The rise and fall of Instagram (?)

Instagram stopped being for showing your photos a few years ago when then undid Tag aspects of a photos. Yeah, everyone gamed the Tag, but it was a way of getting your photos seen. My numbers were never big, but they tended to be solid when I posted solid work.

Instead I started to use Story option, while it good for getting more social based photo work seen by my followers & friends.
I stopped using that after the election, since I'd prefer not to help META make money from work by freely giving to their enterprise.

So back to Flickr for me.
 
Never gelled with Instagram. My on-off relationship with social media works ok with flickr.

I think generally social media and the online world makes you a small ripple in a daily tsunami of content. Same with any art form nowadays, anybody can and will be that monkey with a typewriter (or camera) and some of us kid ourselves and each other about what is good art or not (ours or other people's). And for some of us it's very easy to get discouraged and feel overwhelmed.

For some of us the answer is to find or form our own virtual enclaves. That's why some people stick to particular forums more than others. That's why it's nice - on flickr for example - to have a few followers, to join some groups. If you really want photo-based social interaction there's that too in the right groups. That's maybe also why some of us give up on social media, or say we don't care for the digital world. It's to preserve our sanity. We aren't designed to operate in a world of even thousands of others.

And that's why I couldn't relate to Instagram.
 
JohnGellings said:
This seems to be a big reason Instagram isn't what it used to be too.
Click to expand...
The undoing of Tag's and making folks buy memberships was the roll out of coffin time for vast majority photographers on the system.
The story system really only plays to your followers, so it had limited appeal, but was fun to use.
Now add that it's post election and I'm just not interested in helping META out financially anymore with giving away my free content (the final nails in said coffin).
End of story.
 
p.giannakis said:
Hmm... I gave this one a try. Looks quite promising actually.
Click to expand...
I'm there a couple of weeks now, but not so much interaction...

I've read that Bluesky is going to introduce a photo app aswel (called Flashes), to compete with Instagram, but more minimalistic.
I'm curious about that, as Bluesky is much more interactive.
 
filmtwit said:
The story system really only plays to your followers, so it had limited appeal, but was fun to use.
Click to expand...
You can add location tags or stickers into your story aswel. This enlarges your reach a little bit so more non-followers will see it too.
If you go to an event or something on a specific location, and you add that location to your story, other users who are searching on that location will see your story too and then you can see them showing up in your "who saw my story"-pane.
You can then quickly connect with others and catch up.
Of course, it all depends on how stalky you are and how open others are for this 😀

filmtwit said:
Now add that it's post election and I'm just not interested in helping META out financially anymore with giving away my free content (the final nails in said coffin).
Click to expand...
Speaking about financial things... musicians can add their music in the posts and stories too.
I know some people who do, and when they get their payout with royalties later on, it shows they had a lot of plays from their music via FB and IG through their stories, but the payout is ZERO.
While I know they paid artists earlier (even if it was just a piece of a couple of seconds from a song, they received $ 0,000001), it looks like META doesn't do the effort to make these small payouts anymore for some time now.
 
Disappointed_Horse said:
Bluesky is another privately owned for-profit company funded by venture capital. Despite its CEO saying that Bluesky will not "enshittify the network with ads", I find it difficult to see it going in any other direction long term.

Bluesky - Wikipedia
Click to expand...
Use it while it's good - and right now it is - and if it goes to shit, walk away. "This is the way". 😈
 
filmtwit said:
So back to Flickr for me.
Click to expand...
I never left. For someone who's just warehousing photos and linking to them in posts or showing to friends it's still nearly perfect, as it always was. It's basically my floating portfolio. Achieving the dubious objective of internet fame was never in my sights.
 
wlewisiii said:
So? I remember the arpanet with ! addresses. Orkut and google+. Yet another transition is hardly a big deal.
Click to expand...

Sure, an individual can walk away and it's no big deal. That's no problem for people like me who never cared about building an online following and aren't dependent on these networks for marketing a business. The problem is that social networks gain critical mass, with people and businesses investing time and money in building a following, and then those people and businesses can't just walk away. If you had spent 15 years or so building a following for your business on facebook (3.065 billion monthly active users as of early 2024), instagram (2 billion monthly active users as of 2025), or Xitter (611 million monthly active users as of 2025), could you? I believe that's why these sites still have number of users they do, despite the fact that they've become toxic cesspools.

My point is that it does not make sense to invest one minute of time in another VC-funded social network because everyone knows there are only two ways a VC-funded social network will end up: (1) they charge a monthly fee, which means that they get zero traction and die after 1–3 years; or (2) inevitable enshittification via algorithmically-fueled advertising. If anyone enjoys using the latest "social media network," well, I'm no one to judge, but keep your expectations realistic.
 
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