8r4d I was drinking my Mackers #coffee this morning and realized that this little #face on the lid leaves the imagination with some wild connotations. I mean the beverage basically comes from the little mouth right where my lips meet it.

When I joined Instagram back ten years ago it was a fun, ad-free way to post and curate a photo collection online and the results of posting on a regular basis, meant that you had this amazing feed of your photography and life moments to share with a group of friends and followers. Just like virtually every social media platform these days, Instagram has gone down the road of needing to turn users into their product to sell the advertisers. This is just the state of free services online and we take for granted that when we use the services there are millions or sometimes billions of dollars worth of infrastructure behind the scenes that someone needs to pay for. This doesn’t justify turning it into a model that solely serves advertisers over the Interests of the millions of people who give their content to the platform, but it explains it. The socials were abuzz this past weekend because Instagram seems to be piloting yet another degradation to their service in service of advertisers. I didn’t personally see this, but I’ve read that many visitors to the Instagram app faced an unskippable advertisement before they could scroll through their feeds which from my personal experience are already more ad than feed. I don’t think I’m strange in suggesting I think we’ve lost something over the last few years by our acceptance of these platforms catering so heavily to advertisers and yes, I’ll remind you that I do understand the need to pay for services like these. Now I’m not saying that I’m ditching Instagram or I won’t post on the platform or that I’m going to take my ball and go home as it were, but I think that continuing to build any sort of presence there while subjecting my friends and followers (who are mostly friends) to a stream of ads and this increasingly unuseable application is not my intention on that site and service. I have always favoured a platform that I have full control over and have found myself building social media profiles singularly for the purpose of reaching people who can’t or won’t come to my standalone website. But as I’ve learned over the years, those people are few and far between anyways, and the people who really want to see the things I post and write will go out of their way to find it and read it and consume it. And more importantly, none of it is so deeply important anyways that I should sacrifice my personal moral position on social media for the sake of some so-called engagement. I’ve posted this little screed below a corny picture of a coffee cup lid for the very reason that when you control the space where your post lives you become less beholden to the algorithms controlling who sees what that post is at all. Like I wrote in a previous post, I understand that not everybody can create their own micro post piece of software like I have done, and that will deeply limit the ability for everyone to eventually break away from the social platforms, but maybe this continuing monetization and strangulation of open posting for the purpose of communication with friends and family will gradually cease to be a thing that happens on these platforms for better or worse. For my own part, I am going to focus less on the social platforms, even Instagram and continue to build my own little property out here, even if virtually no one sees it: because no one seems to see the other stuff either so it doesn’t really matter anyways.