Avoiding doomscrolling: RSS and other alternatives

03/04/2026

No slop: No AI was used in the writing of this piece.

Background

This will be an ever-updating post for me (and others) to help avoid doomscrolling and social media addiction.

I want to stop being distracted by social media. I feel like I can get easily consumed by these platforms (Instagram, X, Mastodon, ...) and most of them have really effective doomscrolling mechanisms designed to make time feel like it's going 10x faster and confirmed damage to mental health and cognitive function.

I am not an expert, but I believe the greatest thing you can do is create a strong enough willpower to avoid using social media and harmful spaces that try to reverse-engineer and exploit your attention span in the first place. The second best thing you can do is to create enough friction to use these platforms. Sometimes, there is genuinely content you'd like to consume - like links shared with you to X and Instagram. The idea is not to block these services, but rather to create dumbed-down alternatives.

The RSS Part

Anything I can put in RSS - I will. That's my daily digest.

Unfortuantely X, Instagram, and many others are playing a cat and mouse game where they deploy methods all the time to avoid being scraped. The solution is to use alternative front-ends that offer RSS.

These are the RSS feeds I use:


                    X: https://xcancel.com/user/rss
                    HN: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100
                    WSJ: https://feeds.content.dowjones.io/public/rss/RSSWorldNews
                    MSTDN: https://mstdn.social/@user.rss
                    Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/subreddit/top/.rss
                    YT: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<>

For YouTube - this tool is seriously great to find the channel ID and get the RSS feed URL.

For Instagram, the only "good" RSS feed I found was through rss.app, which unfortunately, is a paid service.

I use NNW as a client. It does exactly what I need it to do.

The Browser Part

I use a redirector browser extension to redirect socially-harmful links to their not-so-harmful counterparts:

Instagram -> imginn.com
X -> xcancel.com

LibRedirect maintains a good list of redirections to open-source front ends. I don't mind about the front end part, so I will use imginn.com for Instagram, for example, which is the only front-end that works AFAIK.

If you need to block a website, you can use uBlock (which is the best ad-blocker) to block any websites or parts of websites you want. Simply add the following to your filters to block example.com:


                    ||example.com

The Phone Part

Distractions on my phone are really good at fooling me. If it were at all possible, I wouldn't have a smartphone, but that's not really an option in 2026.

So I put my phone in my bag or at the charging station. I rely on "iPhone mirroring" whenever possible. I find it much harder to get distracted on it since it gets uncomfortable to use very shortly, so only short tasks are feasible.

I think Android alternatives exist like Windows' Phone Link and scrcpy, but I haven't tried them myself.

I also installed uBlock Origin Lite to achieve similar results on your phone.

End

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. I know my solutions are not perfect, but they're working more often than not in my case.

boats-lastasdjflaing4i@iclasdasdasdoud.com