Thanks for the memories, but good riddance. I deleted Instagram. Two days ago. The reasons are as you would expect: doomscrolling, fatigue, vapidness, and of course, all of the horrifying[1] things Meta enables. Concerning Instagram itself, the list is long. The app started innocently enough: a place to visually share what you were up to right now. A successor to Flickr for the smartphone age, and combining the on-the-go status-style of Twitter, it launched in October 2010, and quickly became successful. I signed up for the service on November 5, 2010, at 7:02pm[2], shortly after. It was a fun place of course — the early days of social networks before we (as an industry) started calling them social graphs, and other terms that made these networks business-aligned. Sharing square 1:1 ratio photos immediately from your iPhone with Hipstamatic-like filters was simple and caught on amongst most I knew. You had Twitter, you had Instagram. Over the decades, and a big acquisition, the app started to head down the enshittification path. Competitors like Snapchat, and VSCO[3] brought a bit of heat in various ways: Snapchat with its close-friends temporal content, VSCO with it’s more privacy-focused and artful social network, and then came TikTok. Instagram responded to any new comers by simply ripping-off their features wholesale. Inertia in a platform is borne out of convenience and the FOMO of connections already made. My own habits had naturally declined in recent years, and much like my abandonment of Twitter in 2015, Instagram existed on my device purely for direct messaging, and keeping tabs and supporting friends and family. My posting had gone down to almost nil, and I rarely interacted or cared about engagement anymore, even with a dedicated group of people who followed me (~3.4K, small by influencer standards, but sizable for someone who’s just doing my best to be myself). As Mastodon, and the indieweb has taken over my internet participation (this very website!), Nick Sherman summarized my own feelings on this, especially as someone who identifies with the DIY-skate-punk-musician-outsider ethos: It’s been a tough year so far but I really find joy in the community here on Mastodon and the larger Fediverse. There’s a satisfying DIY punk rock feeling to it all, as if I’m sticking it to dystopian billionaires every time I boost someone’s Mastodon post or fave someone’s Pixelfed image or try out some new Fedi app or follow some interesting stranger on some weird platform I’ve never heard of but can still interact with because it’s federated. It’s what the internet is supposed to feel like. — Nick Sherman I’m chasing a through line here with my last two posts and this one, and it’s been weighing on my mind amongst all of the modern horrors of our current world. It’s just one that I can control, and opt-out of[4]. It’s okay to like, or love something for a while in a mutually beneficial relationship, but when one side is only taking, it’s also freeing to let it go. Hey Instagram, see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya. Content warning: This is just one example (please do your own research if you aren’t aware somehow) but Erin Kissane’s reporting here is astounding, heavy, damning, and dutiful work. ↩︎ I downloaded my archive and it’s surprisingly robust. And also mildly creepy. ↩︎ Full disclosure, I worked at VSCO first as a contractor, then full-time from 2016-2018. ↩︎ If you stay, please consider not making them further money and using your data. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

Social networking is about reach. It started small: your friends first, then grew outwards towards acquaintances and your professional life. It grew out to people who might follow you because of some shared interest, and then to complete strangers. Social media likes to tell you it's about the content. People are "content creators" and not artists, filmmakers, comedians, or photographers. They may call themselves that, but if social media is their primary platform and the source of their audience, they too call it "creating content." All in service of the algorithmic machine that needs to be constantly fed by humans until the machine itself feeds itself in an ouroboros of bullshit. Bots and AI all the way down. Some people believe that social media offers some semblance of permanence. They become attached to their body of work, their content. Their profile — their persona — becomes their identity, and the place where they can make or remake themselves. When the machine changes the rules, or the policy favors the platform provider's business goals rather than your own, there is outrage. On the very platform itself, even. But you are a cog in the machine, under the guise of creating content, only to sell ads and reach in the Venn diagram of like-minded or interest-overlapping people. It's not about your friends, your followers, or who you follow. It's about who can see what, and what the people who make the platform deem to be the thing that makes them the most money. They reward and provide special access to those creators and influencers who are exemplary stars that everyone else should aspire to. The trap and the fallacy that people have fallen into is the idea that these platforms are the ONLY way to get further: to sell, to advertise, to be seen. You trade convenience and a "free" app for the ensnarement and caging of your creativity. Social networking and media should have always been temporal. These should be thoughts and creations you're okay with letting go of into the wind. Social platforms are a distribution channel at best, and a mechanism to garner some notice. Some apps have leaned into this: messages that disappear or vanish, time-boxed content, and auto-deletion. Not everything is worthy of archival. In many instances, you'd even cringe at something you wrote ten, or even a year ago. If you care about your creativity, and what you make and bring into the world, I'd suggest having your own website. A place you can shape and change as often, or as little as you like. That is something worth being and feeling precious about. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

Smartphones are a distraction. Numerous studies and research have proven out various scenarios: from students unable to learn as well, to laws prohibiting hands-on device use while driving, and the various apps and platforms that buzz, ping, and are designed to distract. People are looking at ways to solve this modern problem — from the dumb phone movement to companies creating phones with restraint and limits[1]. The options revolve around the actual device being limited. For some people, this may be a necessary route. Save for Messages and WhatsApp[2], and during work hours, Slack, I’ve never had notifications on for any social media apps or any other apps. But the problem lies further up the chain: the design of the device itself. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, it was indeed a much lauded moment in the category. Prior to this, phones came in a variety of form factors. They were as large as satellite phones, then became smaller foldables or slideables: a hybrid approach with a tactile physical mini-keyboard mated to a small screen. Palm introduced the Pilot series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996 with the Pilot 1000 and 5000, with mostly screen, driven primarily with a stylus. The iPhone truly revolutionized the industrial design and brought us to our current moment: a full-screen device that you could touch, tap, drag, and swipe to interact with. It brought down the wall that a keyboard or stylus blocked. We no longer needed the middleware. We could touch all the things! Prior to this, screens were large and encumbered. Classic TVs were housed in cabinets and were more furniture than centerpieces. They’ve become slimmer and larger over the decades but for the most part are still primarily active devices. One turns on a TV to watch something. A TV doesn’t necessarily reach out to you. It’s a consumption device. It generally is turned off. Now, a small screen, or a larger one as a tablet, sits positioned. A phone is usually on, 24/7, 365 days a year. A person may choose to have it in a cradle propped up for display. Screens and battery have made it such that always-on is a feature, and no longer a decision. It acts as a supposed gateway to connection: access to the broader world as you know it. I place mine face down. When possible, I tuck it away[3]. And I even leave it at home when I know I want peace and solitude: on a run, climbing, spending time with friends and family. My attention is focused. The phone disrupts that. In the last two years, even that wasn’t quite enough and I started to research what proponents of limited or dumb phones were looking for: Limited access to apps or inability to install most distraction-designed or attention-grabbing apps. E-ink or black-and-white displays. Basic core apps: phone, messaging, calendar, contacts, sometimes a camera, book/reader apps. No notifications. Those were the common ones that stood out to me the most. We have the ability to organize our home screens. And while Android users have been blessed with the ultimate in customization over the years, it’s only been recently that iOS users have been able to hack and then customize their screens. Prior to iOS 18, I attempted my first real foray into a minimalist phone. This worked quite well, but what you don't see is the second screen. It was still chock full of apps and folders. I was still going over there more often than not. And then came iOS 18. The answer for me ultimately was born out of my own Mac desktop and how I've set that up. I hide the Dock, collapse and stack all files and folders, and use Spotlight, and only very recently Raycast, to get to my apps. If I need it, I’ll launch it. Otherwise, I don’t see options for apps I’m not actively using. Porting this approach to my phone, I wondered if Spotlight on iOS would do the trick, coupled with relegating everything to the App Library. I settled on two home screens. The first is my general core apps. Very basic things: Settings, WhatsApp, NetNewsWire, Ivory, Maps, Music, Photos, Camera. Default dock contains Messages, Mail, Safari, and Bear. The second is my work/reference screen with two bonus “in test” apps: Claude, Slack, YouTube, Retro, Uppercase (disclaimer: I am the founding designer), Touchstone (climbing gym membership bookmark for entry), Pixelfed, Tapestry (testing), and Art of Fauna (testing/playing). I’ve been using this for a few weeks now, and it’s been great. Previously, I could never remember where I put some app I don’t access regularly and have to hunt around in folders for them. Swiping down to search for them is far more natural (and faster, especially if it’s a particularly unused one) and if used enough or recently, is listed right at the top. And you can always swipe between recent apps as well. I really have to remember to trigger an app that I used to just tap because it was there, like so many empty calories. If you have to, set app limits. I reduced my Instagram visits tenfold last year by setting a 5-minute time limit on it, and the prompts got annoying enough that I’d just stop. You do have to be an active participant in that decision; otherwise, it’s easy to “Allow for today”, but it’s a good reminder of why you implemented it. Today, I’m just about to leave Instagram altogether because of Meta. Short of getting a limited device, see what you can do with giving your phone a deep cleaning, and rearrange or purge that furniture you’ve been hanging onto for no good reason. I personally dig surveying this category of devices: Light Phone, Punkt, etc. ↩︎ For my family abroad. WhatsApp is widely used in Asia, and elsewhere. From restaurant reservations, to general inquiries, all the way to recently using Cathay Pacific’s customer service business chat when we flew from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur via Hong Kong, it’s a compromise I’ve made to stay in touch with them. We used Signal for a bit, but it was difficult to get them to adopt it. ↩︎ I don’t even carry it in my pocket these days, opting to stash in a small bag or such. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email