I haven't posted to Instagram for 4 weeks. Not with any pre-planned intent, it is just harder to engage with a platform that you don't enjoy using. I am not the only person to feel this way. This lack of engagement also coincided with my own focus on this Journal / Photoblog as the primary outlet for posting new photographs, while continuing to build the website.
I posted a few days ago on Twitter that Instagram wasn't going to reverse it's latest push to be like TikTok, and then it promptly did. However, I still believe that it won't be long before the changes are reintroduced either directly or by stealth. After all, Instagram is part of the Facebook/Meta stable and at a certain level we are only content providers for the platform to monetise.
Yesterday there seemed to be a large movement of photographers to Vero, a platform that is gaining ground in the areas where Instagram is currently losing people. I'd looked at Vero in the past and found it was only available on Apple devices, but now there is an android and desktop version. Vero seems to produce the experience that Instagram did in the days before Meta - simply a feed of posts from people that you follow. Ad free, algorithm free. Perfect.
And it does look good. This screenshot is from the desktop app.
I do, however, have reservations - mainly around the impact of future revenues. The current model is that the first million users are free for life and after this users will need to subscribe to use the platform. There are currently more than a million downloads on Google Play and I guess more or less the same amount on the Apple equivalent. There is every chance that the current T&C's will change and that the lure of the advertising money will be too strong to resist, but for the moment let's hope not.
I'll still be posting new pictures here first, but you can find me here vero.co/ansolasoir
