I want to love Instagram. Really. It’s the least toxic of the big social networks and it’s mostly photography-centric. My problem with Instagram isn’t the content. My problem is with the feed. I don’t like it. In fact I don’t like it to the point of quitting the whole thing.

I get it, we’re beyond the halcyon days of reverse-chronological timelines on any significant social network, but good grief I can’t make heads or tails of what Instagram is feeding me (see this article for a few examples.)

They also seem to have ramped up the number of ads to every-half-dozen-posts-is-an-ad levels.

And their API is still read-only so you can get stuff out but can’t put stuff in via any method other than their own tools (with exceptions).

I’m out.

I know, I know, this has happened before but I’m doing it (and writing it down) anyway. After all, it’s not like I don’t have any perfectly fine image sharing options. Let’s see…

You get the idea.

It’s hard to not be where everyone else is, so who knows how long this will last, but it’s worth another attempt so here we go.