Instagram DM without Instagram

I used to have this ideal belief that if I were to reduce my screen time, it would be because I simply don’t want to spend unproductive time being glued to a screen—not because I’m not allowed to. I saw guardrails as an inelegant solution. Needless to say, in the end, I finally admitted to myself that I lack self-control. To the point that I now can’t imagine using my devices without any guardrails in place.

I’ve found that the following guardrails work best for me: app deletion, account deletion, and DNS-level blocking. Why are Screen Time limiters not a solution? Well, put it simply, they don’t work on me. Back during my early days of acceptance, I had set up a 15-minute screen time limit for all apps on my phone. However, if all it takes to bypass it is tapping the “15 more minutes” (that’s iOS for you), then how effective can they get?

Which is why I started deleting apps I find myself spending too much time on. I found this easy to implement for my case, even for most social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. I’m a passive consumer of these platforms to begin with; they have interesting content, but at the end of the day, I never really needed them. Although I find that it’s a different case for Instagram in particular. The app’s DM feature is one of my primary contact channels with my friends. But, unlike other messaging apps, well, it’s not just a messaging app. Every time I open it, random posts selected to hook my attention appears before I even have the chance to tap the button leading to the DM page. Unfortunately for me, it works every single time. The act of checking-my-DM-for-unread-messages always ends up tragically, with me having been glued to Instagram for over an hour. I tried deleting the mobile app and opting for the web app instead, but it had a negligible impact on my screen time nonetheless.

I only recently discovered that there is an embarrassingly simple solution to my lack of self-control on Instagram: Meta Business Suite. It acts as an aggregator for the Meta-branded messaging services I use, including Instagram DM. (For whatever reasons, though, the iOS app doesn’t let me slide through post carousels, view comments, or watch Reels. It doesn’t even provide a link so that I can view them through a browser.) And it didn’t have to be specifically Meta Business Suite either. If all I wanted was a way to open Instagram DMs without needing the full Instagram app, I could use any chat aggregator service, like Beeper. It is important to note, however, that Beeper “communicates with Instagram servers exactly the same way the official [Instagram] website does,” as mentioned in their blog post here. Which means, they’re not using any official APIs provided by Instagram to access DMs externally—not that any exist for use by third-party services. This implies that the access token obtained by Beeper through authentication is not scoped for just DM access, but for every other thing that users can do with the Instagram web app^[1]. I opted to use Beeper, so I thought I should be extra secure and use the On-Device Accounts option exclusively.