy.” Self-hosting taught me skills that made me a better programmer, and gave back a sense of independence that most of us don’t even realise is being taken away. Swapping doom scrolling for an RSS feed and YouTube clients that filter out Shorts turned my idle time into something more productive and informative. And switching to Linux full-time led me to the open source community, a much deeper understanding of how computers actually work, and a genuine love for the OS and what it has the potential to do.

Without this journey, I probably wouldn’t have started working on things like Caracal OS — and for that I’m grateful.