I’m not a fan of social media, but I used Facebook and Instagram for years.

I liked seeing posts from friends, and loved seeing updates from family. But I didn’t like the notifications, or the never-ending feeds, or how they made me feel. 

I joined social media so I could stay in touch with people. In the end, I was scrolling for longer than I wanted to admit. Maybe you’ve felt the same.

Search Google for how to spend less time on social media, and you’ll get half a billion results. Spending too much time scrolling? Track your screen time. Attention hijacked by notifications? Turn them off.

These are decent starting points, to be clear. I’ve tried them all and gotten a lot of time back. But they’re about mitigating social media as it currently is, with never ending feeds and attention sucking notifications.

It's time to start talking about, and building, social media as it should be.

Not Facebook as it should be. Social media as it should be.

It can be tempting to look at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and think about what could be better. We know the feed is addictive, maybe we should work on how to make it less addictive?

This is a fine approach, but it’s simply taking away the things we think are harmful. It's better if we start from a blank slate, and add the things we think are good.

When you think like this you’re prone to more novel ideas. You’re no longer thinking about how to make a feed less addictive. You’re thinking about whether you need one at all.
 
So if you have your blank slate, what are the things you think are good?

For me, they’re spending time away from feeds, thinking deeper about each day, and sharing what matters with the people who matter to me.

Last year I started from a blank slate and added those things intentionally. It turned into Sundayy, a social network designed to be used less, and to be used mindfully.

Daily reflections are there so we can think deeper about each day. Reflections are revealed only once a week to help us spend time away from feeds. It’s best used with a small amount of buddies, the people who matter to you. 

Maybe there’s a better way to start out making something. But not for me.

To me if you want to earnestly build something for people, to bring them along, you can’t set out thinking about “the market”. You have to start with what you think is good. The things you value. That has to be at the core, then the rest will follow.

There is all of myself in Sundayy, and others see themselves in it, too. We’re brought together because we share the same values about what social media should be. 

Right now social media is synonymous with ads, endless feeds, and privacy violations. We’re searching for ways to reduce screen time on Instagram, or to break away from engineered feeds on Facebook.

Let’s start asking ourselves whether we should have to do any of that at all.