For the past month I’ve been using Instagram for just viewing my friend’s Stories and Posts by completely disabling Reels and the “Explore” page. This has been so freeing. By using Instagram to only see friend’s posts, I’ve saved so much time and have taken control of my feed. While my solution isn’t perfect, nor is it for everyone, I do think most people should seriously consider taking the steps laid out below to claw back some time, without feeling forced to delete the app altogether just to cut down on screen time.

Before I dive into steps on how to take back control, I want to give a bit of context on why I attempted this at all. I wanted to delete Instagram because spare moments that were intended to quickly check in on friends became hours of doom scrolling and mindless unaware use. It’s incredibly frustrating that since Meta has a monopoly on my friend’s online presence, that I was then forced to spend more time than I wanted in this monstrous platform. Instagram spends an ungodly amount of time sanding down every single rough edge on their app and showing provocative content to keep us on their platform. I just wanted to chat with friends and see what everyone is up to.

Using Instagram’s Website and Deleting the App

Understanding Instagram’s corporate motives gave me an idea. What if I didn’t have to use their app. By using the Instagram website instead of the app, I am nullifying their Billions of dollars spent on making their app as addictive as possible. Sure the website is a pretty awful experience but for a platform I just wanted to occasionally use, it would serve my purposes exactly. All the random loading, janky interfaces, and frankly unpleasant experiences serve as cues for me to do what I need to do and get of their platform. The momentary stutters would take me out of my trance and help me monitor my time in their platform verses getting constant dopamine hits from new content every few seconds. The beauty here, is that by using the website and deleting the app, you don’t really lose much functionality DMs still work (with no notifications), you can still view stories, and even post. 1

If you’re like me and the Explore/Reels tab is your main source distraction then here’s where a $1 app SociaFocus into play. SocialFocus (a Safari Extension) allows you to disable any part of the Instagram website. This means that you can hide the Reels tab and the Explore tab completely. Eliminating muscle memory is huge and getting rid of the temptation plays a huge role in making Instagram the way you want it. For me, all I want is for Instagram to just show me my friend’s posts and not all these attention stealing Reels. SocialFocus literally does just that and blocks out all junk I don’t want. Easily worth the $1 on the time I’ve saved alone.

At the end of the day, Instagram does serve a valuable purpose in my life. It allows me to connect to friends I don’t see often. But that isn’t an excuse to monopolize my time and trick me into watching hours of mindless videos. 2 Our attention is worth more than that and it’s time to use the tools at our disposal and take it back.

1 Posting on the web isn’t the best experience I’ll be honest. In these situations I’ll download the main app again, post what I need, then delete the app immediately (if I don’t delete the app immediately I end up getting sucked into their addictive platform again). You can post from the web with some of the same functionality but it isn’t meant for this. If you don’t post on your story often this won’t be a problem, but if you do you’ll be deleting and reinstalling the app a ton. The other alternative is to post just pictures and no text. This ends up being fine. ↩

2 Seriously, in 2 hours of viewing Reels I maybe found 2–3 videos I actually got something out of. The rest were a waste of time. ↩