Om Malik:

Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created a mobile social network based on visual storytelling. The impetus provided by the early photography-centric approach turned it into a fast-growing phenomenon. For Facebook, it was an existential threat. And it was worth spending nearly a billion dollars to own, control, and eventually subsume. And that’s precisely what Facebook has done.

What’s left is a constantly mutating product that copies features from “whomever is popular now” service — Snapchat, TikTok, or whatever. It is all about marketing and selling substandard products and mediocre services by influencers with less depth than a sheet of paper.

I still publish photos to Instagram because that’s where my family is, but Pixelfed is my home for photography on the web now — you can follow me @mike@libertynode.cam. I only check Instagram when I’m posting and only because the service lacks the APIs to do so through a third-party automation.

➝ Source: om.co