Social media ugh

I’m down to one social media account that I use with any frequency, Instagram. I honestly don’t love it, I can’t stand Meta, and I have a lot of qualms about using it, but I’m using it. Why, you may be asking yourself, if I don’t really like it do I use it? A very good question.

Over the past two years I’ve become a sewist—a sewer? I never know what word to use here, but a person who sews her own clothes. And, in order to find out about new patterns, what people are making, learn more about specific patterns, I needed to go where they were. Yup, you guessed it, they’re all on Instagram. I revived a dormant account and started to follow people who sew and knit and crochet. But, most importantly to my ugh on the title of this post, I started to use hashtags for specific patterns to find out how people were liking them, what modifications they made, etc.

Now comes the ugh. Recently Instagram made a change, you can still search for a hashtag, but you can no longer see all recent posts with that hashtag, you’re only options are “Top Posts” or “Recent Top Posts” Let me say that how they define “top” is a complete mystery. And, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why this change was necessary? It’s leading to me spending less time on the app, which is probably the opposite of what they want, right? But it may be better for me in the long run.

I have, through a lot of different channels, stumbled onto the blogs of people whow sew and write about it with frequency, but this feels like a rarer thing because so many people abandoned their blogs for social media. For all things yarn related this isn’t a big deal because Ravelry exists and is wonderful. But, for sewing, it’s been harder and I’m caught wondering why I’m feeding this content machine and if I shouldn’t continue to search out blogs for my RSS reader. But then I wonder how to find them? To be honest, I’ve found quite a few through Instagram, which is just ugh, ugh, ugh and the cycle continues.