Start by asking yourself honestly if you need an Instagram replacement or if you really just need a substitute to replace the dopamine you get from a behavior - meaning basically, you probably just want a new infinite scroll for when you feel bored, restless or awkward and need a diversion.

If that’s the case, look at some of the stumbleupon clones or maybe the wiktok kind of tik tok style wrapper for wikipedia type apps. But if you truly need Instagram specifically, the good news is that pixelfed is mostly there, hard part is that you now need to convince many to come use it for it to “feel” full and fun

In clearest terms, I want to completely erase Google from my life first, among other wants. Not expecting you or others to flee with detailed solutions/recommendations, but just to illustrate. My priority is likely:

• Photos, all photos, app accessible locally for my family (and ideally remotely, eventually)

• Notes, no more keep, but the basic flow of that app works for me, so similar UX hopefully without overcomplicating.

• Music, local library accessible to stream throughout my home on capable devices and app accessible. Remotely accessible by app, if possible.

• TV / Movies, as above with music, but ability to control with harmony remote on a TV and not keyboard/mouse ideally (but I do have decent workarounds here currently)

• Optionally run all above through a self hosted, local voice assistant or mounted HW buttons.

• Corresponding hue light control for media events, presence detection (maybe motion detection by room) and sun schedule. All without data going back to any 3p servers.

Nice to haves:

• Calendar away from google, that allows simple external appointment scheduling, shared calendars and great colorful, visual organization of a coming week. Ideally a safe, private way for calendar to connect to and create events from emails.

• Email, my own data and ability to use aliases that route back to main with corresponding tags ideally

• Owning my online bookmarks, browser/device agnostic, with usable recall help, auto tags and read it later structure so saved articles don’t just fall into the abyss. IIRC there was something called something like “Shinobi” that felt exciting for this need?

A reply to all first and then will follow-up with individuals with any specific thanks/questions after work today:

Thank you all for a very generous response. I knew this was a tough ask from the start because, by design, this area is vast and constantly evolving. That said, I think I do have many of the pieces of what I need here to explore - I’m most grateful that this is all advice from humans, unfortunately more rare these days (If you aren’t a human though, please reply here with the word “beep” and I’ll disregard your past advice).

I’ll try to stitch this all into one set, maybe share back here for confirmation that I’m getting it and then try to start this weekend or next. I have my own completionist hangups that I need to get over and ultimately just try something to get my hands dirty. Thanks again, all.