When videos are older, or are not viewed often their quality will be downgraded until they are either viewed regularly or never at all. This decision showstype: posts that Instagram is forgetting that it should promote net neutrality rather than a two tier system where influencers get the red carpet, and normal human beings are treated badly.
The idea of Net Neutrality is that all content is delivered from all sources to all people at the highest available speed and quality available.
Over the years I have subscribed to hundreds of podcasts, YouTube channels, people on Instagram TikTok and more. I then stopped subscribing, and sometimes like, but never when I’m asked to by the content creators. The short reason for not liking and subscribing now is that if I subscribe I usually grow tired with the content and stop watching, so my subscription is an illusion. The reason I don’t “like” plenty of videos is simply that the videos are not worth a like.
Today I read from Techcrunch and The Verge that there are new tools to limit things so that people can only get comments from friends and family. The irony isn’t lost on me.
The irony I’m thinking about is that we have built a social media landscape where the content from strangers floods our timelines without us wanting to see it. Rather than just give us chronological timelines with posts from our friends, they add mitigation factors for slowing down and stopping harrasment.
Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.
From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social.
For those of us living in Europe we now have the option of paying for Facebook and Instagram, not to see ads. In theory this is fantastic and we should be jumping on the opportunity.
I don’t feel that way. I had plenty of conversations, with uni friends, colleagues and more, until Zynga brought Farmville. When Farmville spammed our timelines and killed all conversations the value of Facebook as social network was destroyed because instead of conversing and networking we were taking care of virtual farms.
If you want to see how unhealthy social media is just look at this story about DMs on Instagram. Now if you want to DM someone that you don’t follow they can send just one text message.
Imagine, you’re a user of Instagram. You’re following friends, family and colleagues. Now consider that every fourth post is by someone you don’t know anything about. Now imagine that you see the influencers several times a day, every single time you refresh your feed.
Within the last two days I saw a headline that is either amusing or tragic. The headline is that Instagram is creating a twitter clone, or even a Twitter competitor. This is amusing, or tragic, because Twitter and Facebook have always been competitors. You had the network of strangers that became friends, with Twitter, and the network of uni friends that became estranged years after graduating with Facebook. Chronological
Both of them had chronological timelines with people conversing with each other.
Over the last two evenings I have been attempting to read nested data. I have tried to parse the data and other methods but without success. I have browsed the web to try to find solutions but for now I am getting stuck. Learning is also about trial and error, and knowing where to find the right information. For now I am lost. At the end of this process I will be more self-sufficient.
Recently I migrated my photos from Instagram to a WordPress blog. The process took some trial and error. The first step is to understand how to read JSON files and format them in a way that WordPress can use. The next step is to import that data into Wordpress.
To request your data follow this link, request the data and wait for an e-mail telling you that the files are ready to download.
The Fun and games of attempting to migrate Instagram data continue. I have now spent several days on the task. I have my Instagram posts currently sitting on a local blog. The challenge has been to migrate it from my local WordPress installation to the main website.
After dozens of failed attempts the SQL database, seperate from this blog’s database was getting filled with lines of data. I was up to over 31,000 pieces of data or more.