Slowth: Short Video Blocker

A Safari extension that quietly hides infinite‑scroll feeds.

Slowth blocks YouTube Shorts, Instagram and Facebook Reels, plus Explore and trends on X while leaving the rest of each site available.

Each site has labels that match what it blocks. Instagram and Facebook add a feed mode; TikTok is Off or Block site.

TikTok is replaced with a friendly blocked page. You can opt any site into full block too.

Enable Slowth in Safari, then choose what to hide or block for each website.

Safari blocking works on websites without screen recording.

For 24 hours, enabled restrictions cannot be turned off. You can add restrictions, but cannot enable whole-site blocking. The timer survives restarts and force-quits.

On iPhone and iPad, Slowth can detect YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and Instagram Stories and block the app when your selected content appears. This uses screen access that you start and stop.

Choose YouTube or Instagram in Screen Time, then enable the content types you want to block. Start screen recording to use the apps while detection runs. When Slowth detects selected content, Screen Time blocks the entire app, not just that video or story.

Slowth needs screen images to recognize Shorts, Reels, and Stories inside other apps. To receive these images, it uses the iOS screen recording feature. You start this access yourself through the system broadcast prompt.

Screen images are analyzed on your device to recognize the content you chose to block. Audio is ignored.

Screen frames are analyzed entirely on your device and never uploaded. By default nothing is saved; confirmed frames are saved only after explicitly enabling hidden debug capture.

Slowth is open source. You can inspect the app and its on-device detection pipeline on GitHub.