For some reason, the fight of most social media against any third party way to access them comfortably helped people like me finding the motivation to get rid of them altogether.
Yep. Instagram has been so hostile up logged-out people that it drove me away, and I actively recommend businesses avoid. Prior to this, quite a few small businesses I ran across used Instagram as their website, but it's completely useless if people can't see anything.
Pretty much. I ditched my Facebook account in 2017 and never really messed with IG. At some point I just wasn't seeing much of what I liked about the site initially (a feed of what friends and acquaintances were up to) and didn't find it worth the tradeoff - lots of companies are skeevy, but I might continue using their products if I get something out of them. Didn't find FB to be worth it.
But still, I'm in a few long running group chats with friends and maybe 60-70% of the links people post are to Meta sites. Can't access even though it's almost always just something reposted from a (openly accessible) website.
The bots and the spam ruining platforms is bad enough. Putting such a large chunk of actual online human conversation behind login-walls has seriously put a dent in things. I feel like this is the other half of the whole "search engines suck now because of ML-generated/SEO-optimized junk" argument. There's nothing to balance that stuff out because you need a sketchy persistent, personally-identifiable account to access the rest.
