Auto-generated description: A photography platform advertises itself as chronological, ad-free, and uncropped with the tagline Reclaim your feed.

Every so often, I get the urge to rejoin Instagram.

Of course, not the current version of Instagram full of attention seeking content and unwanted ads, but the one people like to remember when they hear the app name. The place you can share photos with friends and people you follow. As it was put in a recent Verge article, Instagram but in elder millennial mode.

Every time this comes up, there’s always a call to use one of the newer alternatives such as foto or Glass. But having tried those both, I think there’s one key thing wrong with all Instagram alternatives.

They are all Photographer focused.

Allow me to clarify. All of these put the emphasis on photography or Photographers; clearly trying to align with users who pine for the Instagram of old. Glass even specifically calls out its platform is for Photographers.

The issue is the online Photography community is not exactly inclusive; and sometimes are flat out gatekeeping arseholes. Either they get hung up on the gear, or they are all high and mighty about the artistry of it all. If you think about what made Instagram truly click, its appeal wasn’t about photography specifically.

At its prime, Instagram was focused on sharing life, through the medium of photography.

It had a bit of an exclusivity problem within its own community early; shunning anything outside of smartphone photo sharing and the complaints from iPhone ‘elites’ when it was made available on Android. But eventually it was democratised to be a platform for the many, not the few.

Artistic photographs of a professional Photographer that could be printed and be shown in a gallery could live next to a quick smartphone photo just showing someone’s morning coffee; and it didn’t matter. It was flexible enough to be anything to anyone; a way to show life, or art, or gear, for personal or brand promotion, for visual news updates etc.

These alternative platforms simply aren’t designed to be that way; and therefore will naturally be limited in scope and adoption.

I don’t know what the answer is here. It’s pretty clear the business model to make peak Instagram again is just not appealing to those with the money to actually make it happen; without a later dose of heavy enshittification (there I said it!).