Shortform: Instagram

This is neat. Someone’s building a image-focused app for Bluesky. It’s not intended to be an #Instagram clone, but you can see some resemblances.

Folks on #Mastodon and #Pixelfed might have noticed that Pixelfed has been getting some attention recently. I’ve been on Pixelfed for a little while, but for most of the time I was on there, I didn’t see a lot of adoption. That’s changing, especially as Pixelfed finally released an iOS app. Pixelfed is ActivityPub-based, so it was already possible to use Pixelfed via fediverse apps like Tusker, but a native app is the first thing potential users will look for. I’d been using the beta version on Test Flight; it’s not bad.

I would love to see more diversity in photo-sharing services. I always thought it was a shame that Flickr’s fortunes sunk the way they did.

(Glass is worth considering also.)

Every day, I wonder how long #Instagram is going to stay around. The experience just gets worse and worse.

At this point, my feed is a torrent of barely relevant ads and videos that have no value to me. The limitations are ridiculous: you can’t copy text, you can’t include links in posts, you can’t browse the site if you’re not logged in. The design isn’t ineptly bad so much as calculatedly, maliciously bad.

I remember, a decade ago and more, when these sites—now synonymous with an internet gone bad—were legitimately cool places to be. They had a reputation for oversharing and mundanity, but they felt like communities you wanted to be part of. The only thing I get from them now is stress, chaos, and the pervasive sense of being harassed by the people who run them. I still share my work on #Twitter and Instagram—unfortunately, they remain relevant enough to qualify as parts of my “digital presence” that I have to pay attention to—but I never browse them. I hate them too much to bother.

And I wonder if this will always be the natural conclusion of any mainstream-oriented social media site. Could something with much more limited features and minimal advertising survive? Do people really want to watch strangers’ home movies as much as some venture capitalist thinks they do?

Instagram

Wide blue yonder

Instagone