Mindful Instagram replaces the Instagram home page with a quiet overlay: an inspirational quote, your DM notifications (fetched from Instagram's own API), a daily open counter, and a 1-minute breathing exercise. Messages, Create, and Profile are always accessible. Everything else — Reels, Explore, Search, Suggested Posts — is permanently blocked.
The core mechanic is intentional friction: – Home Feed, Stories, and Notifications can each be toggled on, but only 3 times per day. After that, they stay off until tomorrow. – Every toggle-on has a 5-second cooldown before it activates. Just enough time to ask yourself "do I actually need this?" – A 10-minute reminder and 20-minute auto-off prevent runaway sessions. – Focus Lock disables all toggles for 24 hours. Irreversible. For the days you really need it. Technical notes for the curious: – Manifest V3, vanilla JS, zero dependencies. The entire extension is ~300 lines of content script + a popup. – Zero data collection. No analytics, no telemetry, no external API calls beyond Instagram's own endpoints. Settings sync via chrome.storage.sync. That's it. – The UI is inspired by Teenage Engineering's hardware design language — beige chassis, monospace type, orange accents, hardware-switch-style toggles. I wanted it to feel like a physical device, not another app competing for your attention. – DM notifications are fetched from Instagram's inbox API endpoint and displayed as names on the overlay, so you can see who messaged you without touching the feed. This is v3.3. I'm a solo builder and this started as a tool for myself. It's free, no premium tier, no plans to monetize. Would love feedback from this community — especially on the 3-use-per-day limit (too strict? not strict enough?) and whether the Focus Lock UX makes sense.
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