I’d guess the simple answer may be that people don’t care/know, but for those that have ditched Facebook for whatever reason, yet still use Instagram, it’s a little surprising.
Is it partly a result of it being a more focused/limited form of social media that filters out some of the stuff people didn’t like from Facebook?
I use Instagram on occasion because it’s something almost everyone my age has and when your meeting new people, you often have to meet them where they’re at (digitally). I barely touch Facebook anymore because the interface is cluttered and half the features broke and were never fixed , like searching for events. I tried Pixelfed, but after a month, only one person has liked a single photo I posted. The app itself is great.
The reason I prefer Instagram over Facebook is universality in my age group and, as you pointed out, it cuts a bunch of the crud from FB and I actually see pictures of my friends rather than a bunch of stupid disguised ads and political BS.
Who still uses this shit. People bitch about zuck and musk while riding their dicks using Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to complain.
Because it got popular when it was it’s own independent company, and THEN Facebook bought it.
And that purchase happened in 2012, well before Cambridge Anylitica broke as a story.
It’s more that people saw no reason to leave, and by the time there were good reasons, Instagram was too large and established to easily dump for most people.
I think people underestimate the scale of surveillance/tracking. People lump it in with “oh it’s just advertising”, similar to all the commercials you watch on tv. But it’s a completely different beast. Personally my eureka moment was when I set up a pi-hole and saw the staggering amount of creepy tracking on my devices.
Pi-hole is software that runs typically but not necessarily on a raspberry pi. It maintains a list of known advertising and tracking servers and blocks them by rerouting at the DNS level. For example an embed in a page tells your computer to contact tracking.facebook.com pihole tells your computer that that website is at 0.0.0.0 instead of it’s real IP address. Nifty thing is that you can redirect all of your DNS queries at the router so even devices that can’t normally run ad blockers can take advantage of it.
It’s a network level ad-blocker by blocking at the DNS level.
It was originally meant to run on a raspberry pi, but will run in docker or other Linux os as well. Very light weight and a great self-host project. Been running for years and support via patreon.
Awesome! Didn’t even know of its existence until now. Thanks for the heads up!
I’ve come across people who didn’t know Instagram is owned by Facebook, and people who thought meta and Facebook were different companies. I thought the rename was the stupidest thing ever until I saw it did actually work on some people.
