Failing to stay out of the social media hellscape has been a constant in the last five years of my life. I think I’ve finally made a breakthrough in the past month.

One demon I’ve been fighting for all these years is this love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with social media. I’ve talked previously about it when discussing the addiction to the noise of the internet. As many others, I scrolled way too far, way too long.

This was an issue and have tried many ways to intervene. I installed and uninstalled the apps more times than I wish to admit. But I never managed to really put myself out of it.

Recently, and for a wide array of reasons, I reached a point where my interest towards being active on social media dwindled, and I used this intention as a catalyst to further sever my connection to those sites.

I discovered SocialFocus. It’s a simple browser extension that doesn’t outright block the sites but also degrades their experience. It Removes the Facebook home feed, Reels tab of Instagram, recommended videos from YouTube; while keeping essential functionalities (e.g. Instagram messages, Facebook Marketplace). This is honestly what feels great: evading the lock in design patterns while keeping what is useful.

This piece of software further completed this disconnection. I still have access to the places but no time to waste there. I don’t have any access on my phone, so this is it.

Admittedly, I’m now completely inactive on those sites, so I am still left with contemplating how to further develop artistically without them. While this should seem like an easy answer (i.e. well, you don’t need them to do anything), I still want to understand how to incorporate “sharing” as a step to my process, but that’s a topic for later.