I created an account that's about me learning to draw. I did this pattern: uploaded a pic from my phone, then write the description at my laptop. For each pic, I discuss what I learned and the overall journey. Nothing crazy. Nothing controversial. Nothing illegal in the remotest sense. It was taking me 10-15 minutes per pic, so I wasn't slamming the server. No VPN. My family asked me to set this up so that they can see my art instead of me texting pics. I was just doing this on my day off because I don't have time to mess with it during the week....
It was flagged once, and I verified my contact info. It was flagged again an hour or so later, so they had me upload a face pic (which I did from their app). Then, an hour later, they say that it doesn't follow their community standards and that my account is permanently disabled.
It all happened today. Only 15-20 pics total (I don't know exactly how many, so it's probably actually less).
At this point, I can just vibe code a website for my artwork, but I would assume that what I am doing is exactly the thing that Instagram was intended for!
That’s the more standard practice with Instagram and Facebook.
Separate accounts almost certainly correlates with problematic behavior and your existing account is a basis for trust. In part because your stakes are higher.
While in this case, you didn’t lose hardly nothing.
But, as a general rule, I keep all of my accounts separate. There's too many horror stories of a person getting locked out of one account, and then they can't do anything else.
Separate accounts are the only safe option.
I think my takeaway on this is just that Instagram isn't worth the hassle. I did lose the write-ups that I did for my pictures, though (which is why my upload pace was so slow).
Typically, Instagram accounts are linked with a Facebook presence.
That’s the trust model.
Anyway, whether the Instagram juice is worth the squeeze, depends on why you want the juice and how much you want it.
I disagree, though, that it's spam behavior. It's "well, it's time to set up my account" behavior.
I mean, it's not like they could provide for a human to review after they asked for me to take a selfie. A selfie that shows the same person as the one that has used the facebook account with the same email address and face for over a decade... No, that's definitely asking too much. Or perhaps informing the user of concerning behavior, because all that they did was point to "community standards", which said nothing about what I was doing.
Apologies... my snark is not directed at you. It's just the exasperation towards a system that makes actual human participation impossible, while assuring that bots are the only ones who can get something done and yet stay under the radar.
Wasn't that before Facebook took over the company?
>what can I do?
Stay as far away from Meta as possible to avoid further enshittification?
LOL Exactly!!!
I was only doing it because my family asked me to. Meta killed that, too, I guess.
think about the distribution for "number of pictures a new Instagram user posts on their first day"
then think of how far of an outlier your behavior was.
But, whatever. They set up an automated system that weeded out a human while letting bots run rampant.
Maybe we need a page about "falsehoods programmers believe about human behavior", but they wouldn't read it. :/