Have you tried disabling likes? If not, I encourage you to do so for one month. That’s all, just one month, and then reevaluate afterwards. Kind of like how people took March off Twitter. When Damus introduced the feature to disable likes (“onlyzaps”) I leaned more toward that you’re saying — likes are not completely meaningless and i wanted to still use them for certain interactions. I decided to give myself at least a month with no likes because a habits don’t change overnight. It was weird at first not having likes, and I considered turning likes back on a few times, but decided to see wait and see for myself if I stuck it out. I was surprised after about 3 weeks how my perspective shifted and how much I didn’t care to turn them back on.