How to accomplish an Instagram detox

Instagram is a minefield.

You must follow friends out of loyalty, but your feed is also chock-a-block with spammers and oversharers. And that’s before summer holiday season starts and the sun-soaked horizons make the feed feel intolerable.

Unfortunately, unfollowing risks a political crisis. Plus, most of the year you are here for these accounts’s GIFs and wry captions.

Don’t unfollow: there’s a more diplomatic solution. This week Instagram launched a (long-awaited) mute button that lets users banish posts and stories from their feed. Mercifully, muted accounts won’t be notified, and users can reverse-mute at any time.

To put it into action, tap the menu in the corner of the post. “From there, you can choose whether to mute posts, or mute posts and stories from an account,” Instagram explains in a blog post. “You can also mute posts and stories by pressing and holding on a story in your tray, or from a profile.”

It’s gone live with a select group and the site will roll it out to all accounts in the next few weeks. But with any technological change comes a new set of politics: these are the post-mute rules of Instagram.

Silence the smug

Twitter’s mute function — launched in 2014 — is designed to silence trolls. Instagram’s, on the other hand, is about smugness. Essentially, it’s about having a detox from the sickening couple photos (with “this one”), braggy #freelancelife pics and the relentless beach selfies. The occasional Sangria snap

is acceptable but if one user is delivering an hourly #hotdogsorlegs update, hit mute.

Foresee FOMO

Sometimes it is forseeable: a cousin who’s been planning her romantic weekend in Paris for six months; the group holiday to Fresh Island Festival in Croatia that you couldn’t afford. In these cases, it’s about damage limitation: mute the accounts before they leave so you don’t get FOMO. Just remember to have a quick flick through their photos before you see them next so they don’t discover

your secret.

Hold back

Just because the button is there, it’s not mandatory to use it — at least not immediately. The rule is simple: be selective, don’t go on a muting spree. Muting every person you know who’s on holiday risks your feed becoming grey and joyless, which isn’t the point. The key is finding a healthy balance of filtered sunsets and unfiltered nights at the pub so you know what your best friends get up to without getting pissed off.

Be self-aware

Two can play at any game: remember friends might mute you too. If you’ve started getting fewer likes, employ new tactics: start following relevant accounts or use clever hashtags to pick up new followers. Don’t let the muters get you down.