Filed under: small changes that quietly made my days better

Here’s a little update from my corner of the internet: I said goodbye to every social media feed. Not the apps themselves — the feeds. Whatever was quietly deciding what I’d think about before 9am, gone. Feed blockers, browser extensions, the whole setup. If it was ranked by an algorithm I didn’t write, it’s gone.

And then, because I love a good side project, I took it a step further: for anything that used to come with “personalization” I couldn’t turn off, I started building my own small local apps instead.

Why I did it

Here’s something I’ve come to notice about “personalized” anything — the news app, the shopping app, the little recipe widget that somehow always knows what mood I’m in. That personalization is genuinely useful, but it’s not always designed with just me in mind. Often the real customer is whoever’s paying to understand what keeps me engaged, and the setting to fully turn that off usually doesn’t exist.

So instead of hunting for an off switch that wasn’t there, I just started looking for gentler alternatives — or making my own.

For things like habit tracking, workout logs, and the little tools I actually want tailored to me, I build them myself now. Small local apps, AI-assisted, running on my own machine. The personalization feels more genuine this time, because I’m the one setting the rules, and the only one with access to my data is me.

The engineer-brain way of seeing it

If you want my more technical read on it: I think of the old feed-based apps as a system where I never really controlled the threat model. Someone else decides what “normal” behavior looks like inside their recommendation engine, and their incentives aren’t always my incentives. Building local versions instead felt like doing my own risk assessment — deciding on purpose what I actually want access to, instead of leaving it open by default.

It’s the same instinct as hardening a home network, really. You close the ports you don’t need, and you build exactly the access you want, deliberately.

What it actually looks like day to day

• A lot less scrolling as a default between tasks — quietly handled before I even notice I picked up my phone
• A tiny local app that does exactly one habit-tracking job I asked for, with no notifications I didn’t choose myself
• More quiet, unstructured time — the kind where my brain gets to wander on its own instead of being handed the next thing to look at
• A surprising amount of pride in little pieces of software that only I will ever use

Nobody’s optimizing for my attention anymore except me. And it turns out that when you’re both the user and the builder, you tend to make something kinder for yourself than what most apps are shipping.

If you’re someone who reads “we’ve updated our personalization settings” and feels a little uneasy, this might be your sign. You don’t need anyone’s permission to step back from the feed — just a bit of time and the willingness to try something different.

Here’s to a little less digital manipulation and a little more intention, one blocked feed at a time.

Consider this the homebrew-algorithm treaty: I get to write the rules now.