This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Instagram is owned by Facebook... why would they do anything for the sole benefit of users?
Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
201–210 of 243 posts
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#202uBlock Origin `uBlock Filters - Annoyances` filter list (Not subscribed in a default setting) has a filter[1] already to override this dark pattern. [1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/05a3fea080d06...
Is that in the "anti-facebook list"?
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pinterest manages to do something horribly stupid and kind of abusive that I usually associates with adult sites ads: show you a preview of something that gets your interest, if you click to get access to it put you through a maze of forms and links all promising the result you asked for at the end, and then when you get to it they don't deliver and instead show other stuff you might like but really you don't because…
They have actually had one positive influence on my life. After having dealt with exactly what you described a few times, I learned that I don't need anything that's on Pinterest. If a search results returns a pinterest link, I ignore it. If I can't find it anywhere except that link, it's as good as a dead link so I move on. This can be extended to much of the internet. So much peace now.
I constantly tack "-pinterest" on to the end of Google searches...
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#204You can just use a fake account.
"Fake" accounts still allow behavior tracking.
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#205This has been causing me a fair bit of inconvenience at work as I quit Instagram last year (decided it was toxic) but still need to research people/trends in my design job. Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.
Goodluck with that. They ask for government issued photo ID in many cases for new accounts.
wtf. that is creepy as hell.
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#206This has been causing me a fair bit of inconvenience at work as I quit Instagram last year (decided it was toxic) but still need to research people/trends in my design job. Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.
FYI, you can only have 5 accounts per IP, so don't lose them (or just use a proxy to make a new account)
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, these profiles are not public anymore (in the common sense meaning of "public profile"). BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it?
The fun part is they are still public if you are the google bot. Open an incognito window and try going to a linkedin profile. Then try it with google translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=af&tl=en&u=htt... Odds are good you can still view the profile through translate because linkedin thinks you are google. LinkedIn, Pinterest and others want to be indexed by google, but don't want the content tha…
I have a user agent switcher add-on and many times I just have it spoof my user agent to be Google bot. the internet suddenly works as it is supposed to
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#208They also use meta robots=noimageindex,noarchive on every page without an opt-out which is so incredibly stupid and walled-gardeny for an image sharing site. I wanted to use Flickr instead but nobody else uses Flickr, then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code (that and Google completely ignores…
Lychee is a very good minimalistic self-hosted photo gallery: https://github.com/electerious/Lychee
Stack is PHP/MySQL so it'll run anywhere. I've been using for years now with no complaints.
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#209Support the federated alternative that is being built based on the same technology (ActivityPub) as Mastodon and Peertube. [1] https://pixelfed.org/ [2] https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed
Every time federation comes up, I always ask where the bridges are that allow "following" people on the non-federated sites (e.g. Twitter), and the answer is always vague and non-specific, suggesting that such bridges exist without any information about using them. I'd love to see a switching guide for, say, Twitter, that specifically says "here's how to transparently follow people on Twitter, and here's how to have…
Bridges are a (very necessary) migratory tool, but you're never going to get perfect connectivity while living in a walled garden, because the whole point of a walled garden is to block connectivity and interoperability. The lack of good controls for cross-posting across Twitter/Facebook/Instagram is one of the central problems (no pun intended) that these federated services are solving.
Some bridges do exist (see Matrix connectors), and I agree that it should be a very high priority to add more of them and improve the existing connectors.
But it's also important to understand that, yes, they're messy, and will probably always be a little messy -- because the services they are connecting to don't play nicely with others. If Twitter had an amazing 3rd-party API that anyone could use to write a custom client, view content, export data, and filter posts, then it wouldn't be as big of a priority to get off of Twitter.
However, all of that being said, I too would like to see more guides here. I spent a long time following Matrix before I realized there were public Discord bridges that could be used without even hosting my own server.[0] I just never saw it mentioned anywhere.
The publicity/documentation around this stuff could improve a lot.
[0]: https://t2bot.io/
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#210uBlock Origin `uBlock Filters - Annoyances` filter list (Not subscribed in a default setting) has a filter[1] already to override this dark pattern. [1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/05a3fea080d06...
Is that in the "anti-facebook list"?
> Is that in the "anti-facebook list"?
I have no idea if it is in that filter list or not as I don't use it but if you want to add the 'uBlock filters - Annoyances' list to your uBO setup follow steps below.
1. Open 'uBO Settings'
2. From within the uBlock Origin Dashboard, Navigate to 'Filter lists' tab (should be second tab)
3. Expand the 'Built-in' filter list options by clicking the '+' button next to 'Built-in'
4. Check the option for 'uBlock filters - Annoyances'
5. Hit 'Apply changes' button in top right corner