I’m seriously debating leaving Instagram. I’m trying to determine if I want to sign up for Glass (or similar) as a replacement or just live without. Anyone made that move recently?

@Mtt I’m on Glass but still have my Instagram active that’s mostly now view-only. I post everything to Glass and my Micro.blog photoblog.

@pratik That’s on the table for me. I follow <100 as it is. May go private and read-only. Does Glass still have an active user base? Feels like I haven’t seen much about it lately.

@Mtt I dropped IG in January and haven’t looked back. I had Glass, but let my subscription lapse because I wasn’t using it as much. But I’m thinking about going back.

@Mtt I made this move a while ago. I highly recommend glass of you enjoy photography.

@pcora I’m definitely an amateur when it comes to photography. I had an account there when it launched, but didn’t let it go far.

@Mtt that seems right, and tracks with my logic. Low activity ≠ not worth my time. I thought it might replace Flickr for me, a place to store albums and stuff. But that’s the wrong mindset. Glass is good for giving family and friends a place to go to see my photography. Maybe. Still thinking it through.

@Mtt (Not really an answer but I thought I’d share my journey.) I left Instagram around 2019 when Facebook/Meta began turning it into a crappy mall. I tried Flickr, Pixelfed, etc. but they were all ghost towns with little to no engagement. I was looking into Glass when I found Micro.blog. To my surprise, people actually looked at what I posted here and did more than reflexively double-tap them as they scrolled. Plus, I was surprised to discover my photos meant more to me than my writing so they’re actually more appropriate as blog entries anyway. My point is that I started thinking I wanted an instagram replacement but it turned out that I actually had very different needs.

@gregmoore That’s actually helpful and makes a lot of sense to me. Part of the reason I’m considering Glass is because they provide an RSS feed and I can import them into Micro.blog automatically. The appeal, in my head, is having the dedicated photo spot but still providing access via my blog. But maybe I should just skip the middle man and go all in here. What apps do you use for images? Just micro.blog? Sunlit? Mimi?

@Mtt (I’m definitely not denigrating Glass. A lot of people here like it.) I use the official M.b app the grand majority of the time and Sunlit whenever I need to add more than one photo. I’m also not posting “galleries” of photos here, just one or two photos as part of a blog post so your needs may vary.

@pdxmph Yeah, I didn't realize that either until a few days ago when I saw someone on here say as much. I have no idea how it handles alt text or tags. I don't even know about the caption/description as of yet. I'm gonna see if I can find who posted about it.

@pdxmph I just tested it. It pulls in the photo without issue. However, it pulls in the caption as a title. It appears to be because Glass' RSS feed lists it as such. So every post becomes a titled post with an individual photo as content. Not ideal. There is an easy way to do it with individual posts, but I don't think there's an automated way. Maybe @manton can chime in?

@Mtt @pdxmph The Glass RSS feed isn't too bad, but yeah, there's no alt text and we'd probably need to do something clever to add it... I'm not sure what the right behavior there would actually be, but I'm open to exploring better support for it.

@manton Personally, I think if the “title” text could just be used as body text, it’d be a done deal. Exactly how the manual import into the Micro.blog app works.

@Mtt I’ve been using Glass for over a year and really like the service. I did a write up about a month ago you may find useful; see: excited-pixels.com/2022/10/2...

@Christopher Getting an invalid address message on that link and the domain.

@Christopher Figured it out. Looks like OpenDNS is blocking your site as an adult content site. Work Wi-Fi uses it for filtering.

@Mtt hmm, weird, I’m getting it to load over a couple different devices :/

Domain is: excited-pixels.com. Post is on Oct 23, 2022 :/

@Mtt @manton That would be great! It would also help with Letterboxd imports. But with RSS import, Micro.blog only links to the photo on Glass and doesn’t upload it to Micro.blog, like it does when you use the Share sheet. So those links will break if Glass goes away or if you delete your Glass account.

@Mtt huh, what a weird categorization!