I used to love Instagram. It was very easy to feel creative, sharing was fun. Then Instagram became part of Meta's dystopia. While I've always been patently aware how much personal data is being shared to fuel the advertising machinery, I thought that my browsing habits which include frequent usage of the Incognito mode and regular deletion of all tracing data I'm able to find would protect me from it all. It does sound very naive now that I'm writing about it. One day a friend sent me a screenshot in which he highlighted that Instagram was recommending him an ad based on my interest in it. I slipped, and I don't know when or how. Then we were chatting about it over Viber about how everything has gone to hell, and in less than ten minutes he sent me another screenshot - this time it was a news agency recommending him an article on data protection. Now that was scary and I really can't see how that could've been a coincidence. There and then I decided I would take the time to move all of my posts away from the prying tentacles of Meta and friends. This is me actually doing it.

Migrating text was an interesting exercise, but now comes the hard part. I need to figure out how to migrate 800M of media I downloaded from Instagram so it's easy to browse, it doesn't cost me much in bandwidth, and if possible in a way that would let me limit access to my friends. I'm assuming I'm going to need to use a CDN, but I've never set it up privately. For access, I could solve it in a quick and dirty way by installing a .htaccess file, or whatever the nginx equivalent is, but I'm afraid that the already limited audience of this page will lose the little motivation it has for it that way and that the whole exercise will not be worth the trouble.

I'm going to get some sleep and let the solutioning happen in the background.