Whatever I said about showing up on social media recently, there won’t be much of that happening, at least not on (most) “big tech” social media platforms.

I left Twitter/X a while ago, and now I’m quitting Instagram.

Some of you know that I’ve disliked the push for video for a long time. I increasingly feel that a moving feed is stressing my brain, and more than anything, all the ads and suggested posts, which are mostly from businesses who all try to teach you a load of s***, are exhausting. I only want to see beautiful photos, read, see posts from people I follow, and find inspiration. But Instagram has become utter chaos, like a marketplace full of people screaming at the top of their lungs “look at me! buy my course!” and whatnot..

Yes, there are interesting business accounts there – most accounts about barefoot shoes, music, photographers, certain fitness accounts, and more. But they are all people I choose to follow.

I had some hard times at the end of last year, culminating with my husband’s illness just before Christmas (everything is good now, there’s more info here).

So over Christmas I was exhausted, and I took time off everything to rest my soul and get back to normal life. I didn’t open social media. I didn’t write, I didn’t even take photos. We watched movies, I went for short walks, did my foot strength program, lifted some weights, enjoyed some Christmas chocolate, continued working on my upcoming blog move/merge, and did some experiments with blocks in WordPress.

Around New Year I went back onto Instagram, scrolled some posts, liked some of them, followed links to Threads, read a few posts that were linked to from Instagram. And almost immediately I felt that exhaustion, stress and feeling of – dread? – coming on.

Then I started thinking in terms of “Do I really need Instagram? Does it add anything positive to life anymore?” and “What would happen if I deleted everything?”

It’s possible having an Instagram account for business would be a good thing. But I’ve been struggling a LOT with ideas of what to post there. I hate reels (ok, if there are cats or llamas involved, they’re ok). I hate that the Instagram algorithm pushes video. I did enjoy making them during my Bulgarian squat challenge, but I’m a photographer and designer, not a video maker. And I’m not interested in using a platform where I have to obey the algorithm gods to even be visible.

Yes, I could do my thing and it would at least be searchable, but I would still dislike using the platform which would make it quite unsustainable. I found a brilliant blog post on this topic recently and this is exactly how I feel about using Instagram:

“It’s like trying to enjoy a nice civilised cup of tea and a slice of cake in a strip club.”

Read the full post here: Why I left Instagram

In the end I kept my accounts just because I felt I “should” be on Instagram, but even if I didn’t open the app, the feeling of “I should post something” stressed me out. And when I opened the app the constantly moving feed stressed me out.

The final nail in the coffin came this weekend, and honestly, it was a relief that Instagram triggered me to make the final decision.

Ad breaks. I read an article about this months ago, but it never happened and I thought they had abandoned this horrible idea. Basically it means you will scroll your feed and all of a sudden there’s an ad that YOU CAN’T SCROLL PAST. Like WTF?!

On Friday I got an announcement that I had to make a decision about how Meta uses my information for ads. I thought it was the same as some year ago, that I needed to re-authenticate whether I want to pay for no ads (this is only available in the EU) or let them use my info for ads. Previously I’ve chosen the free option. I haven’t been happy about it since it means they use my data way too much, but I wasn’t sure if Instagram was worth paying for.

Now there was an option to get less personalised ads, which means they get less of my info (as if they didn’t had enough already though). This is always my preferred ad option. The problem was that this meant I’ll get ad breaks. So now they have implemented this feature. So you either have a terrible user experience an unusable app, or you give Meta all your information (or money).

Enshittification has reached a new level.

Well, kudos to Meta for helping me make the decision to finally delete my accounts. I had spent a lot of energy thinking about this.

I’ll be polite and make a final post on both my accounts about leaving. If you follow me on Instagram, the best way to keep updated with both my photos and fitness endeavours is probably here on this blog (there’s a subscription link in the footer if you’re interested in that). I will probably become more active on Bluesky and on the Foto app – a new app that is being built, still on Beta but they have made the decision to make it public soon, after what’s going on with social media right now.

That’s pretty much the rant for today. 🙂