Facebook without the News Feed.

Why Facebook is the hardest one to quit

Nobody says they love Facebook anymore, and yet very few people manage to leave it. The reason is rarely the feed — it’s everything attached to the feed. The neighborhood group that actually answers questions. Marketplace, which quietly became the best place to buy and sell secondhand. The event page for a birthday you genuinely plan to attend. A message thread with a relative who uses nothing else.

Those are real obligations, and deleting your account breaks all of them at once. So most people keep the app, tell themselves they’ll only check Marketplace, and surface twenty-five minutes later somewhere deep in a stranger’s comment section. The trap isn’t weakness. Every useful destination inside Facebook is reached by walking past the feed, and the feed is built by some of the best-funded attention engineering in the world. Our view, spelled out across how to use social media intentionally, is that the design is the problem — so the fix should change the design, not the person.

What goes — and what remains

The desktop trick — and where it stops

Desktop users solved this years ago. News Feed Eradicator, a browser extension, replaces the feed on facebook.com with a quiet inspirational quote, and a small devoted audience has sworn by it for over a decade. It proved something worth noticing: people don’t want less Facebook, they want Facebook minus the feed.

The catch is where it lives. Browser extensions of that kind run on desktop computers, and Facebook time long ago migrated to the phone. On an iPhone there is no equivalent lever to pull inside the Facebook app — Apple doesn’t allow one app to rewrite another, and Facebook itself has never offered the option. Sociano fills exactly that gap: the same feed-free idea, applied on the device where the habit actually lives, and extended past the feed to Reels and suggested content too.

Setting it up

1. 1

   Get Sociano

   Download Sociano from the App Store — available by annual subscription on iPhone ($39.99/year in the U.S.; local App Store pricing varies). There’s nothing to configure before you start.

2. 2

   Sign in to Facebook inside Sociano

   You log in through Facebook’s official website, exactly as you would in Safari — Sociano never sees or stores your password. From that point the Facebook rules are active: no feed, no Reels, no suggested posts, while Groups, Marketplace, Events and messages behave normally.

3. 3

   Close the back door, if you want

   Thumbs have memory. If yours keeps finding the blue icon, turn on Sociano’s optional native-app blocking, built on Apple’s Screen Time framework. The feed-free route becomes the path of least resistance instead of the path of most discipline.

Why subtraction beats rationing

The common alternatives all leave the feed intact. App timers ration your exposure to it and then offer an Ignore Limit button at the weakest possible moment. Friction apps make you pause before entering, then drop you into the same algorithmic room. We compare these approaches honestly in Sociano vs. Screen Time blockers — they have real uses, but they all negotiate with the feed rather than removing it.

When the feed simply isn’t there, the negotiation never starts. You check Marketplace, answer the group thread, reply to the message, and there is nothing on the screen inviting you to stay. Sessions end because they’re finished, not because you won an argument with yourself — the same principle that makes stopping the doomscroll a matter of environment rather than willpower.

Worth knowing

Sociano runs Facebook as a controlled web session rather than altering Meta’s app — nothing is hacked or jailbroken, and the approach is App Store-safe. The trade-off is that a web view can lack a few native-only conveniences; Messenger in particular has features that only exist in its standalone app. The complete, unvarnished list lives on our limitations page.

Privacy works in your favor here: Sociano shows no ads, sells no data, and doesn’t track what you read, type or browse inside Facebook. Broader questions are answered in the FAQ.

Frequently asked