I have to create one for personal reasons. I know it's inherently un-private, but how can I maximize privacy while creating & using it without running into problems?
Hopefully someone has an answer! I don’t need instagram, but I miss it. There’s currently no better alternative for following fashion.
100% couldn’t agree more. No platforms can equal it because there are many people making high quality posts about all fashion related topics there
Isn't it possible to follow the same people on YT shorts or something where you have more control over your privacy?
I’m not very familiar with how YouTube works now, do they have hashtags or something similar to find people with the fashion I like? It’s been so long since I’ve used insta, I don’t remember who I followed.
Well afaik, most of the creators put their stuff up on shorts as well. And on YT you've the freedom of signing up with whatever email, using a VPN and adblocking services. Or you could totally use the popular frontends as well. And I've seen people use hashtags in shorts. I personally don't use hashtags much so I don't know if you'll experience the same thing.
Just accept that its not private, use the website (not the app), and don't upload anything that you aren't comfortable with being public.
You can also sign up with a burner phone number.
I've been using barinsta for a while now, and while it crashes sometimes and often takes ages to load my feed (I follow around 150 accounts) it's way better than the official app imo and enough to browse and occasionally react to my friend's messages. My one rule is to never post my face and I don't upload pictures of people in general, but I guess that depends on what you have to use it for. On and obviously no location tags in posts, but I don't think I have to explain that on a privacy instance ^^'
sadly barinsta development stalled over a year ago and in my case I get banned every time I use the app and need to do weird captchas on the official site.
Look for third party clients if you can. I don't know much about Instagram but third party clients are usually much better if they exist
instagram aggressively bans all third party clients, so barinsta (android) and bibilogram (web frontend) has all stopped development.