This post made me finally uninstall Instagram from my phone. Though the network effects makes it difficult to completely chuck it from my life. The exodus of my peer group from fb made it possible for me to delete it completely from my life and don't need it anymore. I hope something like that happens for instagram too. It was not for the lack of trying. I tried hard to transfer my friends and family to Signal and was unsuccessful. So now I'm waiting for the forces of nature to take over and hope that something miraculous happens and something that doesn't weaponise human mind takes over instead.
Realistically though, even if you had succeeded in getting your friends to use Signal, wouldn’t you have the same social media problem as before? They’ll still be posting stories and you’d still be addicted to checking it.
I think it's much less addictive than Instagram. It's most likely only people you know, no garbage ads, no garbage "influencers".
Plus in my experience at least, people post stories much less often but obviously that varies.
