This is basically how I feel about Instagram. I just can’t understand why people use the platform, or even how they do.

Every time I try to use the app, I just end up closing it in frustration a couple of minutes later. What’s the point in following people when the algorithm is just going to show me a randomized assortment of their posts from the past week where every one is followed by a “suggested” post from somebody I don’t follow and then a “sponsored” post (ad). And then it stops after like 20 posts and refuses to load any more because “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!”, even if I haven’t opened it in 5 months.

I guess following people whose content you’re interested in has gone out of style in favor of consuming whatever the algorithm vomits up in front of you. I feel like even Tik Tok does a better job of letting you see content from people you’re following, and that thing is basically all algorithm.

And now I sound like my parents in the 2010s trying to figure out why people use Facebook…

It’s not. You have the “explore” tab which is more like “today’s viral toots” (which tend to be a lot more varied than Lemmy’s “All/Top 24h” since Lemmy is a link aggregator and doesn’t really lend itself to jotting down thoughts or diatribes), and you have your personal timeline which is people you actively follow. It’s not a cafeteria, it’s your RSS feed.

Where it gets shouty is in replies, especially as those get federated weirdly. But that’s only a problem for the few percent of users who are making content, not for consumers.

You don’t like a bunch of people shouting at each other across a cafeteria? It kind of explains why I never got twitter either.