If you go looking for DigTek on social media, you won't find us. No Instagram showcasing our apps. No Twitter/X account sharing updates. No Facebook page. No TikTok presence. No LinkedIn company profile.

For a small app company trying to reach users in 2025, this might seem like digital self-sabotage. And in many ways, it is. But it's also a deliberate choice rooted in the same philosophy that shapes our apps: constraint as a form of clarity.

The Reasons We Stay Away

Let's be direct about what makes social media platforms problematic from our perspective.

The Data Asymmetry

Social media platforms operate on a fundamental imbalance: they know vastly more about their users than users know about what's being done with their data. Terms of service change regularly. Privacy settings are often deliberately complex. The full scope of data collection and usage remains opaque even to technically sophisticated users.

When you post to a platform, you're not just sharing content—you're contributing to training datasets, behavioral profiles, and commercial products that extend far beyond what's visible on screen.

The Attention Economy

These platforms are engineered to maximize engagement, which is a polite way of saying they're designed to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible. The business model depends on it.

This creates a fundamental conflict with our design philosophy. We build apps that help people focus, reflect, and then stop using the app. Social platforms need the opposite: infinite scroll, constant notifications, fear of missing out.

The Tracking That Crosses Boundaries

Modern social media doesn't stay contained within its own walls. Cross-platform tracking, data sharing between corporate siblings, behavioral data sales to third parties—the ecosystem of surveillance extends far beyond the apps themselves.

Many users don't realize the extent of this tracking. It's often enabled by default, buried in settings, or requires regular re-configuration as platforms update their systems.

The AI Training Question

There's a newer concern that's still unfolding: user-generated content increasingly feeds AI training systems. Sometimes this is disclosed, sometimes not. Often it's enabled by default, with opt-out mechanisms that are difficult to find or deliberately complex.

Your photos, your writing, your creative work—all potentially part of training datasets for commercial AI systems, often without clear consent or compensation.

Worth Noting

We're not suggesting these platforms have no value or that people who use them are making wrong choices. Social media enables genuine connection, community building, and communication that wouldn't otherwise be possible. These are real benefits. Our point is simply that the costs are also real, and often understated.

The Philosophical Alignment

Beyond specific concerns, there's a deeper misalignment between social media platforms and how we think about technology.

Our apps are designed around principles of data minimalism, user control, and attention respect. Social platforms operate on opposite principles: data maximalism, algorithmic control, and attention capture.

Participating in systems that directly contradict our design philosophy felt inconsistent. If we're building apps that respect user attention, how do we justify using platforms engineered to capture it?

The Cost of This Choice

Here's where we acknowledge the very real consequences of staying off social media.

The Visibility Problem

We're a tiny Norwegian company with no marketing budget, no existing user base, and no social media presence. We have eleven apps that we believe genuinely serve people well—and almost no way for people to discover them.

This isn't a complaint, but it is a reality. In 2025, social media is how small creators and companies build awareness. It's how you participate in conversations, join communities, and let people know you exist.

By choosing not to be there, we're accepting near-invisibility. Every app we launch faces the same challenge: How does anyone find out this exists?

The Marketing Paradox

There's a genuine marketing problem for companies like ours. The standard advice for indie app developers is: build an audience on social media before launching your product. Share your journey. Create a community.

We've done the opposite. We built the products first, shaped them around clear principles, and only then considered how to talk about them. Without social media, that conversation happens in limited spaces: this website, email, and word of mouth.

It's not an efficient strategy. It might not even be a viable one.

The Ironic Dependency

Here's the uncomfortable truth: we're likely dependent on the very platforms we've chosen not to use.

If someone discovers one of our apps and finds it genuinely useful, the most natural way they'll share that discovery is through social media. "Hey, found this focused task app that actually works" is a message that spreads through existing social networks, not through blog posts on small websites.

We've built apps on principles that reject attention-capture economics, while depending on those same economics to spread awareness of their existence.

The paradox is real and we don't have a clean resolution for it. If our apps spread at all, it will likely be because people who do use social media decide to talk about them there.

We're not above that irony. We're just trying to be honest about it.

What We're Trying Instead

Without social media, our approach to visibility is limited but deliberate:

  • This website — A place to explain our thinking and document our work
  • The App Store itself — Clear descriptions, honest screenshots, no dark patterns
  • Quality over reach — Building apps that serve their users well enough that word-of-mouth becomes possible
  • Direct communication — Email for anyone who wants to reach out: developer@digtek.app

These channels reach far fewer people than social media would. But they align with how we think about technology: intentional, focused, respectful of attention.

The Bigger Question

Stepping back, our absence from social media raises a question that goes beyond one small app company: Is it possible to build something digital and valuable in 2025 without participating in attention-capture platforms?

We genuinely don't know the answer. We might be proving it's possible, or we might be demonstrating exactly why it's not.

Either way, we're trying. Not from a sense of moral superiority—there's no judgment here for people who use these platforms differently. But from a sense of consistency between what we build and how we operate.

An Invitation

If you're reading this, you've somehow found us despite our invisibility. Maybe through App Store search, maybe through a recommendation, maybe through persistent curiosity.

If you find value in what we've built, the most helpful thing you can do is mention it in whatever spaces you naturally participate in. We can't build social media presence ourselves, but we're grateful when others choose to share what they find useful.

And if you have thoughts on this tension—between building tools that respect attention while needing attention to survive—we'd genuinely like to hear them. Email us at developer@digtek.app.

This is our attempt to be transparent about a choice that makes our work harder to find. We're aware of the paradoxes. We're still figuring out if this approach is viable. But it feels more honest than the alternative.