TLDR: delete all apps and just use RSS
How people engage with technology has obviously fundamentally changed in the last decade or more. We have moved from a somewhat decentralised internet of blogs and microsites to a small, consolidated network of communication mediums owned by megacorporations.
The upside of this is a new extremely efficient means of consumption - just log on and scroll. The downside has been a loss of autonomy, the consumer as the product, and probably massive spikes in mental health issues. As we become passive consumers of content, algorithmically placated, it's easy to lose the sense of empowerment that was afforded to us by computers and the internet.
The solution is simple - curate your own feeds, delete the apps and escape the algorithm.
Online schizophrenia
Go on any major social media network today and you can see the schizophrenia that has captured humanity in full effect. A minute on any large platform and you are bombarded with endless noise: arguments about far flung wars, addictive videos about useless hobbies and niches (ASMR, extreme slime), hair brained doomsday theories perfectly designed to play on your sensibilities, whatever. The algorithm itself is expertly tuned to play on human paranoia, insecurities, fears and addictions.
It's all a distraction.
My personal opinion is that engagement with any algorithmically generated feed is a time and energy sink not worth remotey engaging in. The algorithm is always a distraction from whatever your purpose or passion is.
But this begs the question, how do you consume your content? After all, the internet is a rich place full of content and people on the topics you are interested in.
Just curate your own feeds
Yarr RSS self hosted
People will tell you to delete the app, get rid of the smartphone and you can escape all this. I don't think this is realistic if you are anyone living somewhat of a modern existence.
Instead, just pick what you want to consume, and choose the right medium to consume it and delete the rest.
One of the best ways to achieve this is through RSS feeds. You can use an RSS app like Inoreader, pick the feeds of the websites you want to engage with, add them, and delete all other news apps or aggregators. Extra points for self hosting something like Yarr .
RSS feeds are so elegant and powerful, but highly underappreciated. If you use YouTube a lot, then one thing you can do is all the RSS feeds only for the channels you actually want to watch videos for. The RSS format for YT channels is:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELS_ID_HERE.
RSS alone can be used to replace news apps, Youtube and a bunch of other stuff?
What about Instagram, Facebook...?
There are smart people who have created RSS feeds for websites that don't already have them. One such application is RSS Bridge, which has support for Instagram.
You'll find there's an RSS feed for the majority of the content you want to intentionally consume.
The final product is a single interface, full of content you actually want to consume to meet your goals, free from distaction and the rot of the modern internet.