It had been a long time since I posted anything on Instagram…
I previously had an account – sift666 – that I used to post some photos on from 2013 to 2016, but after I stopped using it my login stopped working, and it’s been over seven years since I’ve posted on Instagram or even looked at it. I set up a new account a few days ago to suss it out.
https://www.instagram.com/frot666/
What got me started on this Instagram exploration? It was mainly from reading a blog post that said Instagram was still the forth most popular social media platform with over two billion active users. I hadn’t looked at it for seven years and was curious.
It’s really only #4 if you don’t count YouTube, but that is fair enough I think, YouTube is using AI to generate millions of views and comments, and it’s not really social media anyway. The active accounts number about 1.3 billion so two billion is a bit inaccurate. But Meta is every bit as “Alphabet” (CIA) as YouTube so I wonder how many accounts are AI on Instagram?
Looking back over my old account, I found there were 168 original images – mostly photos because that is pretty much all I used it for – and holy cow what a reminder of how different things were back then. Happier times. It was like a different world eight years ago and in many ways I wish I could go back to that world, but I guess it’s all part of the learning process.
This photo was the first post I did on Instagram, back in April 2013. I used to include a bunch of tags on all my posts so I’ll put them back here too, but tags don’t seem to be a thing on Instagram anymore. Tags were a total pain in the arse anyway so I won’t use them again.
#car, #purple, #coast, #nature, #new, #zealand, #frottage, #colorful, #animals, #mainecoon, #sifting, #cat, #sky, #clouds, #view, #frot, #wellington, #blue, #nice, #newzealand, #purplesky, #kilbirnie, #vivid, #colour, #sifty, #grafiti, #sift #graffiti
This was why I stopped using Instagram in August 2016 – I knew I was pissed off about something but couldn’t remember the details! Oh well, maybe eight years on I’m more inclined to work around these issues if the site could still be useful. I’ll keep that in mind and keep sussing it out.
This was a friendly horse I met long ago and posted his photo on Instagram in 2016. Clearly I used to be pretty obsessed with doing Polaroid style edits of my photos. I’m not really into that style anymore, but I do still like doing 1×1 edits of a lot of my photos and art, which works out well on Instagram and that is another part of why I’m testing out the platform again.
One of my all time favourite books is “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” – it was originally written one paragraph at a time using hundreds of library catalogue cards.
That is sort of what I’m aiming for here – a blog post about Instagram, using Instagram itself to write it one post at a time, each with an image and a line separating it.
TESTING INSTAGRAM WITH A COW
Several posts that I tried to do wouldn’t upload and I started wondering if Instagram had already blocked me, but then it all started working again so I was just being paranoid!
PS. Facebook have banned some uses of the word “cow” – you can say cow, but if you call anyone a cow, the post is instantly blocked as hate speech. So just call them a “C0W” instead!
WHAT IS THE CENSORSHIP LIKE ON INSTAGRAM?
I had quite a few problems on Facebook until I got the hang of outsmarting the AI censorship. Is Instagram the same?
This is a bit trickier to check out because I only have one account and can’t just swap to a backup if I get blocked.
So I’ll be cautious and use the same tricks that work on FB.
New Zealand has still never had a female prime minister – all three of the f@ke ones were TR@NNIES, as well as TR@YTORS.
I did continue posting on Instagram for another week, but decided not to continue using the platform, because it's even more full of mind programmed zombies than Facebook, and that is really saying something!