• I am telling a story, not asking for your advice.
• If you choose to offer advice anyway, it had better be goddamned spectacular.

So after Instagram demanded a lock of my hair before they would un-delete our account, it has stayed up for almost two weeks. But it has now gone into a repeated cycle where they have "Detected Unusual Activity" and I have to re-log-in once or twice a day and nothing will post until I have done that.

Presumably this is because of my vintage-2016 hacked, reverse-engineered way of posting to Instagram, possibly because I have been unable to MITM Instagram to extract a more modern app key since 2019. And searching Github for "const SIG_KEY_VERSION = '5'" turns up nothing.

So it turns out that sometime in 2021, Facebook finally made public an API that lets you post to Instagram. Previously it was only available to spam-factory "partners" like Later dot com. It only works if the Instagram account is attached to a Facebook Business page (not a user account) and it can only post to the feed, not stories. Because I guess Instagram thinks stories aren't important now, instead of being the only thing that matters? I can't keep up.

Anyway, because of the Instagram fuckery, I thought, "Ok, let's try the official API for feed posts at least, and just use the hacked API for stories. Maybe that will cut the fuckery by half." So I implemented the official Instagram API in my Facebook uploader. And that worked for a few days.

But now, Facebook has suspended the "DNA Lounge Facebook App" (that is, the API key I use to scriptably post anything) because it is "Creating A Negative Experience On Facebook".

As far as I can tell from the cut-and-paste bullshit they keep sending me, their complaint is that there is not a Privacy Policy explaining how users can request deletion of the data collected by the DNA Lounge Facebook App, which is never installed by an end user, and collects no information, as all that it does is post photos to our page. No matter how many words I use they steadfastly refuse to understand that there is no way for me to delete all none of the data that this app does not collect. Turnaround time on each of these email exchanges is 3-5 days.

This has happened before. It used to happen about once a year, and I'd have to spend a month swearing at them while we were unable to post, until it got escalated to someone else in the call center sweatshop who probably makes a penny more a week than the front line copy-pasters. But the frequency of this denial-of-service has increased.

Leaving us with our current "organic" social media presence being Mastodon, Space Karen, and... Tumblr.

("Organic" is what the VCs and private equity firms call a thing that they showed to your customers without you paying them for it and why the fuck would they do that??)

I don't particularly have any evidence that these "organic" posts (as opposed to paid ads) are actually being shown to anyone, let alone translating into ticket sales, so maybe it will be no great loss if they just stop entirely. But it's all just so fucking annoying.

Imagine an intrusive pop-up here groveling for you to subscribe to our weekly calendar mailing.

And finally, to reiterate:

• I am not asking for your advice.
• If you already deleted your account, and you think that everyone else should too, that's great and I am happy for you but feel free to continue not telling me about it.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.