A short history, swallowed whole
Life catalogued on Instagram, unsavable: 13 years - poof!
Pausing myself on Instagram
Can I really have started posting photos on Instagram in 2012? Less than two years after it came online I became a fan. I’m a writer who initially trained as a photojournalist and while my world is now centred around words, I believe that images remain a crucial pathway to understanding the world. My goal with Instagram has always been to amuse and entertain but mostly to offer food for thought through photos and to see similar work by others.
Here’s one of my Instagram latest posts, a video of the newly hatched tadpoles in my garden pond 31 March. More than 3,500 views; I guess people would rather dream about frogs than read about the president who turns into a toad. I added Kermit the Frog singing “Tadpole”—remember that delightful and optimistic tune?—which I can’t do here. Check it out and smile. For a long time I thought people speaking French were calling them pétards, little firecrackers, which was cute and funny. But it turns out I was mishearing them and they are têtards, oops. Bodiless heads! For those of you who are not keen on frogs, these are small mountain ones who make low quiet sounds and eat all the insects I don’t want in my garden.
Sadly, as Meta makes a corporatized mess of what was once a good photo-sharing platform, there is no way to archive this work once you leave the Meta-world. Nor is there any good way for me to directly contact the 1000-plus followers I have to let them know where to find me now that I am getting off Instagram, What’s App and Facebook because these have lost whatever soul we brought to them. Our mere presence there or use of these platforms puts money in Trump’s coffers via the millions Meta is paying him: $25 million to settle the court case brought by the Wannabe President in 2021 (Reuters report, 25 January 2025)
Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended after his supporters launched an assault on the U.S. Capitol following a speech by him repeating false claims that his election defeat was the result of widespread fraud.
Out of the settlement amount, $22 million will go towards a fund for Trump's presidential library, and the rest to legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.
The payout has made no difference to Zuckerberg’s chances of stopping the 2020 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit against Meta; the court case opens tomorrow, 14 April. Personally, I hope the FTC wins, even though the case was initially brought by Trump as part of his getting-even campaign. Too many people say they can’t get off of these platforms because there is nothing comparable out there. Let’s give potential competitors a fighting chance.
So, what are the alternatives?
I spent a month testing BlueSky and Flashes as Facebook and Instagram alternatives. If you love Facebook or X/Twitter (I don’t and won’t miss FB; I could never stomach Twitter and Musk’s X is worse), you might like BlueSky, which is growing rapidly—but you’ll have to encourage your pals to join you there. Flashes, BlueSky’s answer to Instagram is in Beta and I hope they succeed. For now it’s good, simple, but a bit too limited. I’ll probably add photos there now and again to encourage them.
WhatsApp: Signal is a far better option, if you can get your addicted friends to move, which is a tough call in Europe. My family is happy to make the move. If I’m part of your WhatsApp world, you can find me here or on email. I’m seriously considering using only Europe-based Cloud services because of concerns about increasingly insecure data in the US.
I won’t be posting images on Instagram anymore: I’m pausing my account this week—you won’t see me and I won’t see you after Wednesday (for a last peek). What was once a place to share photos has become an advertising and marketing platform with a few nice photos from friends thrown in for stickiness (thank you for the latter, Dear Algorithm). I’m not deleting the account for now, trying to be optimistic that Meta will be forced to dump Instagram and a more honourable and sympathetic owner will show up. But I’m not holding my breath.
I’ll post 3-4 photos at a time on Substack Chats, which are visible only to subscribers (free and paying) to Ellen’s World. You can opt to be notified about these here, or at least I think you can! I’m new to this, so let me know if there’s a problem, please. In the interest of not bombarding your mailbox, I’ll be posting photos no more than twice a week. Please feel free to opt out of the notifications knowing that you can simply visit Ellen’s World Chat whenever you like, for a day brightener.
I was planning to share a handful of favourite memories from Instagram in Substack Notes, which are open to everyone and not just subscribers, but the work-around is too time-consuming. I thought to add them to this post, but you know what? Adding a screenshot from there causes an error message here. Not allowed. Poof! Bye-bye shared memories.
So here are random favourites from that year, when social media still held such promise, or when we were still naive. These are plucked off my computer:
Chateau de Châlon visit, extraordinary old wines; Gerald Besse winery glass of cool white sitting on local granite—an image that made it into my book Vineglorious! Switzerland’s Wondrous World of Wines (2014); a new 2012 stamp that might have been meant for today’s world; my parents on their wedding day in 1936, found in a box of old photos in 2012. They would never have believed a fortune-teller who described the world of 2025 to them.
My first Chat photos, to give you an idea.