Those of you who have read of my previous run-ins with Twatter [Exhibit A, Exhibit B] will know that I have a healthy contempt for all the big social media sites out there. I don’t 'do' Facebook, I don’t 'do' Twatter and, up until very recently, I didn’t 'do' Instagram either.

However, my recent purchase of a new camera and subsequent trip down memory lane led me to looking back through decades of my old photos and yearning for some way of conveniently displaying that small percentage which turned out half decently.

So, against my better judgement, I set up an Instagram account and started uploading a few carefully selected snaps. Just as a way of having somewhere I could see a selection in one place, without having to dive through my massive archive of photos on disc.

Needless to say, being me…​ [I swear these sites hate me!] …​I soon ran into the usual faceless feckless fuckwittery. I uploaded one perfectly innocent image of one of my friends throwing a stick for her dog on the beach:

…​and then, when I tried to upload my next photo, kept getting this error:

Needless to say, hitting the 'Try again' button did feck all, apart from spawn the error again. So, I tried refreshing the page and got this instead:

'Brilliant!' I thought, visions of Twatter all over again 'Not even one day in and already I’ve been wrongly accused of misbehaving. But, maybe I’ve been over-doing it a wee bit!

Because, in my enthusiasm for the task and facing the decades' worth of photos I have to hoke through, I had probably uploaded about 100 images that day. Albeit spread out over the course of the day. So, thinking I’d maybe hit some kind of undocumented daily upload limit, I left Instagram alone overnight.

Next morning, I re-uploaded the offending image. This time it 'stuck'. I then uploaded about 5 more images and suddenly got the same error and the same notice again. This time after uploading another perfectly innocuous photo of an old rusty abandoned car in a forest:

So, only my 5th or 6th upload of the day and no links of any kind in the description.

What really fucks me off beyond measure about this [and the similar fuckwittery I suffered at the hands of Twatter] is that I was now [as I was then] doing absolutely nothing wrong. But their moronic algorithms flagged my posts as being 'out of order' in some way. And you just know that, once that has happened, there’s no way round it. You can hit the 'appeal' button…​ Or you could just stick pins in your eyes. It would be more productive.

That’s annoying enough in itself. but what compounds that annoyance a thousandfold is that you’ve barely got to spend 5 minutes on these sites Twatter, Instagram, Facebook et al to find an absolute avalanche of people posting deliberately obnoxious, libellous and offensive content or serial spamming --with seeming impunity. Yet [because I’m in no way alone in this] other people are being censored and having their accounts locked for no reason at all.

With Instagram, a lot of this objectionable activity consists of serial spammers who will post endless "DM <some shite instagram account> for collab' type comments on almost anything you upload. Spammers who obviously have nothing to contribute themselves but just endlessly spam other people, hoping to get free content for their own accounts.

Here’s just a small example of the deluge of this kind of junk comment, that came in within seconds, on almost everything I posted:

So, if Instagram are so bothered about making the site a better place for everyone, why the hell are they not focussing their efforts on getting rid of these spam-slinging wankers, instead of pissing off their 'law-abiding' users?

Oh well. At least this has refreshed my memory, before I’d invested too much time in this Instagram account, on why exactly I’ve been religiously avoiding 'Big Social Media.

Lesson learned --Again!

If only there was a viable alternative. And, before anyone mentions The Fediverse…​ Hold your horses. I have things to say about that too. Watch this space!