I started using Instagram in 2011 with my first post in October of that year. I signed up when I saw a post from a friend, Andrea “Moneta” Brannon on her Virtual Bambi’s Monster Emporium web site. I was immediately enamored with the low fidelity, style filters, and limitations of the platform.
I started with every day, mundane images starting with the usual foodspotting. I was pretty good about posting one picture every day. Sometimes it was just something I found interesting that day. Sometimes it was an old picture to share based on a whim or anniversary date. The use of Lo-Fi filter was everywhere.
By 2013, I was starting to do a bit more traveling. I started using Instragram to chronicle my trips. I would share pictures while on a trip. Instagram eventually developed the ability to post more than single images. Instead of trying to find a single picture from a day of travel, I could post a handful. My standard mode when traveling was to either at the end of the day or at breakfast the next morning, do a post summarizing the day’s adventure. This also optimized cellular data usage durning the day, critical when traveling overseas.
During this time, I could see the “fun” of posting and sharing pictures. I’d dabbled in other photo sharing social sites but this one resonated. I was helping other people get started with Instagram. I was creating myriad Insta accounts that were focused for a specific theme or group as a way to not commingle their pictures with mine. I even created Insta accounts for pets to give them voice. In 2020, I even picked up a pet rock and gave them their own channel dedicated to travel selfies.
When Facebook (later Meta) bought Instagram, it was a signal that things were going to change. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. The first thing that Facebook did was attempt to aggregate all the identities that people had. They offered this up as convenience. It made it easy for people to post the same content from Insta to FB. It benefited Meta by giving them a better profile of every user. I resisted this consolidation. I am no fan of bundling services. I kept hope that Meta would tire of Insta and spin her back off. I resisted by limiting what personal information I shared with Insta. It was too late for Meta. I used different email addresses for every Insta profile. I declined every offer to make it easier to sign in.
I have a couple of email addresses that are regular mistakenly (or intentionally) used by other people. I had created Insta accounts on these email addresses to squat and prevent someone from using Insta as a backdoor into my Meta identity. I had a bad experience with Microsoft where someone used my email address on the X-Box network which now, to this day, blocks me from using Microsoft services. A year ago, I got a notification from Insta that I was locked out of this account because my “account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Guidelines on account integrity and authentic identity.” I tried to keep the account alive using a Google Voice number that was not already known to Meta but they required a phone number from an old fashioned phone company. I chose to let that account stay locked. Since I was only squatting on that email address, there was no content to recover. This started a year-long plan to look for another way to share pictures socially. I’ve yet to really find a good solution.
With the rule changes that went into effect at the beginning of this month, I went ahead and shut down all of my Insta accounts, save one. The one is the same one I started with in 2011. I have nearly 9,000 posts. Many of those posts have up to 10 pictures. Some have 30-second videos posted too. I shut down all the other accounts and converted them to blog posts. That experience made it clear that I’m not ready to shutdown my main Insta account. My goal for 2025 is to harvest the 9,000 posts to archive them somewhere.
Moving forward, I’m experimenting with using my own blog for posting my photos. I trying to create artificial constraints on myself. This means shorter posts with less pictures in galleries. This means using Insta to promote my web page rather than a permanent repository. This is how I already think of Twitter and Reddit.