> “This is to help people see photos on Instagram and then understand how to get the best Instagram experience by being part of the community, connecting and interacting with the people and things they love,” the company told Adweek.
Why would you say something like this? And why, as a journalist, would you report it? It's a transparent lie; nobody is going to be taken in by it. So why bother even saying it?
It’s usually SOP for outlets to publish statements from the subjects of their reporting, however banal or ridiculous they may be.
> nobody is going to be taken in by it.
Unfortunately, you don’t know that to be true. Relatives I’ve spoken with who own FB stock love to read statements like this to justify their position.
Reminds me a lot of the now infamous reddit EA comment: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. As for cost,..."
Perhaps I'm voluntarily jumping in front a bus here, but I'm not sure there's anything inherently wrong with requiring players to play for a certain number of hours to unlock multiplayer features. Call of Duty has been doing this since 2007, and is the most popular multiplayer game on the planet.
Anytime I read corporate speak like this I completely tune out, I just simply don't take it for fact. You see most companies communicate like this, and many get caught up in their own contradictions and hypocrisy.
It's not a lie (as that statement is possibly true), but it is a deception as it doesn't tell the whole story.
"So, what I told you was true... from a certain point of view."
I think we'll find that their numbers are saying the loss of revenue of people leaving because they have to always login is far less than the uptick in revenue to be made from the changes this will allow. They rolled this out weeks ago in Australia, and would have been watching for the backlash.
I think (the following is pure speculation) this is just a first step of a number of changes around monetisation. This basically locks the backdoor, where they prevent people not on the platform from browsing feeds for free.
The real change is going to be when users (celebrities and businesses mostly) find they have to pay to reach all of their followers (who surprise, surprise now have to be logged in). They may not require "boosting" for under 1000 (or even 10,000) followers which will keep most users and wannabee influencers on the platform, even if they have to give a couple of dollars to Instagram when they push a product. You may find the advertisers end up just paying more.
It's the mega-users with multi-million followers they want to monetise, Users who get paid 10-100s thousands of dollars per post where Instagram doesn't get a cut despite being the delivery platform. Compared to what it costs for advertising on traditional media such as radio or TV, even a dollar to reach 10,000 followers would be nothing.
But you can't enforce payment when their followers can simply logout and view the feed for free. I would expect the popup appearing immediately rather than after a few scrolls to be implemented soon.
Isn't it the reasoning behind the blackouts? I thought rolling blackouts were typically due to not having enough power generation. What's happening now is related to preventing fires isn't it?
Seriously? Instead of solving the problem the whole government of California is just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . I know PG&E needs to be punished but the people of California need to stand up for their rights and see that instead of wasting loads of cash on pork projects they clean up the areas around electrical wiring instead of just "de-energizing" , it's all quite ridiculous. California is not supposed to be a 3rd world country and just shrug.
That is an odd word. Seems "de-energized areas" would be better. De-energizaton is the action that was taken on the area.
I agree with the other commentor. This term indicates it was done on purpose. It describes the stare of the power line. I think it's better than blackout.
Every time federation comes up, I always ask where the bridges are that allow "following" people on the non-federated sites (e.g. Twitter), and the answer is always vague and non-specific, suggesting that such bridges exist without any information about using them.
I'd love to see a switching guide for, say, Twitter, that specifically says "here's how to transparently follow people on Twitter, and here's how to have your posts show up on your old Twitter account". Or similarly, if you're switching from Instagram, how do you follow folks from Instagram and automatically post to Instagram?
Perhaps you have misunderstood the purpose and implementation of federating sites like these?
Your question sounds like someone asking how a user of a newly opened Facebook account can follow people on Twitter. They're entirely different services. The federating, or not, is immaterial.
The first part is the alternative service.
Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, presented in a Twitter-like format and flow. People who use it do so because they want to avoid the restrictions and cultures of Twitter. They don't want to post the same content across the two services. They don't want to interact with Twitter. They want to be on Mastodon.
The second part is the federating of the service.
Instances of Mastodon are spread around, hosting a set of users on their individual servers. Each of those instances can then communicate between with the others, intending for you to be able to follow and interact with users on other Mastodon server instances as transparently as those of your local Mastodon server. They are still interacting within the Mastodon environment.
There is no bridge. I highly doubt the Twitter API TOS would even allow it. What you can do is get a client that supports both Mastodon as well as Twitter. I recommend Twidere on Android.
Bridges are a (very necessary) migratory tool, but you're never going to get perfect connectivity while living in a walled garden, because the whole point of a walled garden is to block connectivity and interoperability. The lack of good controls for cross-posting across Twitter/Facebook/Instagram is one of the central problems (no pun intended) that these federated services are solving.
Some bridges do exist (see Matrix connectors), and I agree that it should be a very high priority to add more of them and improve the existing connectors.
But it's also important to understand that, yes, they're messy, and will probably always be a little messy -- because the services they are connecting to don't play nicely with others. If Twitter had an amazing 3rd-party API that anyone could use to write a custom client, view content, export data, and filter posts, then it wouldn't be as big of a priority to get off of Twitter.
However, all of that being said, I too would like to see more guides here. I spent a long time following Matrix before I realized there were public Discord bridges that could be used without even hosting my own server.[0] I just never saw it mentioned anywhere.
The publicity/documentation around this stuff could improve a lot.
Get your own website, so you'll have a place for those who just want to check you out without paywalls, loginwalls, any kind of walls.
Add https://fed.brid.gy/ & webmention support, so you'll be @your.domain@your.domain on activitypub (read: pixelfed, mastodon, gnusocial, whatever) so the "fediverse" can follow and interact with you.
Add h-feed markup for your website, so indieweb can follow and interact with you.
Keep RSS & Atom feeds, so anyone oldschool can follow you. I'd love to add keep pingback... but that is insanely spam-prone.
What's a good Instagram alternative with ActivityPub support? And what's a good instance to join, since I don't necessarily want to self-host just to test it out?
How mature and functional is it now? I recall looking at it in the past and seeing that it wasn’t ready (I’m perhaps not recalling things right). In the list of instances, the one with the highest number of users, pixelfed.social, seems to have less than 10 posts per user (in total), on average. Sounds like adoption is not even as good as Mastodon yet.
I have started on one based on the work I did for the PeerTube app [1] but I have not released anything yet as pixelfed it self was too much of a WiP. I will start the project up again in a little bit when I have some time.
They also use meta robots=noimageindex,noarchive on every page without an opt-out which is so incredibly stupid and walled-gardeny for an image sharing site. I wanted to use Flickr instead but nobody else uses Flickr, then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code (that and Google completely ignores it), so now I'm trying Pinterest, but that one also wants you to log in to view full images.
Kind of silly I can't find a good image sharing site in 2019.
Pinterest manages to do something horribly stupid and kind of abusive that I usually associates with adult sites ads: show you a preview of something that gets your interest, if you click to get access to it put you through a maze of forms and links all promising the result you asked for at the end, and then when you get to it they don't deliver and instead show other stuff you might like but really you don't because you did all that for this specific thing.
I don't get it. You have it. You know the user wants it. You know the user wants it very much, enough to go through all that crap. Yet you are going out of your way to not give him access, making him so frustrated that any hope of "but he will crawl around more and do more stuff" is quickly replaced by "he closes the tab in anger at having lost 5 minutes" ...
I'm sure there are metrics showing that it works, or maybe that it doesn't lose enough people to be worth changing, but it is so unnecessary.
I just created an account with an email but after few minutes of clicking around it locked me out. I can only use it again if I give them my phone number, too -.-
As if this wasn't enough of their invasive procedures my profile officially says "Account is blocked because of suspicious behavior".
This is some advanced trickery to fool users into giving them more data than they intended to do when creating a profile and it sucks.
There are more examples: Have you tried browsing Facebook or Xing as a user? It's all a really crappy experience.
Don't worry it sucks as a user as well. Curiosity pushed me to use Google SSO to circumvent their crap one time, and they allowed themselves to subsequently spam my inbox with a flurry of emails. I proceeded to click the "unsubscribe" link in one of them, but to my surprise the spam kept coming. Turns out they have more than a dozen mailing settings and you have to painfully disable each one of them individually. Of course the simpler option is to mark all emails from pinterest.com as spam in the email client.
Especially as a site that specializes in hosting nearly exclusively non-original content, it's so ethically wrong for them to use such tactics.
Pinterest, Quora, Instagram, I never understood why people keep using these clearly unethical websites. Stop using them and other better alternatives will pop out, it's not like you depend on them like you depend on grocery shops or clothing stores. Voting with your attention is easy and cheap.
Now that Instagram has been totally Facebooked, I feel there’s a real gap in the market for what Instagram used to be.
Just want something simple where I can upload some photos, do a bit of light editing, apply a nice filter and share with friends. And also see a chronological timeline of stuff they’ve posted.
No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers.
Well aware this makes me sound old - and this hypothetical service will never make unicorn money. But I’d use it in a flash.
>No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers.
IG is the defacto "photo sharing" tool because it does all of these. What you are describing is closer to Imgur but they have comments and likes as well, simply because without there's no reason for people to come back.
Micro.blog seems to want to head in that direction - they're certainly on board with the chronological feed & "no likes / metrics" idea, and they have a way to import your photos from Instagram. The service itself is meant to be a social network that works via RSS:
I still maintain that if only Yahoo had any intent to do anything rather than sit around back then, Flickr would have won in the field of photo sharing and photo social media, and it would have been a much better end result for the users.
I was surprised that I can't share a HD image on flickr with someone on mobile and have them be able to see the full image. If I remember correctly, it shows them a bulky UI with a scaled down version of the image.
Ah but they have previously. They (at the time Yahoo) used non Creative Commons Flickr images in ads. This made me delete my old school pre Yahoo account and remove everything I uploaded.
I seem to recall vaguely that this redesign was part of a response to a legal challenge for copyright infringement from one of the large photo libraries.
The Write.as guys have been working on a good alternative with their Snap.as service [0]. It's tied to the blogging side, but looks like it'll be another simple tool that doesn't pull the same signup-wall crap as Instagram.
I was very upset with 500px when they abruptly stopped allowing Creative Commons licenses and forced me to re-license my existing photos on the service.
Frankly I'm also slightly annoyed with Unsplash for reinventing the wheel with their own license instead of using standard CC licenses, reducing compatibility with other free culture projects.
> then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code
This just sounds like an excuse to yourself. It’s not hard to deal with this just strip out the EXIF data and bake the rotation into your images on upload. Problem solved, though I don’t know your experience level.
Imgur's compression is awful, and especially on mobile, has a ton of dark patterns for logged-off users or anyone not using their app.
Personally I'm using Instagram for casual "here's my life" photos where I don't care about compression or any of that, Flickr for more curated public photos, and Google Drive as a secondary private backup.
If Facebook offers a public API, people will complain that Facebook hasn't learned their lesson from Cambridge analytica. If they don't, then they're accused of having a walled garden. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Who started with this whole facebook = "Damned if you do, damned if you don't". Been seeing this all over the place. Is it just a catchy phrase or some higher up in the tech world said it and everyone is parroting it?
CA had access to information they never should've had. Just like phone apps having access to a Contacts API that they never should have that kind of access to.
Yup, I recently tweeted about this. Their previous API was much more pleasant to work with. IMO a 'personal use only' account type with a limited data scope would be a great option to have. Thus far, I can't get my 'app' authorized for personal use despite it being only for a page on my blog. I've given up trying to use their API. I'd like to just scrape my photos now but I'm not sure if even that's a possibility.
This has been causing me a fair bit of inconvenience at work as I quit Instagram last year (decided it was toxic) but still need to research people/trends in my design job.
Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.
I find browsing IG on a computer to be a lot less habit-forming than pulling it up on a phone. And, if you open up the element inspector in your browser's dev tools, you should be able to view and download the full-resolution image. It's buried behind layers of nested divs, but you can still get to it.
Not surprisingly, they do everything possible to make the desktop experience god-awful.
I rarely check out IG, but one of the annoying things about the experience is when viewing videos. There is no volume control so you end up with whatever audio is playing at full blast. They also don't provide a slider for playback so you can't do things like rewind to a second ago.
I ended up writing a Chrome extension to avoid that mess.[1]
>Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.
I don't think they care if it's "fake". They will still be able to uniquely identify you and correlate your activity against a number of other sources to build a more complete profile on you, including what you do on Facebook.
I have no idea if it is in that filter list or not as I don't use it but if you want to add the 'uBlock filters - Annoyances' list to your uBO setup follow steps below.
1. Open 'uBO Settings'
2. From within the uBlock Origin Dashboard, Navigate to 'Filter lists' tab (should be second tab)
3. Expand the 'Built-in' filter list options by clicking the '+' button next to 'Built-in'
4. Check the option for 'uBlock filters - Annoyances'
I don't know if theres been any recent change, but not too long ago, login is only required to view Instagram stories. Then they changed it to block location-tagged postings too. Which is a bummer, since I liked to use the webbrowser to browse location-tagged Instagram posts to discover places to eat at. I haven't used it much since, not sure if they added additional restrictions for non-signed-up users recently.
> Then they changed it to block location-tagged postings too. Which is a bummer
Yes this was a bummer too. I used it all the time. Now I use hashtags which aren't as effective and I'm sure they'll shut that down too. O well, nothing useful really lost.
Definitely a new change, just last week I could look at user profiles without having to be logged in. Right now, it shows me an overlay asking me to log in.
Exactly, these profiles are not public anymore (in the common sense meaning of "public profile"). BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it?
> BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it?
Stop using their user-hostile service? They need my eyeballs in order to sell me to advertisers. If they are creating features that turn users away, their bottom line may be impacted enough that they reevaluate their user-hostile business practices.
Odds are good you can still view the profile through translate because linkedin thinks you are google.
LinkedIn, Pinterest and others want to be indexed by google, but don't want the content that's indexed to be public. Google is ruining their own service by allowing this to continue.
Readit News
Why would you say something like this? And why, as a journalist, would you report it? It's a transparent lie; nobody is going to be taken in by it. So why bother even saying it?
> nobody is going to be taken in by it.
Unfortunately, you don’t know that to be true. Relatives I’ve spoken with who own FB stock love to read statements like this to justify their position.
All this says to people is that Instagram is getting more annoying.
"So, what I told you was true... from a certain point of view."
I think we'll find that their numbers are saying the loss of revenue of people leaving because they have to always login is far less than the uptick in revenue to be made from the changes this will allow. They rolled this out weeks ago in Australia, and would have been watching for the backlash.
I think (the following is pure speculation) this is just a first step of a number of changes around monetisation. This basically locks the backdoor, where they prevent people not on the platform from browsing feeds for free.
The real change is going to be when users (celebrities and businesses mostly) find they have to pay to reach all of their followers (who surprise, surprise now have to be logged in). They may not require "boosting" for under 1000 (or even 10,000) followers which will keep most users and wannabee influencers on the platform, even if they have to give a couple of dollars to Instagram when they push a product. You may find the advertisers end up just paying more.
It's the mega-users with multi-million followers they want to monetise, Users who get paid 10-100s thousands of dollars per post where Instagram doesn't get a cut despite being the delivery platform. Compared to what it costs for advertising on traditional media such as radio or TV, even a dollar to reach 10,000 followers would be nothing.
But you can't enforce payment when their followers can simply logout and view the feed for free. I would expect the popup appearing immediately rather than after a few scrolls to be implemented soon.
This is important from a corporate legal standpoint because it makes you as slippery as possible. Words have a tendency to come back to haunt you.
It seems so blatantly ridiculous, and I feel like it does more harm than good, but they must have reason to think otherwise?
I agree with the other commentor. This term indicates it was done on purpose. It describes the stare of the power line. I think it's better than blackout.
[1] https://pixelfed.org/
[2] https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed
I'd love to see a switching guide for, say, Twitter, that specifically says "here's how to transparently follow people on Twitter, and here's how to have your posts show up on your old Twitter account". Or similarly, if you're switching from Instagram, how do you follow folks from Instagram and automatically post to Instagram?
Your question sounds like someone asking how a user of a newly opened Facebook account can follow people on Twitter. They're entirely different services. The federating, or not, is immaterial.
The first part is the alternative service.
Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, presented in a Twitter-like format and flow. People who use it do so because they want to avoid the restrictions and cultures of Twitter. They don't want to post the same content across the two services. They don't want to interact with Twitter. They want to be on Mastodon.
The second part is the federating of the service.
Instances of Mastodon are spread around, hosting a set of users on their individual servers. Each of those instances can then communicate between with the others, intending for you to be able to follow and interact with users on other Mastodon server instances as transparently as those of your local Mastodon server. They are still interacting within the Mastodon environment.
https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.mariotaku.twidere/
Some bridges do exist (see Matrix connectors), and I agree that it should be a very high priority to add more of them and improve the existing connectors.
But it's also important to understand that, yes, they're messy, and will probably always be a little messy -- because the services they are connecting to don't play nicely with others. If Twitter had an amazing 3rd-party API that anyone could use to write a custom client, view content, export data, and filter posts, then it wouldn't be as big of a priority to get off of Twitter.
However, all of that being said, I too would like to see more guides here. I spent a long time following Matrix before I realized there were public Discord bridges that could be used without even hosting my own server.[0] I just never saw it mentioned anywhere.
The publicity/documentation around this stuff could improve a lot.
[0]: https://t2bot.io/
Add https://fed.brid.gy/ & webmention support, so you'll be @your.domain@your.domain on activitypub (read: pixelfed, mastodon, gnusocial, whatever) so the "fediverse" can follow and interact with you.
Add h-feed markup for your website, so indieweb can follow and interact with you.
Keep RSS & Atom feeds, so anyone oldschool can follow you. I'd love to add keep pingback... but that is insanely spam-prone.
App with Pixelfed support for Android: https://fedilab.app/
Public profiles are public on Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/ubports
https://twitter.com/emin3mquotez/status/415206423342366720
That aside, if not now, when? If not us, who? Someone has to start it. None of my friend were on FB when I joined it.
[1] https://github.com/sschueller/peertube-android
Kind of silly I can't find a good image sharing site in 2019.
I don't get it. You have it. You know the user wants it. You know the user wants it very much, enough to go through all that crap. Yet you are going out of your way to not give him access, making him so frustrated that any hope of "but he will crawl around more and do more stuff" is quickly replaced by "he closes the tab in anger at having lost 5 minutes" ...
I'm sure there are metrics showing that it works, or maybe that it doesn't lose enough people to be worth changing, but it is so unnecessary.
I just created an account with an email but after few minutes of clicking around it locked me out. I can only use it again if I give them my phone number, too -.-
As if this wasn't enough of their invasive procedures my profile officially says "Account is blocked because of suspicious behavior".
This is some advanced trickery to fool users into giving them more data than they intended to do when creating a profile and it sucks.
There are more examples: Have you tried browsing Facebook or Xing as a user? It's all a really crappy experience.
Especially as a site that specializes in hosting nearly exclusively non-original content, it's so ethically wrong for them to use such tactics.
Pinterest, Quora, Instagram, I never understood why people keep using these clearly unethical websites. Stop using them and other better alternatives will pop out, it's not like you depend on them like you depend on grocery shops or clothing stores. Voting with your attention is easy and cheap.
Just want something simple where I can upload some photos, do a bit of light editing, apply a nice filter and share with friends. And also see a chronological timeline of stuff they’ve posted.
No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers.
Well aware this makes me sound old - and this hypothetical service will never make unicorn money. But I’d use it in a flash.
IG is the defacto "photo sharing" tool because it does all of these. What you are describing is closer to Imgur but they have comments and likes as well, simply because without there's no reason for people to come back.
https://help.micro.blog/2017/instagram/
But they make it really hard to even see that they have photo / Instagram-esque features, and it seems mostly connected with their iOS app Sunlit:
https://sunlit.io/
I used to be a member but found the service very hipster & Apple / iOS centric. But it might be what some people here are looking for.
Deleted Comment
Have you investigated paid options? Otherwise, it's kind of silly that people expect free image hosting years after everyone has started monetizing.
Another entry for the hall of fame is Quora.
Someone should make a bugmenot browser extension...
They HAVE the full res image. There's even bookmarkets to snag the image. What twisted product goal led to the current state?
[0] https://snap.as
https://unsplash.com/
And then there is also 500px, a bit more controlled but still very nice in my opinion.
Frankly I'm also slightly annoyed with Unsplash for reinventing the wheel with their own license instead of using standard CC licenses, reducing compatibility with other free culture projects.
This just sounds like an excuse to yourself. It’s not hard to deal with this just strip out the EXIF data and bake the rotation into your images on upload. Problem solved, though I don’t know your experience level.
It is decentralized and open source.
Stack is PHP/MySQL so it'll run anywhere. I've been using for years now with no complaints.
Flickr is very good. Amount of users doesn't really affect my use-case, which is offsite storage and being able to send links to my friends/family.
In fact it is maybe the only service that I pay for.
Deleted Comment
Personally I'm using Instagram for casual "here's my life" photos where I don't care about compression or any of that, Flickr for more curated public photos, and Google Drive as a secondary private backup.
The new api has no access to consumer (non-Business or non-Creator) instagram accounts.
Search results for comments of the last month https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
Having a tightly managed API would be just fine.
https://twitter.com/jonlprd/status/1184547466244448257
Good.
Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.
Does Instagram have a real person checking each one? If not, how would a computer verify that a photo ID was valid?
Not surprisingly, they do everything possible to make the desktop experience god-awful.
I ended up writing a Chrome extension to avoid that mess.[1]
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ig-video-controls/...
I don't think they care if it's "fake". They will still be able to uniquely identify you and correlate your activity against a number of other sources to build a more complete profile on you, including what you do on Facebook.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/05a3fea080d06...
I have no idea if it is in that filter list or not as I don't use it but if you want to add the 'uBlock filters - Annoyances' list to your uBO setup follow steps below.
1. Open 'uBO Settings'
2. From within the uBlock Origin Dashboard, Navigate to 'Filter lists' tab (should be second tab)
3. Expand the 'Built-in' filter list options by clicking the '+' button next to 'Built-in'
4. Check the option for 'uBlock filters - Annoyances'
5. Hit 'Apply changes' button in top right corner
Yes this was a bummer too. I used it all the time. Now I use hashtags which aren't as effective and I'm sure they'll shut that down too. O well, nothing useful really lost.
They are available only to members now. Walled-off.
This action works directly against the best interests of Instagram users seeking to maximize their audience and reach.
Let's call this what it is: an anti-feature.
Stop using their user-hostile service? They need my eyeballs in order to sell me to advertisers. If they are creating features that turn users away, their bottom line may be impacted enough that they reevaluate their user-hostile business practices.
Open an incognito window and try going to a linkedin profile. Then try it with google translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=af&tl=en&u=htt...
Odds are good you can still view the profile through translate because linkedin thinks you are google.
LinkedIn, Pinterest and others want to be indexed by google, but don't want the content that's indexed to be public. Google is ruining their own service by allowing this to continue.
Then, they changed it to third-and second-degree connections only, so you had to be signed in. And now, it's completely unusable without an account.