Instead of instagram

This is a post following up a story I posted on Instagram volunteering to help anyone interested to get off Instagram and onto something more open, with the hopes we could get a little crew together to seed a small network that could be fun enough to keep using. Because of a) everything and b) Meta’s recent rollback of moderation and/or attempt to cut its workforce in the shittiest way possible, it seems like this is another moment where people are looking around for options. A few people I know are planning to leave the platform right now, so I want this to serve as a reference for them and anyone else interested the next time ripples of dissatsifaction spread across the platform.

The Modest Goal

Five of us start using a new platform and each convince one friend to do the same.

If we did that, I bet we’d have a pleasant little crew on a chiller platform, which could make it worth checking regularly, and might even entice more friends to join.

I willingly use Instagram for two things: 1) brain-rotting meme garbage 2) seeing paintings and photos from friends and artists I admire. I very unwillingly use it to learn crucial information about art shows and life events that people post to temporary, non-zoomable posts on one of the worst interfaces on earth.

Instagram and other big platforms will always have our back on #1, but I think we can achieve #2 with a little bit of effort.

Give this a read, and definitely feel free to ask me any questions you have, and please share with friends!

One excellent but unrealistic option

Just blog! Blogging is great, and easy, and you can read blogs via RSS. You already use RSS if you listen to Podcasts. RSS readers are really, really great because you get to build your own feed(s) of content and there are no ads. We are in a renaissance of blogs, and I will personally sit down with you and set you up on the blog you want and give you the tools to make a network of friends together.

…but I know that this is not the same experience of opening up an app that makes it easy to quickly post something, so here are:

Two Good, Visually-Focused Options

My personal suggestion is that you either use Are.na or Pixelfed, or. These are two very different options, and neither one is perfect. Everything here is very much my personal opinion, written for friends.

Are.na

Arena is sort of its own beast, but it’s very focused on visual posts. It’s both a way to share content and save it for yourself. You could think of it as a Pinterest for hip contemporary artists and designers who go to the kind of cafes that I’m typing this in. I have an Are.na account, but rarely use it. However, knowing almost no one on there, I still find really good stuff whenever I log in.

Pros:

• Excellent content
• lots of interesting accounts, like Cari
• has an app
• focused on curation by humans instead of algorithms
• independently run

Cons:

• Limited free version, then $7 a month
• In my opinion, an unnecessarily confusing UI and structure
• Private, closed platform

Pixelfed

Pixelfed is basically Instagram on the Fediverse. It’s getting some traction right now, and Instagram doesn’t like that. The Fediverse is a bunch of independently operated servers, run usually by people not corporations, that can all talk to each other using an open source protocol that is also not owned by a corporation. They’re federated rather than centralized, hence “Fediverse.” Here’s my Mastodon account, which is like Twitter, but federated. Being “on the Fediverse” means that anything using the protocol can talk to each other – Mastodon, which looks like Twitter, can connect to Pixelfed, which looks like Instagram. It’s a little confusing, but it means you can pick from lots of apps and servers and styles of using the fediverse, and still follow people using different things. It’s pretty cool once you get used to it.

Threads (mostly) works on the Fediverse, so if you have people posting on Threads you want to follow, you can probably follow them from your own Pixelfed account.

Pros:

• Free
• Federated, so the network might grow
• Very instagrammy
• There are ways to cross-post to different services

Cons:

• kinda confusing to set up
• the cross-post methods can be very nerdy and technical
• the Fediverse can seem pretty empty and geeky if you don’t have a lot of friends there

Why not Cara?

I’m not confident in its stability. There’s a lot to love there, and the people working on it (I’ve met some) seem to be really great, but it’s currently a volunteer project, and we’ve had some heartbreaking failures of wonderful projects (like Cohost) in the independent web space, so I’m concerned by their lack of runway.

A Secret Third Thing

Micro.blog is a way to blog on the Fediverse, so it does all the stuff up there and more. I honestly don’t know if this will be easier or harder to get so I put it last. It’s like a combination of Twitter and blogging, but you can follow or be followed by people on Threads or Mastodon or Pixelfed and even automatically crosspost to those or Bluesky.

Pros:

• post in one place, see and be seen on different platforms
• custom domain if you want it
• kinda weird?

Cons:

• $1-10 a month
• Interface is a little limited and underdeveloped at times

• possibly hard to understand?

Other options

• BlueSky! It feels more and more like Twitter, which I’m not sure is great, but I’m on there. It’s also technically Federated, but in a much, much earlier stage of doing that kind of thing. Mark Ruffalo is trying to help.
• Tumblr. It’s still there. I’m on there, kind of. It’s a closed platform, but less… terrible? Pretty sure the owner of Wordpress will destroy it eventually, though.

Some background on me and why I think small steps like these are important

This section is mostly for anyone who might have found this who doesn’t already know me.

I’m not an open-source purist, but I guess I’m pretty high on the nerd scale compared to average. (Maybe half of this site is written in markdown on a 12-year-old Thinkpad running Peppermint Linux, and the rest is on my M1 Macbook.) I build a lot of small sites, and have run a few small social networks for friends, including a self-hosted forum and a Discord, and have run or participated in small-to-medium sized research, critique, and art groups IRL. I’ve also been doing a lot of work in the small / open web space this year because of Octothorpes, and I got very, very lucky to go to the last XOXO festival where “how can we fix the fucking networks” was the hot topic. I highly, highly recommend reading / watching Erin Kissane’s talk she gave at XOXO.

Much like Erin says in her talk, I’m not suggesting we can escape the network of friends and resources that are, for the moment, captured by closed platforms like Instagram just by using “better technology.” But the more I go looking for healthy alternatives, the more there are to find. Watching Mastodon before and after the big Twitter exodus was instructive. It’s not earthshaking, but better networks are possible.

My from-the-heart advice is start a stinkin blog and use Octothorpes so my RSS reader will fill up with joy every day, but, well, baby steps.