Reminds me I should enable RSS generation for filmulator.org… other than GitHub there’s no notification system for users.
(This is from the perspective of a family, but discussing how I naïvely think companies also are hooked on FB.)
Trouble is, facebook has taken over much of the world. It’s so easy and tempting to open a page or company account there, and you get ‘everything’ (from messaging to forum etc.). Users have also got used to ‘everyone’ being on facebook; if your company is called ‘superPhotos’, I think many would search on facebook before going to a search engine or trying superPhotos.com. Most blogs have died; or friends and families follow us on facebook now, only one grandma, who has no account there, reads the family blog and sees the pictures published there.
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Except that it doesn’t have to be that way. We make a choice to perpetuate this.
Unfortunately, it does have ease-of-use baked right in so there’s not much barrier of entry to start using it (hence its popularity).
It’s also easy to just keep using it. It takes a level of effort to move away from it, which is exactly what it’s been engineered to do. From the ground up it’s built to continue the never-ending cycle of engagement, clicks, time-on-site, all in service to selling more and more ads at higher prices.
It never fails to amaze me that Google and Facebook’s entire fortune is derived purely from advertising dollars.
At the end of the day, the primary and most important point to me is owning your data and work and not being beholden to a corporation for it’s livelihood or even existence. Friendster, Orkut, Google +, MySpace, and many many more are littering the roads of the internet with their corpses (and don’t even get me started on link rot).
It also doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. You can always link from posts on these “ad/social networks” back to your own content/site. Let folks comment on and like/tweet/adore in their network of choice if you/they want.
I’m beginning to sound like an old curmudgeon yelling at kids to get off my lawn. 
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No, you come across as being passionate about freedom and privacy.
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For the geeks amongst us, I highly recommend https://newsboat.org/ . I’ve been using it for years. Of course, it does not depend on any 3rd party web service.
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Well actually I highly doubt that most (probably like 9x%) photographers profit more from Instagram than Mr Z from them. I think that is the real problem. Plus the fact that everybody is using it nevertheless because everybody is using it.
I used Instagram for some time now and… well I never really liked it, mostly because of technical issues, but the longer I use it the more I think that it would be very important to have a real alternative.
Flickr used to be nice back in the old days. I wonder how long photographers will stay on Instagram.
Hi,
I’m just getting back to this for a quick update what I’ve experienced so far.
I think there is some intersting work on pixelfed.social. For Mastodon there is photog.social and Mastodon.art worth to join.
These are not yet an alternative but maybe in the future.
The more people from here join and publish some work the more interesting it will be. : )
Not decentralised, but it seems Twitter is the new social media for photographer (sick of IG). Seems japanese are quite fond of it and I see more and more tweet posting photos.
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” - Yogi Berra
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… And for non-geeks, Tiny Tiny RSS. 
I have a small digital ocean vps running its server and read all news from the Android client.
A breeze, not a single issue in all these years.
Long live to RSS!!
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Just so you know: it qualifies as geeky to get a VPS to host your own feed reader. That’s not something you should expect the average photographer to do. 
I had lots of problems with TT-RSS BTW. After updates it sometimes killed the whole installation. I’m a SQLite fanboy (taking care of full blown DBs is for admins), so now I’m on FreshRSS since a couple of years. THAT has been 100% carefree. 
Regards,
Fellow geek and photographer
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What I’d like to see: self hostable alternative built on PHP + SQLite (runs on any shared hosting and simple to maintain) and WebMentions for interaction. Preferably not a carbon copy of Instagram featuring with many of its drawbacks and limitations. It should be a stream rather than a garden. I.e. not a place to dump and backup your 8TB photo collection, but a feed centric experience that is focused on posting the best. Flickr could never quite figure out what it was. Or rather, it tried to be both.
Could possibly be financed by offering a hosted version (like wordpress.com).
I don’t know if pixelfed will run with sqlite, but it checks all your other boxes.
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I have been playing around with https://lbry.com/
It is a blockchain tech, so, be careful of possible con jobs (I am hopeful but weary of new tech, as anyone who lived through the internet of the last 20 years should be 
).
However, all of the websites I have seen so far in this thread, save perhaps a personal website (and, depending on how you view centralized services, it also could be lumped in with the rest) are based on a centralized server philosophy.
All of the popular services seemed like they had some advantage for the creative artist at some point in time, even if it was just a large audience… but then, something changes… always. Just look at our “friends” at youtube
Libry is an type of “double blockchain”–> one gives ownership, and one provices a means of compensation. Think of bitcoin and bittorrent having a partnership.
Some are seeing it as a alternative to youtube, but you can also use the protocol for still photos, giving us an interesting model for compensating creative individuals without a central power enforcing the rules. Heck, half the mess we are in (as well as the birth of open source software) was caused by government rules (the copyright laws of the mid 1970’s) that treats software like they were books or magazines, not like engines or screwdrivers, much to the profit of companies like Microsoft, I might add…
I thought the internet in the 1990’s was going to the the key that liberated us from corporate and governmental bondage. Unfortunately, the whole thing can be now viewed as a con to control what we say and what we think.
Technologies like these are not “popular”, yet, but, if people like those on this forum (tech minded, like alternative software for various reasons, and aren’t as swayed by what marketing departments tell us is good) don’t at least see if it is a fit for them, how will any acceptable replacement be found to instagram, who, IMHO, engages in theft, like the pickpocket who gives you a fake flower… was your identity really worth that pretty plastic trinket?
I never used instagram/facebook for making money in photography, but I did try it in my main business, and man, what a waste of time with little to no payoff. The whole thing is a con job. We, as humans, are better than that.
(sorry if this post seems like a rant, but the events of the last years have made me realize some of the poeple who were screaming in the late 1990’s about the state of the internet were… correct).
To change things 90 degrees, and linking to Aurelienpierre, it all depends on your goals:–> why do you want to post things online? Many people don’t answer that question fully, so they don’t look for the right tool for the job.
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I’m on lbry for about a year, posting my videos (along with youtube). It’s a nice concept and alternative, and decentralised (unlike their Odysee counterpart). It still need traction though.
Cool. Glad it isn’t new to everyone.
My understanding is that the Odysee thing is a stopgap to offer a service that works while more people adopt the platform, otherwise, everything would just buffer or break until enough people are on the “network”.
With the crawler, they do make it easy to replicate your youtube channel on their service.
It will be interesting to see if people use it for showing (and perhaps selling) still photography/3d artwork. If nothing else, it seems to be another place people might see who you are… and a repository for your work that is traceable for authorship, as can’t be censored at any time by some governmental or corporate body.
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I can see some photographer account, but still far from what you could find on Flickr for example. However Lbry interface is not build for photo gallery, is it ?
No, not on purpose at the moment.
It could be, however, as the underlying technology is open source and could be repurposed by a group of photographers… or a single photographer. The different here is that no body is capable of owning your work here, unlike all of the other suggestions made.
Again, it goes back to your goals. What are you trying to accomplish by putting photos up online?
– networking? I think the idea of using instagram for “networking” in getting clients or booking models is a bit of a pyramid scheme (a con), regardless of what the youtube personalities say. Whole thing seems like a bit of an echo chamber.
– a portfolio? Personally, your own website is the way to do this. Looks “professional” to clients, and there are many open source ways to do this for close to free. I think getting clients is an active process. You contact people who might want your services, then you prove to them that you are person who fits their criteria.
– Selling prints? People don’t just buy a print randomly. There must be an emotional connection to the print to want to own it (or a business reason, but that is the different topic of marketing photography). Building a “name” is supposed to work, but how many “well known” well, well known amongst photography people, have such small reach on social media.
It is almost like the only ones who win at social media are the social media companies themselves
– feeling good about oneself? Well… you can just post them here, and you will feel good as you learn tools to express your vision even better.
I think the whole “influencer” craze has done the opposite of what they claim for photographers.
Oh… and don’t get me started with how adobe and the like got the greater photography community to commit financial suicide regarding stock photography.
I think the idea that you are just put your work out there and people will “discover” you… isn’t how it works. All of these platforms should be tools you use to increase the market’s awareness, not some magic lantern for success.
Don’t worry, musicians have it just as bad, and there is more naivete over on that island.
As long as we are doing this for our own enjoyment, many things work. But, as soon as money is exchanged for your creative efforts, the options change.
Again, just depends on your goals.
Ok… now I’m ranting (sorry).
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