An Occasional Party

On showing up without confusing access for ownership

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to show up on social media, or even if I want to show up at all. I grew up in a time when the internet did not decide who was cool. If you were, you were. There was no need to document it, prove it, or perform it for an audience. People knew you in real life, and that was enough.

When I first joined social media, it felt like the front row to connection and creative expression. You could post a photo because it said something. You could share a thought without turning it into a campaign. You could follow someone because their eye, taste, or way of seeing the world made you want to engage and inspired you to dream.

The creativity pulled us in. The conversation held us. The community made the internet feel human. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm stopped being a tool and became the room itself. It began deciding what we see, who we hear from, and what kind of expression gets rewarded. The social part became harder to find. Now Instagram feels less like a place to connect and more like a place to compete for visibility.

Influencers, content creators, and celebrity figures have become the natural center of the app. They produce at a pace that the platform rewards, and everyone else is left deciding whether they want to keep up.

Underneath that is a tension many people feel but do not always name. The pull between being who you are and becoming what performs. Between sharing something because it matters to you and shaping it so it lands. Between wanting to create freely and knowing the system rewards whatever keeps people watching.

The internet has trained people to believe that if you are not constantly visible, you are falling behind. But falling behind what? A trend? A format? A version of yourself that only exists because the platform rewarded it? At some point, you have to decide whether you are building a life or building proof that you have one.

After a while, it becomes harder to tell if you are posting because you have something to say or because the platform has trained you to keep feeding it. I tested the theory myself. I overshared, and the algorithm picked it up almost instantly. Suddenly, I was worthy of being seen. But we should not speed past the part of the conversation people like to avoid. Yes, some of it is the algorithm, but a lot of it is the audience.

People are not only scrolling past your post. They are choosing where to leave their presence. A like, a comment, a share, a save. Those are not passive gestures. They are choices, and every choice tells the algorithm what to push futher.

That has changed how people show up. Some are sharing more than they ever intended to. Private moments become proof of relevance. Personal stories become engagement tools. A thought becomes content before it has even had time to become true.

I understand how easy it is to become part of the machine because I was becoming part of it too. Before I was hacked in 2021, I was posting three times a day and growing a real community that had reached 35K. I was consistent. I was engaged. I was feeding the platform because, at the time, it felt like the platform was feeding something back.

Then everything disappeared. In one moment, I understood that none of it actually belonged to me. Not the account. Not the audience. Not the access. At any time, Facebook, Meta, or a hacker could decide I was doing too much and cut me off from the community I had spent years building.

That experience changed my relationship with Instagram. I stopped treating it like a home and started seeing it as an occasional party to attend. A place I could show up to, share something, connect with those who were there, and leave without confusing attendance for ownership.

Others have started to make similar decisions in their own way. Some stop posting altogether. Not because they have nothing to say, but because the exchange no longer feels even. Some step back. Some stay but give less. Some remove themselves entirely for the sake of their own clarity.

And then there are the people finding their way to places like Substack. Not because Substack is above the internet. It is still a platform. It still has metrics. It still has its own rules. But there is something nostalgic in the way people are using it. It brings you back to the personal blog, the letter, the essay, the longer thought that does not need to be cut into slides or shaped for the feed.

It gives expression a place to stretch out. A place where people can write without needing to become more consumable. A place where the reader chooses to arrive, instead of being pulled into whatever the algorithm decides they should see next.

That may be why Substack feels different right now. It gives people another way to measure value. Not by how often you appear, but by what remains with the reader after you do.

Instagram is still useful. It can sell, introduce, amplify, and move culture. I am not pretending otherwise. But it is harder to call it a space for connection when so much of what we see is shaped by performance.

So maybe the question is not whether we stay or leave. Maybe the question is what parts of ourselves are we willing to keep handing over to a space that keeps asking for more?

Until next time,

Allie, the TBOYaficionado