I had Instagram when I was younger and then I deleted it for privacy reasons an to refocus on my true friendships. The content I followed on Instagram, I now see it via RSS feeds or YouTube. During years, it made me feel better to be only in the “real world”.
But since a little while, I am very tempted to go back there. Not to socialize because I have had no problem to keep contact with friends via Whatsapp but more to be able to present me a bit via who I follow and to have a nice good-looking page of me to show to friends or acquaintance
Anyone have ever been or is in a similar situation ? How do you manage it ? What should I do ? Use Pixelfed ?
The core question here being why shouldn’t I do it ?
If you use it you need to be comfortable with letting Facebook corp having all the data that they can possibly come from you using it. Which is basically anything that is possible for them to obtain.
I wouldn’t do it. I’d rather build a personal site where I share whatever I want to share. And if I wanted my publications to be available in other platforms, I’d look into setting up POSSE somehow.
But if you really have/want to publish on Instagram, I think you would want to be very mindful of your usage of the platform.
Choose whether you want a public or private profile, assuming that anything you put in a public profile will be scraped by third parties to do whatever they want with it
Be very mindful of what you share, including what’s in the background of your image, video or audio
Strip metadata from files before uploading them
Good opsec is key if you don’t want your published information to be associated with the rest of your private activity online: compartmentalise and don’t reuse the email address or phone number provided to Instagram, or to your public online persona/profile.
Avoid installing the app, or giving it any permissions
I personally use Instagram with my “friend related online activity pseudonym” (e.g. the same I use for Playstation and Snapchat). I set the account settings to the most privacy friendly least privacy unfriendly setting possible and do not have the app installed since I share posts via Browser on PC and use the Webapp to view stuff on android. I usually post pictures of what I do rather than pictures of me, so most of the time the posts are more of a POV perspective, with some exeptions where you can see me from the back (don’t forget to remove Exif data if that’s a concern for you). Instead of liking/commenting/sharing posts directly on IG and using their DM feature I share an url to the post via signal or whatsapp. I don’t use the “For You” feed that’s pre sorted by their algorithm, but the “Following” feed (likely not related to privacy since I’m sure they still track how long you spend on each post or sth, but still nice to have a chronological feed. You have to switch it in the upper left corner every time when you open Instagram which is a PITA but it is what it is). I’m aware that they will still be able to collect a lot of data (e.g. who do I know/who knows me, my interests, etc.), but it’s still miles better than using it like someone who doesn’t care about privacy. Also it doesn’t add too much of an inconvenience neither to me nor to the people I share posts with (clicking on a link in signal/whatsapp instead of opening an instagram dm).
I never understood the appeal of those platforms, to be honest. Why would someone want to promote personal content to acquaintances? I’ve never had an account on those platforms, so I can’t help much here. From the start, I asked why I would want to engage in another version of virtual social interactions. This isn’t healthy; many studies have shown it. I look forward to the day when people realize that we are numb and need to return to having real experiences in the real world.
Been there. I stopped using Instagram in 2022 when they mandated that I should enter my DOB in their app, so that they can “serve me better ads and help curb harmful content against children.” Something about that wording just irked me in a way that I haven’t logged in to that app, not that I don’t get the thought every once in a while to do so.
Whenever I want to log in there, I just go read an article about what awaits me there. I know eventually, I’ll start watching reels because people will keep sharing me that, and then I’ll be pissed about how a lot of them are either wrong / harmful or straight up MLM. Also, in last 2 years I have realized that if I want to stay in constant touch with someone, I can do that without Instagram, so never going to go back again on that shitty platform.
Validation is one hell of a drug. However, it’s not just that, according to few researchers, Facebook taps into our instinct of not just being liked by people but “liking them”.
