Instagram in particular seems to have gotten much more aggressive in not letting you view anything without an account.
For whatever reason though businesses like restaurants and bars will often nominally "have" a wide range of social media accounts, Instagram is often the only one with actual content. I used to be able to reasonably use these but I now seem to get a wall requiring login immediately.
It's possibly/probably worse because I'm often doing this in incognito mode, which tends to make everything more aggressively naggy. Twitter seems to be fairly random as to when they'll let you, say, view replies or media or something without requiring login, while Reddit is basically fine on desktop (even better in the "old" mode) and a dystopian nightmare on mobile.
Pretty much everything "big" is much much worse on the mobile web, I guess because they figure they stand a pretty good shot at getting you to get The App instead. It sucks.
Mobile is especially bad lately since Firefox Mobile has gone walled-garden and you can no longer install a user agent switcher to get a true desktop page. The fact the "view desktop version" option on mobile browsers still tells the server you're on a mobile device is utterly perverse.
> Instagram in particular seems to have gotten much more aggressive in not letting you view anything without an account. <…> Pretty much everything "big" is much much worse on the mobile web, I guess because they figure they stand a pretty good shot at getting you to get The App instead. It sucks.
Those are two separate issues. Almost all features of Instagram, except for interactive widgets in stories, are available from the web (doesn’t matter mobile or desktop). Like with Facebook, I chose to not install the actual app on my new phone, but I do fire up their web versions sometimes. Considering the extent of functionality, Instagram actually works really smoothly, and I hear the same about FB’s non-basic web version. Though yes, they do require an account.
Speaking of Twitter, it also works well from the web (albeit with no support for their equivalent of stories), but curiously they block VPNs (or perhaps just EC2 IP ranges) in a way that completely breaks some of the site (such as user profiles).
Having to have an account is the problem. When someone sends me an Instagram link I used to be able to just watch the video and browse the profile. A bit later profile access was blocked. And now I can only watch a video once before it blocks for login. Only a matter of time before the window is completely closed.
On Twitter/TikTok I can watch any link without having to login. Twitter even allows anonymous search.
The post I’m replying to made two separate problems out of 1) Instagram requiring to log in, and 2) “everything big” being poorly usable on the Web. I’m not arguing with the silly login requirement (considering Instagram supports private profiles for people who don’t want to share), but providing a counterpoint to the (2).
> Almost all features of Instagram, except for interactive widgets in stories, are available from the web (doesn’t matter mobile or desktop).
Not exactly. When viewed in desktop browser, photo upload is not avaiable and you need to use developer tools to simulate mobile web browser view which is a workaround. Also, even in mobile web, you cannot upload more than one photo, even though this functionality exists in the app. These are very fundamental features of instagram, I think these are not so complex to implement in web versions.
For whatever reason though businesses like restaurants and bars will often nominally "have" a wide range of social media accounts, Instagram is often the only one with actual content. I used to be able to reasonably use these but I now seem to get a wall requiring login immediately.
It's possibly/probably worse because I'm often doing this in incognito mode, which tends to make everything more aggressively naggy. Twitter seems to be fairly random as to when they'll let you, say, view replies or media or something without requiring login, while Reddit is basically fine on desktop (even better in the "old" mode) and a dystopian nightmare on mobile.
Pretty much everything "big" is much much worse on the mobile web, I guess because they figure they stand a pretty good shot at getting you to get The App instead. It sucks.