"focus on blocking the app itself instead of the addictive feed" " the "healthy" and "social" features" maannn, this totally resonates with me, I totally agree and I always thought about this too social media/instagram has positive parts (connect with friends) and extremely negative parts (reels) I will try that
I just don't understand the appeal of reels for the average user posting them (eg, not a "creator"). All comments come through as DMs which feels weird/creepy. The social/engagement is out the window; your friends can't comment on your content and reply to each other. It's just an effing weird one-way broadcast medium that's painful to deal with (might randomly play sound, might show photos for too long/too short, video with no easily usable scrubber, etc). The only "advantage" I see is that it's limited to 24h so you don't feel like you're making as permanent a record of your content. I'm sure some "younger" folks (who are probably 35 now) thought this was a good antidote to the generation before them being embarrassed by their old FB content, but man. I just hate reels.
Thankfully I don't doomscroll or otherwise sucked into the content generated by randos; I mostly only see stuff my friends post, but man, I would pay good money to never have to see a "suggested" anything again.
I actually built an app to do that for iOS. It’s called TimeCap, and it creates a web view of Instagram without reels and the explore page. Then I use Beeper for the DMs. My daily social media use is less than 20 min per day now.
I'm curious. I don't use social media and am very extroverted. All of the communication, including sharing media, I do through WhatsApp (because it's most popular and widespread) or Signal (preferred).
Does Instagram have any advantage in communication or media sharing over standard widely adopted messaging (and group messaging) apps?