I am not a heavy user of meta apps, but still i forced to use one or two meta apps daily for educational and work related communication. Also instagram was so addictive until i understood the dark pattern and toxicity in the entire platform. That was just a platform for comparison and show off, even though many users/customers uses it as a blog platform, broadcast, promotion tool or anything.
One of the harderst product to quit was whatsapp. I used it in my custom rom (lineageos) installed phone with bootlocker unlocked. Recently i started to get a popup saying “please use the official app”, no matter i downloaded it from anywhere (playstore, official website, apkmirror, aurora store). I know they detected that my phone is modified and installed a custom rom, they are intentionally doing this to millions of users. So, finally trying all the way to fix it, meta itself forced me to quit. I used one of my family members phone to just login and instantly deleted my account. Btw, nowadays i feel so peace. The most exciting thing is that, 2 of my friends actually contacted me via telegram and phone call to ask what happened. So, atleast 2 people noticed my sudden disappearing and cared to ask why!
The case of instagram is not like this, but random account restriction and “are you human ?” popups. Really meta can’t figure out are we humans or not with this massive of data they collect? After they forced me to add my phone number to account and the refusal led to disabling of my 5th account, i choose to quit again.
Figuring out fediverse platforms like pixelfed, mastodon, lemmy showed me a different world that moves slowly and gives peace of mind.
Congrats on making it, something like this can be quite hard.
By the way: You should probably move from Telegram to something like Signal to get strong end-to-end encryption by default back. Telegram’s secret chats aren’t the default, are inconvenient to set up and cryptographically strange.