The first step to emancipation from social media addiction/slavery is to remove all that shit from your phone. The phone is almost always 90% of the problem. Kill it with fire.
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My approach is to install no unnecessary apps and to keep the damn thing in airplane mode unless I’m making a call or sending a message. One of the upsides to being a man with no friends is that I can get away with doing this.
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Deleting all my social media accounts and apps was my solution too. I even went so far as to put YouTube on my Pi-Hole’s block list for all of my devices except for the desktop I use to drive my TV.
One of the rules that really helped me is “no second monitor content” - if I’m not willing to actively pay attention to it, then it probably isn’t worth my time to pay attention to it at all.
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You just convinced me to fiiiiinally delete reddit off my phone. I was definitely falling into the habit of defaulting to it when I opened my phone. Social media is so addicting sometimes.
Now my main problem is finding out where to hang out on the internet now! I’m gonna give mastodon a try. I know it’s still a social media, but I’m going to try and curate my feed and follows very closely.
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Honestly, I find with without all that shit on my phone, I pull my Kindle out of my backpack and read. .
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Reddit is the last one I havent been able to kick yet.
Kicking Facebook/Insta was easy because of how little good there was left in the platform, but there seems to be just enough good communities on reddit to keep me pulling the slot lever clicking refresh.
For a while I reduced my usage by only viewing it through my phoens web browser, but now I have gotten the muscke memory the tab rarely leaves my browser
Any tips? Haha
Agreed, so many good communities that only exist on reddit.
Honestly my only tip is to just rip the bandaid off, I had to delete it as soon as I got the urge or else I probably would’ve kept it. I’m gonna try to only view reddit on my PC (with a time limit if I am spending too much time). That way I can make it more of conscious act to go there, instead of the default action whenever I whip out my phone.
Gonna charge my e-reader!
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Regarding Reddit. It’s not my thing, but I get it. Most of the platforms have been easy to ignore because…
…I am greatly angered by the bullshit and rage-bait on them. It infuriates me that they use that to steal increments of our precious time on Earth. When I think about that it is easy to not use them.
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I WISH I could yeet Meta out of my life, but unfortunately Facebook is the societal backbone where I live… Local clubs/companies/farmers/etc use exclusively FB to market and organize. And I live out in the sticks where keeping up with and participating in my local community is quite necessary.
At least I don’t care about scrolling the “wall” or whatever it’s called, so never spend much time on there.
Reddit and Instagram are worse time-wasters for me, but deleting the apps off your phone does make a real difference.
Last year I made the decision to keep most of my digital life on my stationary computer rather than on my phone. The phone only have the most necessary apps so if I want to go on social media I need to get my ass to the PC - and once I do, there are so many other more interesting things to do than scrolling feeds! Turns out I’m more addicted to Guild Wars 2 and fiddling with my websites than Reddit 
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For me it helped to gradually remove the addictive parts of social media over a period of many years: I unfollowed all my “friends” on fb so the feed was empty, and moved from twitter to the fediverse where I eventually switched off my notifications. It was just a small change at each stage but each one removed an opportunity for some meaningless dopamine blast until the logical conclusion was “why am I on these platforms at all”, so then it was quite easy to delete them entirely, even my self-hosted fediverse instance (which of course is still much less bad than corporate social media but still an inherently negative environment imo).
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Here’s what worked well for me:
Reddit - no app on phone; website blocked on phone via screen time (iOS). That small amount of friction completely killed the neurotic scrolling habit and usage on my phone dropped to zero without much effort. I leave reddit unblocked at the network level because it’s occasionally useful in search results when I’m doing something useful on the PC.
YouTube - no app on phone, website blocked via screen time. I use the Unwatched app, which is basically an RSS video player for YouTube, meaning I can watch stuff, but only from the small number of creators I “follow” via RSS. Practically speaking, this is mostly useful when I want to watch a video or two while doing something boring like walking on the treadmill. On PC I use the FreeTube program, which works well enough.
I think if you can find a way to remove the infinite scroll and the algorithm shoving content at you, it becomes a lot easier to break away from these services to whatever extent you feel is necessary.
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