Instagram was one of the first apps that I downloaded when I bought my first iPhone, 8 or 9 years ago.
I knew about the platform by seeing some friends re-posting their pictures on Facebook and being intrigued by the retro look of the filters and frames that you were allowed to add before posting a photo on the app. It was one of those things that you know you’ll enjoy it even before putting your hands on it. I was working with video editing and motion graphics but was becoming more and more interested in Photography.
As I was expecting, the minute I started using Instagram was love at first sight, and for many many years was by far my favorite social media of all. Back then it was a very different time and you were only allowed to post pictures that you took with the smartphone you had in your hands, and that was definitely part of the fun. All of a sudden everybody had a “camera” in their hands and the device limitations really forced people to be more creative with their content. For me (and for a lot of other people I know) that experience was one of the big pushes I was waiting for to start paying more attention to Photography in general and later start a career as a Photographer from the scratch.
The rest is history, as people say, and by now (in 2020) everybody knows what Instagram is and what it has become. I was never the most popular on the platform, but at some point I had accumulated ~50k followers, which sounds very impressive for a lot of people (spoiler alert: it is not). The majority of my followers came from the early days of the network when Instagram itself used to select a few people to become “suggested users” for a couple of weeks here and there, and that would make new users discover you as soon as they created an account. That generated a big boom on the numbers, of course, but at the same time not all of those people were genuinely interested in your content, and most of them didn’t even become super active users.
Fast forward to the present, and Instagram hasn’t brought me any joy for a long time, and for a couple of years, I thought about a lot of different strategies to prevent me from deleting my account altogether. And then at the end of July, I decided to do what crossed my mind so many times: I started a new journey!
This was the caption I wrote with the inaugural post:
Hello friend,
It’s day 136 of isolation and, yesterday, I decided to do something that was in my mind for a really long time: I deleted my original Instagram account, the one that I had for almost a decade, where I once accumulated 50k followers and posted a couple of thousand pictures.
About a little over a month, when I got really close to doing it, I decided that the best thing to do was to just delete the app and take a big break from it. That was definitely a smart decision but yesterday, when I logged back into my account, I realized that absolutely nothing had changed and all the same issues were still bothering me. The pressure of finding an incredible photo to post, a number of followers that didn’t say anything about myself or my work, and the constant hustle that the platform has turned into.
Then I realized that the only way to go back to enjoy this place the way I used to when I first joined, was to delete who I was trying to be and just starting all over again. I thought about simply creating (another) new profile, but I knew the main one was always going to be on the back of my mind, and I definitely didn’t want that to happen.
So this is my new home. From now on it will be about who I am, what I’m interested in at the moment, without trying to please anyone, or anything. Without chasing any trends, numbers, illusions. Without any rules to follow.
This is my new journey.