How To Defeat Mark Zuckerburg Forever

I hate Instagram, and yet I cannot remove it from my life.

This was not my choice. I crossed the point of no return years ago. Maybe I should have insisted that my high school friends set up a Discord group chat instead. Maybe I shouldn't have volunteered to run multiple club Instagram pages. Maybe I shouldn't have decided to start a photography account.

At any rate, I'm trapped. I need easy access to Instagram on my phone or my computer. This is a problem, because Instagram is awful and I actively hate using it. It's a Frankenstein's monster, created slowly over years as Meta grafted aspects of other social media platforms onto the bones of a humble image-sharing app.

Snapchat got popular and they introduced stories. TikTok got popular and they introduced Reels. A messaging system? Fuck it, Meta has like 10 of these already! What's one more? I think there's still a store but I'm too scared to check.

Over the last year or so, I've grown a stronger aversion to social platforms which are too hyper-generalized in function, as well as platforms which shove algorithmically-recommended content in your face. Instagram is aggressively both of these. I want to feel like I have agency over my digital consumption, that I'm choosing how I spend my time and what I take in. I don't want to passively digest junk food, I want to find the delicious, gourmet Lazeez and consume that instead.

But what is there to do? Instagram knows it has me trapped, so it's turned the enshittification dial all the way up. Posts are strategically arranged to draw me into distraction and away from the actual life updates I told Instagram I wanted to see. There's no way I can just take an axe and chop everything I hate out of the app.

At least, not out of the app.

Let me introduce you to my beautiful friend the Firefox Mobile app and his handsome wingman, the Firefox Mobile Extensions Store.

I've been using this as my mobile web browser for about a week now and I have no idea how I lived without it. I'm not even an anti-Chrome guy, but the mobile internet is so comically unusable without AdBlock, it's startling to me that anyone uses anything else. Don't you guys want to see the website?

But that's not what this article is about. I realized that if I could block ads, surely I could block other things. Say, the specific elements of a website that irritate me and I wish would just go away.

Instagram has a mobile site.

Using the extension IGPlus, I was able to remove every aspect of Instagram that bothered me. I turned off Reels, the Explore page, the non-chronological main feed. Then, drunk on power, I turned off like counts and stories, and then changed the font. I don't even hate Instagram's font, but I changed it because fuck you, I own the computer and I'm the one who gets to decide how it looks.

It's perfect. I unfollowed like 800 people I barely knew and now my feed is entirely cool things going on in the KW region and one picture per day of someone I actually care about.

The best part? You can do this for other sites, too. I installed a bunch of extensions for YouTube so that when I access it from the browser, I can freely access features I would have otherwise needed to pay for (no ads, playback with the screen off) and even a few that are completely impossible officially (automatically skip sponsor segments, change titles and thumbnails to be non-clickbait, no algorithmic video recommendations at all). I don't use Twitter or Reddit on my phone anymore, but there are extensions to strip out all the algorithmic distractions from them, too. If it has a website, it's possible to pull this trick. Hey—why not use these extensions on your PC, too?

Look, we all know that social media is bad for us. You don't need that lecture from me. It's destroying our attention span, our brains did not evolve to know what is going on across the entire planet at all times, etc. Going cold turkey is probably the healthiest way to handle this stuff, but it's not actually practical for most people.

To be honest, though, that's not why I'm doing this. I'm just picky and particular and I want the tech I use to form itself around me. I want what I want and only what I want.

Big Tech hasn't wrested the web away from us just yet, and we can still use it's openness and adaptability to our advantage. We can filter out the garbage and have a healthier relationship to the platforms that dominate our lives. We can finally start to assert ourselves, and let our tastes change the platforms—not just let our tastes be influenced by the platforms.

And then, once you try it, maybe I can convince you to join me and become an email newsletter guy.