It’s really easy. You replace Instagrams and all other social media with NOTHING.

Delete all doomscrolling apps. They are not a necessity. You will live your life just fine without them. Just don’t use anything at all.

If there are people you wish to keep in touch with, contact them using a direct method. If you have work you wish to publish, use a normal old website with an RSS feed.

Did the same. Perfect life. Still sort of doomscrolling HN however... ;)

(and it is very good for the phone battery life, one more thing you less take care about after such move)

This. I have been social media free for many years now and want to encourage others to do the same. Engagement algorithms, selling influence to the highest bidder, and misinformation alone ~should~ be enough to sway most, but it's also just a big waste of time.

What I do instead: send pictures to friends/family via various messaging platforms, get news via RSS (self-hosted Miniflux), run pinchflat to download youtube videos from a very select group of channels (no comments section, no suggested videos, sponsorblock to remove the annoying bits), and use a lot of the extra time I was wasting to read, workout, and engage in my various hobbies.

Some other helpful things I do with my Android phone: set to grayscale, uninstalled any time wasters (youtube, news, games), use an app called BuzzKill to limit distracting notifications (some notifications disable during work hours, some apps have a cooldown so they can only notify once every 15 minutes for example), setup notifications every 5 minutes when using an app that could be used for time wasting (browser mainly). These time wasting alerts (done via Tasker) are a nice reminder of time wasting as the amount of time can easily go unnoticed.

PS I also don't feel like I have a boring life. I have many IRL friends, hobbies, and a close-nit family. All these steps have aided in finding fulfillment with what I have.

My goal is not avoiding doomscrolling though (I don’t do that on instagram in the first place).

Other than direct contact I like to also have more casual and indirect interactions. Instagram works well for me here, I’m curious if anyone is doing similar things with any other apps.

But sure, if you feel that instagram or social media is causing you more problems than benefits, absolutely do something different.

I also switched to Nothing(tm). Being slightly out of the loop with friends and current events is jarring at first, but also markedly less stressful. Over time, the jarring part went away. I have to make more of an effort to keep up with friends, but this means I have been having actual conversations with people and making plans to do stuff again, whereas before I felt I had nothing to talk about and already knew what everyone was up to because I was monitoring them.

I love being unplugged from friends like that. Then when I see them I have something to talk about and catch up on.

It's early days for pixelfed, it will take time for people to move, but you can be part of the change

Mastodon is fine for photo sharing too

Are you an active pixelfed user? If yes, how are you enjoying it?

I was a few years ago for a year or longer. Like anything on the fediverse, your account and content are at the mercy of whoever runs the instance. I was on the official pixelfed.social instance and the admin (who’s also the main developer and has been doing a lot on this app) deleted my account without any warning and without any way to recover it. He “thought it was spam” when the content was not spam at all. It was about bringing a community together. There’s no support whatsoever (emails don’t get responses). There wasn’t even a conversation where things could be discussed to see what looked wrong or needed any changes.

If you run your own instance and connect to others, then it can be a good option. I’d say the same for Mastodon too, though I don’t have practical experience with it.

Fairly new as a user so my impresson is of limited value. It seems nice so far. Similar to mastodon, but more focused on photos. Finding people to follow early on is a challenge but so far I sometimes look at the global feed and follow people who post something I like

You can do the same on any blogging platform like any Twitter clone or such, no?

Yes, but it's theory vs practice. I'm interested in stories and impressions from people who are actually doing it.

Are you using twitter or blogging like this? How do you like it?

Did it on Twitter. It has no grid but has communities and lots of photographers. Now though a bit of an exodus and more spam

Thanks for writing, sounds interesting. And yes, Twitter does not look stable at the moment. A blog, ideally a self hosted one, sounds perfect; but I don't know how to approach community interactions there. To clarify, I'd like to post personal photos and interact with viewers; I don't want to make money in any way. I'm curious how this works in 2025, I'd love to hear more if anyone has anything to share.

I’d suggest a WordPress blog with ActivityPub installed, so your posts live on the fediverse too. This allows two way interactions and makes it easy for people to follow you from whichever way they find easiest (ie on Mastodon, or an RSS reader, or even email if you have that set up). The blog post at the top of this link is actually my blog. It’s been fun to see the comments today that were written on Mastodon, but appeared in the comments of my post. That’s what the two way interaction that ActivityPub provides and I’m always happy to see it in action. I made a video about this a few months back if you’d like to learn more https://youtu.be/t4pmWufYRr0?si=pfQQwb6pxUxIM6pq

The two way activitypub integration looks very practical, I didn’t realize this is an option; I’ll read more, thanks!

Stopped looking at it more than once a week

I stopped the day Instagram started training their models with user posted content. I only keep it because my wife is sending me interesting things and vice versa.

I'm planning to move my photography to Pixelfed, like you. I don't care about the interaction I get. It'll be just a webpage, a public gallery which I can show people when taking photos comes up.

Actually, I created the account already, but didn't have the time to post the photos actually. Since I have limited storage, I want to handle resizing + optimizing them before posting them to not exhaust my quota too quickly.

The breaking point was for me to not being depending on these apps for my happiness. Taking photos makes me happy, sharing is just putting it out there. People's acknowledgement doesn't change the fact that I have taken these, and printed and framed some of them.

My number one rule for using Instagram is: ignore everything on the app that's not from a real-life friend or acquaintance.

Do not engage with force-fed Reels from strangers. I only watch Reels posted by friends. I also only watch and react to Stories posted by friends. This gives me real human connection with none of the algorithmic crap. My account is private and I do not get any joy when a random stranger likes my photos.