Social media in 2025

One of the benefits of starting to disengage myself from social media is rediscovering RSS feeds for news sites I follow (instead of relying on a billionaire funded algorithm) as well as finding blogs that have really good writing.

Case in point, this article from a couple of days ago describing the evolution and future role of social media in photography.

Photographers After Social Media

Unlike the author, I’ve never cared for Instagram. The limitations of the format that it allows always seemed heavy handed, arbitrary and hostile to photographers. And anytime I posted a photo of our dogs I got inundated with spam offers of monetizing my content. 

But as he points out, now it’s just a metastasizing thing that defies description.

I used to love Flickr. It always seemed to have great respect for photographers, and at the time had a vibrant community and the ability to find groups with common interests. I’ve had an account since 2007. I might start using it again but I was way over the limit of what I could have without shelling out some money. So I recently went through and deleted almost all of the photos from my account.

My involvement on Flickr stopped around 2012 when I put away my cameras for various reasons. Going through my account and looking at the groups I used to hang out in, it’s sad seeing how many of them are virtual ghost towns, without any new posts or comments in years (sometimes 10 or more). There do seem to still be a few groups that are still active though. Maybe I need to spend a bit of time reacquainting myself.

2025 will be a year of me shifting my online focus away from algorithm-driven social media.