When I was at my most homesick, I would check Facebook all the time to reconnect to family and friends. But every time they posted about their day or added a photo of them in a group in my home city, it would only make me want home more. Eventually, I started avoiding social media where I followed lots of people I knew in real life.
I was very lucky when I moved off to university: it wasn't that far away and my best friend was already there and had friend groups that I meshed well with.
Our mutual friend however, went to a different university further afield. Through a combination of homesickness and social anxiety he was forced to drop out, he felt alien to both the environment and the people, to the point of physical sickness. We tried to help him in the early days, he even took the initiative and baked his flatmates cookies as a well of saying hello; but their less than welcoming response just served to make him feel weird.
His university experience ended before Christmas. He had felt such pressure upon him to return home, it devastated his sense of self-worth and dropped him into deep depression as "first year is the easiest" and he had failed at even accomplishing that; he returned home to the rest of our friend group and eventually recovered, gained a job and has gained qualifications through that route.
It's scary to think how narrowly I missed having the exact same experience, and where my life would be now if I had.