Not for You

A browser extension that removes the algorithm from every major social platform. No suggested posts, no recommended accounts, no "people you may know." Just the accounts you chose to follow, in the order they posted.

notforyou.app

What it changes

Every option below is a checkbox in the popup, on by default (except where noted), and can be turned off per platform.

Nothing else changes. Search, profiles, messages and posting all work exactly as before, and the popup can turn the whole thing off for a while (five minutes up to a day) when you want the algorithm back.

Install

Chrome Web Store (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc and the other Chromium browsers)

Firefox Add-ons

To run it from source instead:

npm install
npm run build

Then open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, choose "Load unpacked" and pick .output/chrome-mv3.

For a Firefox build of your own, npm run build:firefox and load .output/firefox-mv3 as a temporary add-on from about:debugging.

How it works

Two mechanisms, and the first is always preferred:

1. URL redirect. Where a platform has a real chronological route, the extension sends you there with a declarativeNetRequest rule: YouTube to /feed/subscriptions, Instagram to ?variant=following, Threads and TikTok to /following, Facebook to its Feeds view, and Reddit to old.reddit.com if you ask for it. Durable, and it degrades gracefully.
2. DOM work. Only where no such route exists (X keeps snapping back to "For You"; LinkedIn buries its Recent sort in a dropdown) or to hide the leftover recommendation blocks that no URL avoids. This part is matched against the platforms' current markup and will break when they change it.

Redirects that a single-page app performs internally never hit the network, so lib/spa.ts catches those in the content script as a fallback.

Possible additions

Platforms worth supporting, roughly in the order they make sense to build.

Privacy

No accounts, no servers, no analytics, and the extension makes no network requests of its own. The only thing stored is which platforms are enabled and their options, in the browser's own extension storage. The website is separate and does use Google Analytics to count visits. Full policy: notforyou.app/privacy.

Development

Built with WXT and TypeScript, Manifest V3 on every browser.

npm run dev         # load into Chrome with hot reload
npm run dev:firefox # the same in Firefox
npm run compile     # typecheck
npm run zip         # package for the Chrome Web Store
npm run zip:firefox # package for Firefox Add-ons

lib/platforms.ts is the single source of truth: content scripts take their match patterns from it via matchesFor(), and wxt.config.ts builds host_permissions from the same list, so the two cannot drift apart.

The social card at site/public/og.png is generated from site/og-image.html. Regenerating it after an edit is a headless screenshot; the command is in a comment at the top of that file.

The site

npm run dev:site    # preview site/public at http://127.0.0.1:8080
npm run build:pages # regenerate the per-platform pages into site/public
npm run build:site  # minified copy of site/public into site/.build

site/public is the source of truth and what you edit, with two exceptions. The per-platform pages (twitter.html, youtube.html and the rest) are generated: their copy lives in site/pages/platforms.mjs, their shell in site/pages/template.html, and the shared theme, hero and install regions are lifted out of index.html itself, so edit those and re-run build:pages rather than the output. site/.build is likewise generated, by build:site, which strips comments and minifies the inline CSS and JS for deployment.

Use npm run dev:site rather than any other static server. Every internal link is extensionless (/youtube, not /youtube.html), which works in production only because the CloudFront function in site/url-rewrite.js appends .html at the edge; scripts/serve-site.mjs applies the same rule locally, so a plain python -m http.server will 404 on every page but the homepage. Pass a port and a directory to preview something else, for example node scripts/serve-site.mjs 8081 site/.build to check the minified output.

Contributing

Platforms change their markup constantly, so the most useful thing you can file is a broken selector: which platform, which option, and what you see instead. Open an issue. Anything security-sensitive goes to email instead: see SECURITY.md.

Releases are cut by tag. Bump the version in package.json, write the CHANGELOG.md entry, then push a matching v1.2.3 tag: the release workflow rebuilds both store packages from that commit, checks the tag against package.json and attaches the zips to a draft release for upload.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.