I’ve been using Instagram as a way to stay up to date with all the local community events or small businesses doing events around me for the past couple of years.
With everything happening at Meta and TikTok, I’ve deleted and uninstalled most social media accounts and apps.
Do y’all have any suggestions for keeping up to date on local events around your neighborhoods without having to use Instagram or Facebook? Do I have to sign up for 30 email newsletters?
ive never used those services, ever. email/mailing lists have always just worked… but only for the last 25 years or so. ymmv
Say goodbye to your normie friends and make a new set to replace them.
You’re getting a lot of flack here but I completely agree and am facing down the same issue. The best alternative I’ve found is my local subreddit, which is fairly active around community events. There’s still a disconnect from the actual businesses, by and large, but it’s not nothing.
If you’re lucky they have an Atom or RSS feed somewehere. (Even if it just may be one from their back-end so they can show the articles on their news page). You could then put that in an RSS reader of your choice.
If you have some scripting experience you could check out Newsboat. You can use a script as source there, and that script then scrapes the their website and generates an Atom feed from raw HTML parsing.
I’m not sure, that’s the one reason I use Instagram also. You could use something like MyInsta, which blocks ads and I think lets you disable shit like Reels. You could also try using an RSS feed with proxygram, although I’ve found the public instances to be unreliable and I’m not sure if it still works. Otherwise, you’re going to need to somehow convince them to use a certain Mastodon instance instead (offering to host one for your local area might make people more interested, but even then good luck with that).
