Fonts In Use is not active on Instagram
Fonts In Use. License: CC BY-SA.
The Fonts In Use staff was never especially enthusiastic about maintaining our account on Instagram. The platform is antithetical to so much of the what we love on the web: hyperlinks, web feeds (e.g., RSS), advanced search, chronological timelines, archival functionality, cross-references, citations and proper credits, web standards, semantic formatting, and direct community connections, with freedom from corporate intermediaries and their agendas – the Open Web at its best.
We sincerely appreciate the 28,000+ people who’ve followed our account on Instagram, but the benefit of “being where the eyes are” has involved compromises that are increasingly incompatible with our staff’s values. It’s been almost a year since our last post on Instagram, and we wanted to explain why here, publicly.
Rejecting passive complicity
There are legitimate questions about whether Instagram is even an effective platform for sharing design anymore, but – more significantly – there are deeper moral considerations about the platform that can’t be ignored. Instagram and its parent company, Meta, have been involved in countless issues related to the invasion of privacy, psychological manipulation, unauthorized surveillance, corporate fraud, employee exploitation, security breaches, censorship, negative environmental impacts, copyright infringement, moderation negligence, and conscious facilitation of everything from housing discrimination to literal genocide.
It can be easy to forget or disregard all these issues while scrolling through a timeline of enjoyable posts from people you like. Surely, casually browsing photos of your friends or sharing some small design item doesn’t have anything to do with genocide, right? Meta has carefully engineered its experience to manipulate its users, and depends on this kind of passive complicity from otherwise critically-minded people to maintain its stronghold via the network effect. Their power is dependent on a massive user base continuing to use their platform without thinking too hard about the consequences on a larger scale.
It’s too much for us. Fonts In Use can’t justify supporting such a morally corrupt company with more content, energy, or attention.
Doing what feels right
Discontinuing our activity on Instagram matches a broader ethos at Fonts In Use where we try our best to operate the project in a way we feel good about, even if doing so risks the possibility of a bit more work, a smaller operating budget, or a reduced audience. We’re proud to exist as proof that you can operate a successful, sustainable organization without relying on so many of the dystopian companies and technologies many people accept as necessary evils these days. We don’t claim to be perfect but – if you’ll pardon the cliché – we’re trying to be the proverbial change we want to see in the world.
That mindset has led to other significant changes for Fonts In Use over the years:
- We stopped using Twitter, despite having tens of thousands of followers there, and embraced decentralized, non-corporate social media with Mastodon.
- We cut the use of third-party cookies and scripts from our website.
- We moved our website analytics away from Google and onto a privacy-friendly, self-hosted system.
- We rejected sponsorship from companies we find problematic.
While some of these decisions make our work trickier, there are also notable practical benefits:
- Our content and relationships with our community aren’t beholden to the whims of egomaniacal billionaires.
- Visiting our website doesn’t require annoying consent pop-ups.
- Our website loads faster.
- Our readers’ privacy is secure.
- We sleep better at night.
Best of all: despite abandoning all those practices accepted by many as inevitable compromises, Fonts In Use still has a stronger audience now than it ever has, by almost all metrics. More people visit the site more frequently, looking at more pages, and clicking more external links to sponsors, designers, and independent font companies than ever. Who knew removing unsavory variables from your online presence may actually be good for business?
Push the status quo
As with Twitter and Google, we don’t expect our discontinued activity on Instagram will have any immediate effect on that company’s behavior or bottom line. But maybe other designers reading this will reconsider how they manage their own content and relationships online, or be more proactive in removing toxic dependencies from their occupation. Maybe it will reduce the influence of predatory corporations on the world of typography just a little bit. One thing is certain: unless more people push against the status quo, the grip of horrible corporations will only become tighter and tighter.
If you’re considering a similar move away from questionable social media platforms, there's no better time than the present. Even if you don’t completely leave those platforms, you can always start building up an independent presence in tandem – on a decentralized social network, your own website, and/or an email newsletter – where you control your own content and aren’t trapped by any one gatekeeper to maintain connections with your community.
In the meantime there are several ways to keep up with what’s new at Fonts In Use:
- Subscribe to any of our many RSS feeds: for all posts, staff picks, comments, just the blog, or any tag, designer, contributor, format, user-curated set, category, etc. (most listing pages on the site have corresponding RSS feeds).
- Follow us on Mastodon.
- Sign up for our upcoming email newsletter.
This post was originally published at Fonts In Use