It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing".
It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise.
Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected.
It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.
Honestly I'd imagine this is on purpose. Facebook wouldn't want their platforms to overlap too much anyway-- wouldn't that be putting all eggs in one basket, in terms of vision for the future of social interaction?
There's bets they're clearly taking across companies (like stories), and they definitely are trying to flow traffic between Instagram and Facebook, but to some degree they've kept each app their own and that has only worked in their favour so far.
It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing".
It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise.
Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected.
It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.