In the past few months, I started thinking about how I use social networks and the impact they have on my life. Today, I took a strong decision: it’s time to move on from Instagram, a platform that is clearly no longer a social network. How did we get here? Where are we going? I need to dig deeper into my past personal experience with the social network to really understand why I am going to use Mastodon and Pixelfed.
My Instagram experience
I have been on Instagram since 2011, way before even Facebook acquired it, way before Facebook was called Meta. It might not be news to you, but back then it was very different: people were posting photos of their food, café latte art, and having a filter was a must!
I did not have anything original posted there, and I started using it only when I moved to Denmark around 11 years ago. Things started changing then: it was both a way to keep my family and friends up-to-date with my life. Instagram was the social network to post photos of places I have been, cool things I was doing, and see what my friends were up to. Instantly uploading a picture about my travel experience was exciting!
Later on, it became a way to showcase my gym progress. 💪 I became extremely happy to share and felt spikes of dopamine from the appreciation of other people. Receiving a like was so satisfying that it made me super engaged with the platform. I started following people that I barely knew to feel inspired by their progress and their hard work. It was useful and rewarding.
Then there were memes
In the last few years, things started slowly changing. With the TikTok mania, Instagram and Facebook copied that idea, and both became sources of a never-ending scroll of content that was no longer from my friends. 😨 The developers have even removed the friends from my main timeline and added the Following and Favorites tabs, where For you would be the default timeline tailored to keep me glued on content that I barely was interested in.
This also changed a lot in the way I interacted with my friends: Instagram is no longer about checking what they are up to and talking about it. It is about sending messages with memes and stupid videos. Some people consider that being close, and I fell into that trap.
How long does it take for you to see a post from somebody close to you in the timeline? How many posts do you need to scroll?
Losing touch with friends
Right now, if I scroll on my For You timeline, I can’t see a single post from my social circle: none of these people are my friends. 😢 If there is a post of somebody I follow, it’s somebody that I never met, or I met once.
Most of the content on Instagram is clearly AI-generated. Some videos and posts even clearly try to polarize me with political or very opinionated themes that just disturb me. They cause emotions that would keep me engaged, in a bad way. With the latest policy changes from Meta, Facebook, and Twitter with the American Nazi shenanigans, I had enough. 😢
I feel it was slowly cooked. In the past year, I noticed how 2 people started sending me more and more memes of things that are disturbing. Topics like pronouns, gender equality, abortion, transphobia, violence, racism, and homophobia are now clearly memes and jokes. What once was important things to fight for to them and to my community, slowly became something to laugh about the more it was pushed by the algorithm. 😡 Is it really tailored?
If it is on the platform and people are just laughing about it, it must be acceptable to ridicule marginalized people, right? Except, that hurts people.
Today it is my birthday, and clearly a very few friends remembered. Those that I shared memes with did not wish me a happy birthday, while in the past that would have been very common. 😟 The social part of Instagram is clearly gone, and it is time to move on.
I have been here before
A few years ago, I stopped using Facebook for very similar reasons. The price I paid back then was loneliness: I was no longer invited to events, and rarely read messages to not get sucked into Facebook again.
I was forced back on Facebook just to handle the volunteering at my LGBTQ+ Volleyball club. 😫 When I log in on it, the feeling is the same: the content on the platform is even worse than when I left, and it shares the same issue as Instagram. Thankfully, I don’t feel addicted to Facebook anymore and I can clearly close the app and move on with my day.
I also stopped using Twitter for the similar reasons. Leaving was easy this time. I have been using RSS feeds from blogs and news websites for a long time. On top of that, Mastodon provided me with a better experience than Twitter. Bluesky does not offer anything different than Twitter, and the people and companies that I want to follow are on Mastodon already.
What is next?
I have looked for years into a few alternatives. The problem with that is that all of them require people to move to those platforms.
The most exciting one for me was Manyverse, where meeting in-person is kinda-required in order to get their timeline updates. The protocol (Scuttlebutt) and the idea behind it are very interesting. Back in 2019, I used to support the project financially with donations, but nowadays, the app development seems stagnant. There are still too many technicalities to overcome before making it a full product usable by my friends and my mother. 😅
The ones that I will use are Pixelfed and Mastodon. These are more robust platforms that can interconnect and talk to each other even. It is mind-blowing that I can see Pixelfed posts on a Mastodon app. It could be a nice idea to use it independently on the instance where all my friends are. I can self-host my profile/instance instead of relying on one overflowing with advertisement and nazi propaganda. I will probably move my photos from Instagram to a Pixelfed instance. There are guides and tools to automate the process after exporting the data from Meta.
Today I have deleted all my posts from Instagram, except my very first post: a photo of my mom’s Pizza di Scarola back from 2011. I hope people will remember those days, and that social networks will not make me feel lonely again. I don’t want an algorithm that makes me enraged just to squize money and time. It will be difficult since it will take time for my peers to change platform, and it will take time to rebuild the social network. I’ll go first, as it’s time for me to move on!
You can follow me on 🐘 Mastodon here: @koalalorenzo@mastodon.social