After a decade of wondering why my friends still used Instagram, they’re finally talking about uninstalling it this week. So I’m all for these new features, keep em coming zuck!
I’d love to uninstall it but I can’t follow the people I want to follow anywhere else
You wanna know why they’re there? Because you’re there. The ol’ catch-22 of social media walled gardens. Inconvenient for literally everyone except the guys running them.
Here’s hoping people figure out that the Fediverse is specifically designed to solve that problem.
Just leave Instagram. The quickest way to get rid of a stalking “president”.
What a fucking idiotic shitstorm entirely of their own making.
Meta deserves all the shit they get for this transparent act of kowtowing.
They will get zero shit and there will be no repercussions or consequences and Zuckerberg knows that
It sure looks like they’re getting shit right now - I don’t disagree with your cynicism about long term effects though. If everyone “outraged” by this continues to use their service this will have very little effect on them in the long term.
“Technical problems.”
“Following” and “unfollowing” are pretty basic aspects of the service. How interesting that the “technical problems” only have to do with these specific accounts.
Anything under Meta (FB, Insta, WhatsApp), Twitter/X, TikTok - you should be considering these to be fascist mouthpieces and interpret information gained through them with that lens.
Personally I believe them only because meta has proven to be incompetent time and time again. I’m betting they migrated the followers to the new account, but forgot to update some foreign key and now it errors out when the old code tries to unfollow.
The malice though is in doing this new migration scheme instead of the old method of “update the profile picture and bio”.
I’d expect more broken things if that were the case?
Depends on how carefully they follow separation of concerns, I suppose. I’ve seen errors exactly like this before where old data couldn’t be deleted but new data could be deleted without issue.
To be clear, I am not defending them, nor am I entirely writing off the zuckbot doing this on purpose. Just without further evidence, it is easy for me to assume they are incompetent.
There are local servers all around the world. You generally interact with the one closest to you, but it isn’t the “single source of truth.” At some point changes should be reconciled with the source authority, but all the remote servers are trying to update the source at pretty much the same time. Resolving updates from your global diaspora of servers in an accurate manner is hard and you’re likely to see odd bugs arise, especially when a large number of people take similar actions at once. You can see this in trending viral video likes–toggling your like on and off or viewing the video at the same time from 2 different locations is likely to give you a different like count each time. You can also see this when Trump rebrands the official POTUS account and starts spewing his vitriol through it, large numbers of people will realize they don’t want to deal with his bull shit, and some of their updates will fail to resolve in a timely manner.
This doesn’t happen to everyone, but if you unfollow someone and it works you aren’t gonna complain.
I checked and I don’t think I was following him. I don’t really use meta accounts. Did this not affect everybody?
Apparently, this happened because people were following biden and kamala. When trump got in, those accounts changed hands and became trump and vance accounts. Apparently thats how they do it. They are accounts for the current president and vice president. Whoever that is.
It would probably work if they just deleted their accounts.
At this point one should ask if they are trying to make people quit meta on purpose.
Obviously, fuck Meta, but…
“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady,” he wrote on Threads. “Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes.
“This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition. It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”
That sounds like a plausible explanation. If you followed when Biden was president, that same account is now Trump’s.
Which means there are likely millions of users either unfollowing or following the account since Monday. I’d be surprised if anyone wanted to hear from both Biden and now trump.
I couldn’t find an actual article, but here’s people complaining about Instagram doing the same thing four years ago:
Old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/l1y2je/unfollowed_and_blocked_the_white_house_account/
Hell, 4 years ago Biden was bitching that Twitter didn’t do this
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/22/politics/biden-twitter-white-house-accounts/index.html
I have heard from at least one person who deliberately unfollowed before Monday who suddenly was following again after the changeover. Maybe there’s technical difficulties there, but it’s a bad look for sure.
There’s just nothing to gain from intentional fuckery tho, and a very plausible reason.
Even if they “unfollowed” it might not have stuck and if they refreshed it still would have been there.
Things changing on the GUI but not where it actually matters is literally the issue here…
So I 100% believe a bunch of people experienced what you’re saying.
They’re just confusing client side GUI with server side database.
I definitely would consider currying favor with the incoming administration a potential gain, which is why even if this is truly a technical error, so many people would believe otherwise considering the messaging from Meta these past few weeks. Regardless of intentions, Meta has failed in their user experience at a time when many people are evaluating if these platforms are worth the trouble- purely as a tech business that seems like quite the misstep. Of course, the truth is that it doesn’t matter, we already know Meta is bowing to right wing pressure and actively choosing to allow harm to LGBTQ+, women, and other minorities on their platforms, and they shouldn’t get plausible deniability for their mistakes.
so many people would believe otherwise
Just like they did four years ago when the same thing happened…
That sounds like a major liability. Think of the hospital bills for all the eye bleaching related injuries if Donnie started posting beach pics…
