Escaping the Algorithm

This app can't actually be built. Meta's API doesn't expose the signals it would need: follow-graph activity, DM frequency, like history, per-post ranking rationale.

That's not a problem with the project. That's the project. If Meta opened these signals tomorrow, the prototype would be buildable overnight. They won't.

Before designing anything, I spent time finding out what people were actually angry about. Not think pieces. Not UX papers. What real users were saying, in their own words, in 2025.

Four research passes:

I needed a rule to decide what belongs in this app and what doesn't.

What got cut:

What survived does one of two things. Tells you what's happening to your feed (Home, Bubble), or lets you leave (Viewer, Settings firewall).

Five screens. Each one answers a grievance.

Top number: how many of today's 50 posts came from people you actually follow. Below that, a button to switch to the clean feed. Below that, Receipts. At the bottom, the breakdown: Followed, Suggested, Sponsored, AI-Generated.

Chronological. Only people you follow. No ads, no suggested, no algorithmic insertions. Each post has a small label under the username (Close friend, Mutual, Loose follow) which explains the ordering and reframes the screen as a diagnostic view, not a feed clone. The feed has a defined ending. "That's everything from your follows in the last 7 days. You're all caught up."

These posts exist. The platform just chooses not to show them this way.

A topic treemap of what dominates your feed, paired with a "From Your Network" section: topics your follows post about that rarely reach you. Politics, Activism, Travel, Health, History, with post counts.

"Filter bubble" language usually blames the user. You got what you asked for. This screen shows the opposite: even the people you explicitly followed are being filtered. When Meta suppressed political content for a year, users had no way to know. Bubble would have shown them. The algorithm decides what you see based on your activity. But it also hides posts from people you follow, for reasons it never explains.

Tap any post in the Viewer. A drawer opens with the ranking signals: posted by a close friend (45%), DM frequency (30%), recent likes on similar posts (18%), geo-tag matching a recent search (7%).

Every recommendation engine works on signals like these. Almost no consumer product shows them.

Two sections. The first is a Disturbing Content Firewall. Five categories, each a hard toggle. Child safety content is permanently blocked, not a toggle, not a preference. The other four are the ones Instagram's controls consistently fail to suppress.

The second is Feed Controls. Four toggles: Suggested posts, Sponsored posts, AI-generated posts, Reels from non-follows. Off means gone. Not deprioritized, not "shown less often." Gone. The user decides what enters their feed, not the algorithm.

Instagram gives you controls. "Not Interested." Mute. Content preferences. But after you set them, there's no feedback. No log. No proof they worked. You tap "Not Interested" on weight-loss content, and similar posts keep showing up a week later.

Receipts is an accountability tracker that sits on the Home screen. It keeps a record of every control you've set and tells you whether it was honored:

When something fails, a coral banner flips on: "1 control wasn't honored this week."

Two decisions made this work. It lives on Home, not buried in a separate tab. And the failure case is the loudest part. The app tells you when something went wrong, which is exactly what Instagram doesn't do.

Things I sketched but didn't ship:

The hardest part of this project wasn't the screens. It was cutting. Every interesting feature had to pass the same test: diagnose or negotiate? Most of them negotiated. Most got cut.

Until the platform decides accountability is something it owes its users, these screens are the receipt.