Goodbye Instagram, hello Substack
I’ve been disenchanted with Instagram for a while now. Increasingly so, as the ‘improvements’ were made following the FaceBook, now Meta, takeover. There’s just too much noise. And not just from the ads and reels. The very nature of the medium has made everybody louder in order to be heard. Everyone’s done the workshop, course or tutorial from the self-appointed guru telling you how to beat the algorithm for surefire success. It used to be about sharing but now it’s just shouting. Enough.
I’ve all but given up posting work on Instagram. An illness and then recuperation earlier this year meant I had no motivation for any creative pursuits for over three months. I didn’t go to my studio, I didn’t make any new work and so I had nothing to post. In some ways that was a relief.
However, as much as I hate it, Instagram is a window for my artistic practice. It’s where people invariably look to check out your work. The arts organisation that I’m a member of use Instagram as the main outlet for promotion, and use the artists’ @handle as the main accreditation for work, so a presence is required.
The recent notification about using artists’ images within Meta’s AI offering was the last straw. I’m not naive enough to think that my work hasn’t already been scraped by some tech company or other for their own use but for Meta to treat the whole exercise as a given quoting ‘legitimate interest’ is just arrogant.
I’ve downloaded all my posts, removed all but the most recent and set up pages on my website to display them. It was quite nostalgic looking back through the work – a useful reminder of my progress as an artist and the projects that I’ve worked on over the years. A sketchbook of sorts.
I used to write a blog on my website, the content was invariably linked with what I posted but with more detail. This is my impetus to start again. I hope you’ll join me and follow along with my endeavours.
