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Eugen Rochko

I got to use Instagram on my
fiancée's phone for the first time and honestly I'm impressed that so many people use... that.

@Gargron Yeah, I'm very similarly impressed that people use Instagram. UX is terrible, unless you are using "the app". And I'm a "desktop web" person. But so many... Popular things are designed for people who are clearly not me...

@Gargron Instagram is in a weird phase. They're trying to convert users to their TikTok clone Reels, so the user interface is shattering between two completely different paradigms.

@Gargron Right? And it’s not even just the UX. Most of the content there is so cringey that I can’t stand it for five minutes when someone wants to show “something cool”.

@Gargron Yeah, i used to use it regularly and then stopped. I opened it again a year later to check something and it was an unusable mess, like trying to walk through a maze of neon signs with mirrors and obstacles with the occasional photo I was actually looking for.

Such a reversal for something that started out deliberately minimalist

@Gargron It used to be a neat little photo sharing app with a friendly community and then things deteriorated ever so slowly. Now all users are stuck in that mess.

@Gargron when Pixelfed it's literally better

I have to use it because so many people I know are on there and expect me to be on there, but at some point I said enough is enough and built my own mod. No ads at all and way too many server-side setting overrides in the debug menu to play with. Still hate the algorithmic feed tho. Also reverse engineering is fun.

@Gargron it was really great when it first started, a real community. As expected, when Facebook bought it it started going downhill and now it's just terrible.

@lmc @Gargron

I had been using Instagram between like 2012 and 2022, didn't really see any changes in the community

probably because I mostly followed friends and activist group accounts :shrug:

there are some minor things that are irritating like the only way to make a clickable link is putting it in your bio and it may contain only one link at a time. if you find an old post with a link you'll have to type in manually at best (link shorteners are a thing, yeah, but I didn't see many people shortening their non-clickable links) or they might have written just "link in bio" and there's no link after all this time ofc

one activist group from my country used Link Tree for it, just putting the linktree link in the bio and writing "proceed to our link tree to find this article and many more" and I wish Instagram people did it more frequently

@kaedechan @Gargron the inability to have a chronological timeline, forcing celebrities into your feed, the absolute nightmare of reels, and advertisements have destroyed it IMO. I started using it just after launch in 2010 and it started going downhill not long after Facebook bought it in 2012.

@lmc @Gargron
hmm, I've had chronological timeline for a very long time, 2018 maybe. it was a loss :anya_cry:
reels were avoidable, weren't they?
I've quit a long time ago for the Fedi, so maybe something changed after this

@Gargron I would be worried if many people were using my girlfriend's phone. 😳

@Gargron yea - mostly older people like my age lol - especially Chinese students abroad - that plus #小红书 - where the 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈 battles are - to my understanding at least. 🙏🏻🙏🏻 - 7.

@Gargron the most simple things can only get solved by googling for it. Try finding the posts you have liked.
The content is bland and the app is a UX nightmare.

@Gargron Let's just say it's like a really sad person crying inside while holding the biggest smile they can muster. When you've not been there in a while, it's pretty disturbing.

@Gargron I've been underwhelmed myself. And I'm someone who really likes photography and glamorous shots of models and is a rather visual person, so you'd think I'd be gaga for Instagram. Curious.

@Gargron yeah it's pretty terrible. Also the constant ads and "you might like.." it's too much

@Gargron
for quite some it's probably a case of 'frog in boiling water'; the UX degrading slowly over time in a way that they don't notice how dangerous the water has actually become.

@Gargron Instagram was better before facebook brought it

@Gargron Have you used any app made by Meta? They all suffer the same problems, ads everywhere and a convoluted interface.

People use them because people use them, no other reason.

@desikn No, I haven't had a facebook account for a long time.