Meta itself helped me to quit their products.
I am not a heavy user of meta apps, but still i forced to use one or two meta apps daily for educational and work related communication. Also instagram was so addictive until i understood the dark pattern and toxicity in the entire platform. That was just a platform for comparison and show off, even though many users/customers uses it as a blog platform, broadcast, promotion tool or anything.
One of the harderst product to quit was whatsapp. I used it in my custom rom (lineageos) installed phone with bootlocker unlocked. Recently i started to get a popup saying "please use the official app", no matter i downloaded it from anywhere (playstore, official website, apkmirror, aurora store). I know they detected that my phone is modified and installed a custom rom, they are intentionally doing this to millions of users. So, finally trying all the way to fix it, meta itself forced me to quit. I used one of my family members phone to just login and instantly deleted my account. Btw, nowadays i feel so peace. The most exciting thing is that, 2 of my friends actually contacted me via telegram and phone call to ask what happened. So, atleast 2 people noticed my sudden disappearing and cared to ask why!
The case of instagram is not like this, but random account restriction and "are you human ?" popups. Really meta can't figure out are we humans or not with this massive of data they collect? After they forced me to add my phone number to account and the refusal led to disabling of my 5th account, i choose to quit again.
Figuring out fediverse platforms like pixelfed, mastodon, lemmy showed me a different world that moves slowly and gives peace of mind.
artyom
in reply to Crumpled6273 • • •Yeah I mean having other companies completely in control of my feed and shoving whatever mindless drivel they want is enough for me to quit the vast majority of social platforms.
Honestly never understood the supposed addictive nature because to me they are the opposite.
Crumpled6273
in reply to artyom • • •Actually i used it more when studying in school just because all friends use it. So that actually become an addiction to scroll and find something useful like mining for gold. That's what i mean by addiction.
Years after getting into privacy communities and open source tools, discovered the evil patterns of meta. Then as you said i started to feel the opposite effect of addiction as you said.
Jul (they/she)
in reply to Crumpled6273 • • •FreddiesLantern
in reply to Jul (they/she) • • •Euphoma
in reply to Crumpled6273 • • •TranquilTurbulence
in reply to Crumpled6273 • • •ok_effect
in reply to Crumpled6273 • • •NewNewAugustEast
in reply to ok_effect • • •It still supports them because you still go there. I avoid it all together.
I boycott bands or vendors that use it and am pretty vocal about it.
Mensh123
in reply to Crumpled6273 • • •Congrats on making it, something like this can be quite hard.
By the way: You should probably move from Telegram to something like Signal to get strong end-to-end encryption by default back. Telegram's secret chats aren't the default, are inconvenient to set up and cryptographically strange.
eleitl
in reply to Crumpled6273 • • •CrypticCoffee
in reply to eleitl • • •PowerCrazy
in reply to Crumpled6273 • • •