After I successfully decamped from Twitter and Facebook earlier this year, I continued to hang around Instagram.
It was casual at first, but then I started posting sketches, and I found myself a nice little community of sketchers along with a generous bunch of friends ready to hit the “like” more often than deserved.
What poisoned me on Instagram, though, was the advertising, which I find more insidious than elsewhere because it just pops up in the timeline exactly like everything else, leveraging my openness of mind and spirit to the photos of my friends and familiars to insert commercial messages. That hurts my brain. Every single time.
As I need to keep reminding myself, we built a decentralized web, and nurturing it requires that we use it.
So that’s what I’ll continue to do. Here.
That I need to keep rediscovering this impulse is a testament to the allure of the centralized, and of the need to examine what’s missing from the independent web that makes straying so easy.
Comments
The next post beckons me to learn more about stuff that I care about because you wrote it.
And I'm sure it's all you, no advertising angle.
Basking in the obvious good of this.
" examine what’s missing from the independent web that makes straying so easy". My suspicion it's the 'o, here is everything I need in one place'. We seem to be mostly using web platforms as channels, even turning them into a verb: Facebook(ing), Twitter (tweeting), Instagram(ming). You know what you'll find in the channel, even if you have no connections there yet.
Now you are suggesting to tune into a channel that is all Peter all the time. Or all me all the time on my blog.
What's missing is an easy way to have a dashboard (like FB provides) to track all the decentralized utterings of the people I am interested in, plus something to let me find more, and something to let me respond to everything regardless of where it was orginally posted, and potentially allow others to follow where I responded. We sort of had that, by glueing feedreaders (which I had organized by person, your blog, your blog's comments, your flickr, your dopplr etc, not by type of feed) together with trackback, easy blogging tools like Qumana or a bunch of plugins, and ways to federate things like Diaspora or Mastodon (running an instance ourselves preferably). And by now we need all of that on mobile too. Also everything needs its RSS turned back on. Nothing out there right now serves this niche (when did it become a niche?!?!?), is there?