> I'm trying to make Instagram be what my parents said Facebook was
This sure makes me feel old. It's a great goal though. I miss the golden era of Facebook when it was really just friend content.
The goal isn't to scroll through nothing, but rather have a clean feed that shows me just my friends and nothing else.
Hell, you're trying to make Instagram be what Instagram used to be. Back in the early (pre-Meta) days, it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the posts from people you followed.
A decent part of why I bailed on Instagram back in 2019 or so was because it had stopped being this for a while (posts reordered, some not even shown, so many ads).
But you can't turn that mode on as a default, and it essentially kicks you from the normal app hierarchy into a separate barebones screen. I find it's all for naught anyway because my friends have long since stopped making regular posts on Instagram, it's more common to use stories.
||instagram.com^
Also if you're on android I recommend:
distractionfreeapps.com/
They make a bootleg version of the app with the ability to remove certain feeds, e.g. reels, discover, stories