Social media does it’s best to keep myself distracted. And maybe I’d be fine with it if it was useful content, but no, it’s got to be brain-rot or smth that reinforces bad traits I’m trying to get rid of.
I consume social media from my phone. I was getting stuck on YT short and Instagram reels. I didn’t want to delete neither because I still do get benefit from YT: I watch lectures and tutorials there. On Instagram I keep communication with my family and friends (not just forwarding reels, but replying to/sharing stories and such). Instagram in 2020 had a Threads app, which was purely a messaging app and sharing stories for Instagram. But that was revamped into twitter-like threads we have now.
Evil corp being what it is, doesn’t allow to hide or disable shorts or reels. In browsers it’s easy because you can get an extension which hides the necessary components. But on mobile you can’t do that.. or can you?
With this thought I looked up modded Instagram. Doesn’t exit. But when I let Perplexity search it found myInsta – which allows to turn off Instagram features, only leaving the chat working. I highly recommend it, it’s really good. The reason I didn’t find it is, all the websites for myInsta are blocked, so I had to use a VPN.
I got the modded version of YouTube from ReVanced. Finally I can play YT videos in the background and not have any ads.
My social media usage feels more balanced now, and like I’m in control of it.