You can try to start to ignore your friends on purpose (if you have enough confidence). You can even talk to them about it like look i have a problem with reading messages and responding to them so I want to try to separate these two phases so please dont be angry with me if i won’t respond you in the same very instant. If they are true friends they will understand.
Also usually when I choose to ignore someone it’s not really that important and it means that it’s okay to forget about it - at the end of the day what stimulates us is urgency and if it’s urgent there is no way we will ignore it. So if I,can afford to ignore it its highly likely that you can give a fuck about it for some time.
Also, you will be notified by the chat visually some time after when you open the app, or the person will write you again themselves, or you will want to write something to this person yourself, or you can even set the message to “unread” as a reminder to yourself, so be chill
Yeah it sucks i dont like this masking part neither. Usually if i overthink about these things, it means that these people are not comfy for me and I just let them go. You absolutely dont have to meet all their emotional needs if you don’t have energy or interest for this. I cleared a lot of people from my cirle recently and Im sooo relieved now because I can ignore them freely for days and then respond just with random shitpost meme and its so liberaring because noone gets upset (and they do the same bc they have adhd too lol)