Have you ever found yourself checking Facebook for a specific purpose, only to find yourself five minutes later scrolling through a list of posts and adverts that you had no intention of viewing? Perhaps you manage a Page (or Pages), so need to login to check your notifications, or maybe you’ve just been tagged in something and have logged in to what to find out what it is. If only there were a simple way of stopping yourself from inadvertently getting sucked into reading your Facebook feed when you had no intention of doing so. Well, one app developer thinks he has found a way.
Developer Ryan Orbuch has just released an app, entitled Feedless, that aims to resolve this issue by removing the Facebook news feed entirely. The principle is simple – install the app, change a couple of settings in Safari, and next time you visit Facebook.com on your mobile phone, the entire news feed will be gone. Key features like notifications and Facebook Messenger are left untouched, and you can view individual posts and events that are featured in your notifications. You will need to remove the Facebook app itself and rely solely on Facebook.com in order for this to work, but Feedless prompts you to remove this if it is installed.
While the Facebook news feed removal is free, the app also lets you remove the feed content from Twitter and Instagram too at a cost of £8.99 per year.
What’s interesting about this app is the extreme length it goes to to help you stop passively checking social media – and going by research noted even by Facebook themselves, that may be a good thing. Is it going too far? What would happen to social media everyone installed this app? It may be a step too far for some, but it’s easy to see how others may find this to be the solution they never knew they were looking for. Given that it’s free for Facebook use, it may be worth a shot.
