Paying for Facebook and Instagram

The Unappealing Thought of Paying for Facebook

Facebook would like us, in Europe, to start paying to use Facebook, Instagram and Threads, eventually. I will never pay for any of these services because they do not provide us with anything of value. The day we begin to pay for Facebook and Instagram we will be paying to be spammed by influencer content whilst not seeing content by friends, family and colleagues. In light of this we’re paying to see more adverts. We’re paying to have our time wasted.

Influencer Spam Rather than Posts by Friends

At the same time as Facebook wants us to pay for their mediocre sites there is another option. For 6CHF per month or so we can setup a mastodon instance, or a Pixelfed instance, and we can microblog, or share images, or both, for 12 CHF per month. Facebook wants us to pay 14 Euros per month to be spammed. I will not pay Facebook anything. They experimented with making us miserable, without saying sorry. They did nothing to stop the genocide that was being orchestrated from their social media platforms. They turned Instagram from a photo sharing app between friends to a spam network for influencers. Why would I thank them, by paying for services that they made worthless?

Interesting Alternatives

Flickr is still alive, and people are still active on the site. People are still sharing hundreds of pictures per day, in some cases. Others are sharing occasional images. For 156 CHF per year for Instagram you could get Flickr, and share with people passionate about photography, rather than utilitarian influencers.

For around 6.47 CHF per month you can get a mastodon instance that can be shared by five users. For around the same price you can also get a Pixelfed instance but I think Flickr is more interesting, because it’s a legacy community with 20 years of conviviality. I also think that Pixelfed might be pleasant to install on most instances, unlike Mastodon which I have tried, and so far failed to implement on a personal web server that I control fully.

And Finally

Since 2007 I said “think of ROI for users, not advertisers” and Facebook is finally realising that they should have, but too late. I would have paid for Facebook and Instagram when they had healthy communities of friends that I met on a daily basis. Now that it’s a dormant network of friends, populated by influencer spam, I have no desire to pay for their services. I was on Facebook and Instagram for the IRL community I knew. Now that it’s a network of strangers it would be irrational for me to pay 13 Euros for a primary account and 6 euros per supplementary account. For 20 Euros a month you can get something much more interesting.