So I only use Instagram for the DMs with friends. I don’t follow anyone at all, so my feed should be empty. For years it was.
Then at some point Instagram decided I must not know what I want, they should show me recommended posts from random accounts.
There’s a setting to turn this off … but instead of being a normal toggle I can only “snooze” the posts for 30 days. 30 days of peace and then the spam comes back.
No matter how many times I make it clear what I want, they don’t care. Just gross.
Dude if you only want to use insta for dms, try bleeper. I swear, most of my school friends only use / are active on insta and I never used insta because I Hated reels / insta in general (my personal opinion, never found it appealing)
So my friend suggested me to use bleeper, I had heard of it ofc but I mean I always thought eh it would be too much of an hassle, then when my friend did it and said its easy so I actually downloaded bleeper created an insta with a password on private incognito and then just pasted the password to my phone's bleeper in insta and then gave it to friend and boom I am now in insta dms without using insta.
And its all free. and they even run on matrix protocol and are pushing to be even more self hosted (ie. currently the account gets in their server, (i think) afterwards, it would be on your local device)
Seriously man, I think I am sort of a shill of bleeper even though they don't even know who I am or I have an incentive to, but I genuinely like their product. I genuinely hope that they don't ever enshitten it man. Bleeper team if you are reading this, that's my only request, don't add power creep, keep on focusing on local as you are doing right now and just don't ever enshitten your product.
Sincere question: What is the reason for the popular appeal of using Instagram for messaging?
Because it is what your friends and potential friends are using.
It isn't really a noteworthy messaging app other than bring attached to a popular app.
> potential friends
Hmm. So it's the perceived "best place" as a default. Is there some "discoverability" feature as well?
He means in real life.
You’re at a bar. You meet someone. They ask for your insta username to follow/message you.
Making friends and meeting people is hard enough for most people. The added friction of not being reachable on the platforms people use every day for messaging isn’t ideal. It’s not ideal to say “Sorry, I’m philosophically against social media so I can’t give you a username, you’ll have to text me” - and then you risk alienating them.
(You’d be surprised the percentage of people who rarely if ever use SMS these days, all the young people I know use Snap or Insta to talk to each other)
group SMS/MMS really blows. It's not a surprise people look for alternatives, but man there are SO many alternatives all with their own niche.
Every time my kids start a new sport or class or group we all get a new "group text" app to download and babysit.
Very much an XKCD moment -
https://xkcd.com/927/
But why not just email?
For me, email has become a cesspool of garbage. It’s like receiving letters in a dumpster parked in front of your house that the whole neighborhood dumps their trash into.
I loved email. It was perfect. Now, for me, it’s basically unusable. I can unsubscribe from ten garbage subscriptions a day, and it doesn’t even make a dent.
This question feels out of touch and I'm in my mid-forties.
Yesterday, I saw a couple moving musical equipment into my building and asked who was the musician. The person said I could find them on Insta. I had hoped they'd be on Soundcloud, as I'm a musician and post my music there. Insta is what a lot of young people use.
Before the pan, someone I matched with on a dating app rejected me when I told them I don't have social media accounts. She accused me of being a psycho (saved me from a bad first date). This is how a lot of younger people (she was like 10y younger than me) see the world.
Email is for corpses, at least that's what I think they'd say if you suggested it. Someone up the chain talked about classmates. I'd expect they are a younger demographic and the email stink would apply.
I welcome being out of touch. The current trends seem ridiculous to me.
There's no practical difference between sending a message via Instagram vs via email. It's all just marketing. You probably can't even get an Instagram account without first getting an email account.
> rejected me when I told them I don't have social media accounts. She accused me of being a psycho (saved me from a bad first date). This is how a lot of younger people (she was like 10y younger than me) see the world.
Wow. This is like a Black Mirror episode.
> What is the reason for the popular appeal of using Instagram for messaging?
Same reason people use any social network: because your friends, family and/or people you otherwise/somehow care about are there.
Same reason people use any social network: because your friends, family and/or people you otherwise/somehow care about are there.
If they're on Instagram, aren't they necessarily also on SMS, plus a billion other people? All ad-free?
> If they're on Instagram, aren't they necessarily also on SMS
Many people have friends in different countries, and while intra-country SMS is usually free, cross-country ones usually aren't. I think out of my current friend circle, literally all of them have at least one friend outside of the country where they live, but as an immigrant I'm probably biased too.
SMS is stuck in the past, even with RCS. Apple has used SMS as the wall of their walled garden for years. As an android user, it was extremely annoying to text to Apple devices (and still is to some degree)
If they’re on instagram they’re already in the Facebook ecosystem which means WhatsApp should not be objectionable and it covers the messaging aspect quite well.
Sure, but why Instagram specifically? Is this just first-mover/early-mover advantage or is IG better at something?
> Sure, but why Instagram specifically?
Because Instagram is specifically the place that those people already are. It really isn't hard to understand why others join it. They weren't even first, just the place where people ended up being, until they won't be there anymore and instead it'll be another place.
Also matters what niche/community you're a part of, some of them already left Instagram for other places (like furries seems to have gone to Mastodon/Bluesky as far as I can tell [but not a furry, so please don't sue me if I'm wrong]) while others are still there, like most musicians/artists still seem to prefer Instagram, even non-mainstream ones.
I think that's because that for me personally, I am genz and my generation / my school friends are just hooked up onto it. Literally 99% of my schoolmates were there.
It was the only way that I can keep in touch with my schoolmates / friends for years and though I have their number, we don't have any group chat aside from instagram and I use beeper to actually make it sane to use
Some of the reason might be that you don't need to share your phone number for it.
Bleeper or Beeper (https://www.beeper.com)? Beeper is an app like you describe, can't find Bleeper. And it's by Automattic which I think have an OK reputation for not destroying their products.
Keep in mind that using Beeper for Instagram breaks their ToS and often gets your account suspended or banned. This happens with both cloud and local bridges.
https://www.reddit.com/r/beeper/search/?q=instagram+suspende...
oh I meant beeper, I don't know why I said it to be bleeper. My bad, I don't really know why my brain actually just thought of bleeper instead of beeper, no reason lol..
Yeah what I mean is beeper.
It’s not nice to subject your friends’ private communications to ad tech surveillance.
I deleted my Instagram account, now my friends and I message on other (end to end encrypted) platforms that don’t subject us to censorship and spying.
Sometimes you have to choose between not talking to someone and talking to them on such a platform. For friends, sure, just says that you want to switch to something e2e. But for people you don't really know that well it's kind of unreasonable to expect them to switch for you. LinkedIn is a good example, I don't like using the platform but I also have no interest in adding loads of random old colleages I might talk to occasionally to any e2e platform I use.
That is so real man. I was a massive push in pushing everyone to use signal but I could only convince 2-3 of my friends and literally now there is only 1 single friend of mine who is on signal..
Whereas on insta dm, literally all of my friends are there, mostly 24x7 active. I just used bleeper to sometimes interact with them. I think it made my mental health definitely more saner/net gain
I care about my privacy enough but I can't have it make me lonely. I hate meta with my guts but the sacrifice that I found was using bleeper or something that doesn't have anything extra of insta related except just chats
Sometimes Sacrifices must be made
If your friends can’t install a free app and type in their phone number and an auth code (literally takes 30 seconds) to talk to you privately, they aren’t your friends.
(I have no other messengers and have recruited about a hundred people to use Signal, including much of the Vegas cash game poker scene.)
Quality over quantity is important always, but is of utmost importance when it comes to personal associations.
Delete your Meta accounts, find out who your real friends are.
This is a bizarre position that seems to be advocating for family and friend estrangement based on which chat app they use.
Quite the opposite.
You won’t be able to have friends period if all of society opts in to mass warrantless surveillance.
The Signal desktop app is awful. I refuse to use it for this reason alone, because any time I need to write a lot, I switch to a computer because I can write 100 times faster on an actual keyboard.
> it's kind of unreasonable to expect them to switch for you
And yet they expect you to switch for them?
I guess there is a difference between expect and assume. It would be weird for me to assume that the vast majority of people care deeply about digital privacy when clearly that's not true. Its pretty reasonable for them to assume I have Instagram or whatever when the vast majority of people do.
From their perspective, they assume I already have an Instagram account and if I say I don't then they aren't really going to understand why I wouldn't want to make one. For someone who isn't well informed on issues of digital privacy, I think this is a reasonable way to behave. From their perspective, someone demanding they download and use some random app they haven't heard of for reasons about encryption they don't understand is not reasonable.
Of course it is very worthwhile trying to educate people on issues of digital privacy. If you are able to educate them, then they will see that you perpective is reasonable. However, you aren't going to change everyone's minds
They didn't even consider what you want or anyone other than the way to make profit of the app. Sometimes those goals align, many times not. The reason they show you random accounts is because they want you to get hooked and watch the ads they sell.
It’s like X reverting to “For you” from “Following” no matter how intently you ask them to show less often. It’s like X telling you - “don’t ever install our app, it’ll be worse”.
By the way, Meta then must add a paid plan “Messaging Only” mode for Instagram :)
While I do get the frustration, you cannot really complain if you don't use Instagram for its main feature...
You can use an application like Franz or Beeper to have ONLY the chats and nothing else.
Can vouch for beeper. My mind was blown when it JUST WORKED. I use beeper to chat with my friends on insta and its definitely a really good method to communicate with the insta friends instead of using the app. Though when they send reel I can't really see it natively and it opens web browser but that's what I want and I don't watch the reels the guys send anyway.
Is there any account that just shows boring stuff every day? Because now it says when I snooze that I won't see recommended posts unless I've scrolled past my friends' posts. So it seems I need to follow something that I'm totally uninterested in (I'm thinking gray boxes of unvarying sizes would be good), and that posts quite often.
OOh I found a use for AI slop! Getting me off instagram!
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