I think I've kicked Instagram
I soft-quit Facebook years ago and never looked back. Shortly after the Election of the Damned, when Meta made it explicit that they were no longer interested in anyone's safety but their own, I soft-quit Instagram. Not completely, because I have friends on there and that's where a lot of good craft/art/animal news is, so I wasn't prepared to delete my whole account. But I installed Leechblock and told it to only let me access Insta on Saturdays.
For a couple of weeks I kept instinctively clicking on the shortcut. For a few more weeks I would wait until Saturday and then go catch up on my timeline.
The really handy thing about Leechblock is that you can override your own rules for a set amount of time. So if on Tuesday a friend links me to a really choice baby hippo pic, I can tell my browser to let up the restriction for five minutes. I go look at the baby hippo, I skim my timeline briefly, and then I leave when my time's up.
These days I reflexively click on the Instagram icon a lot less often. Sometimes I do it on Saturday, blink when I don't get a DENIED screen, then decide it's too much effort to log back in right now; maybe next week.
I retain that option, which does mean that Meta has my stats and a certain amount of information about what I'm doing. But I'm no longer trapped in four hour doomscrolls where I get increasingly enraged by the willful, stubborn stupidity of humans in general and the growing number of people who refuse to understand that the verb "relish" does not take a proposition. (IT JUST DOESN'T. FUCKING FIGHT ME.) I haven't killed the monster, but I'm not letting it eat me anymore.
I don't get weekly updates on what my cousin's kid is doing at school or Pedro Pascal's latest polite fuck-you to the bigots or the progress of Fat Bear Week, but all of that is still available to me if I care enough to look. It just turns out that, 90% of the time, I don't.
There's a lot of rhetoric floating around about "degoogling" and how and why to erase any trace of yourself from the entire corporate web, and while I support that trend, I don't think you need to go nuclear. If that's intimidating, or not feasible for personal or work reasons, or you're just not ready to Quit Social Media Forever -- you can still peel them off your soul, one tentacle at a time.