I am in a similar position, yes. I’ve resisted for so many years, but Instagram right now is the only place where some of the local organizations I’m interested in post. Clubs, town events, even leftist social centers who are usually sensible to online privacy and megacorp dependence sometimes only have an instagram or facebook page.

Right now I have a text note with the urls to the websites of the instagram pages that don’t have a newsletter/RSS feed. And another note with the link to their instagram pages, that I sometimes check out. Luckily you still don’t necessarily need to login to access an account’s recent posts from the browser, so as long as you periodically clear your cookies, a browser will do.

I also have been trying to convince some of these pages to create an account on Mastodon or use Gancio, if available. Even a Telegram channel would suffice. Some of them (two) did, but stopped to update it after a few months because most reach comes from facebook/instagram and they won’t bother to post stuff on another platform

be mindful of what info you want out of instagram before opening it. open it, get what you were looking for and get out. dont let it suck you in. turn off notifications. maybe install it in the work profile (if you use android) and leave the profile disabled when youre not using it.

i try to only open it once a week, like i do with my personal email. otherwise i get sucked into it when i procrastinate. but i admit i mostly rely on some friends finding out about local events.

Meetup.com is actually fairly decent about finding events in your area, it’s fairly diverse. Game nights, snowshoeing, park walks, mountain training for climbs, etc.

Start asking yourself what exactly you will miss from the local events news that you collect today from I.G. and what real value that you are really getting from it and go from there.

Do you need all that information and anxiety?

Do you have examples of things that we could help you point where there are alternatives?

Are you looking for social gathering events news happening around? What type?

You’re getting a lot of flack here but I completely agree and am facing down the same issue. The best alternative I’ve found is my local subreddit, which is fairly active around community events. There’s still a disconnect from the actual businesses, by and large, but it’s not nothing.

ive never used those services, ever. email/mailing lists have always just worked… but only for the last 25 years or so. ymmv

Say goodbye to your normie friends and make a new set to replace them.

maybe an RSS feed or pay a street urchin to check up on businesses for you every now and then

I’m out of ideas beside those

I’ve been using Instagram as a way to stay up to date with all the local community events or small businesses doing events around me for the past couple of years.

You have?? This is what I was using the platform for but then, many years ago, they forced an algorithm on us so I was no longer able to use it. Most of the posts I see are days old so I always miss events.

I would love if more establishments / organizations would use newsletters and public calendars. I’ve been trying to tell people, you want to own your content and your mailing list, but Meta makes it so easy for them to do things that it’s an uphill battle.

I use an RSS reader to deal with newsletters. I use BigNews but there’s also Stoop which give you an email address to subscribe to newsletters without them flooding your inbox.

talk to people irl

I’m not sure, that’s the one reason I use Instagram also. You could use something like MyInsta, which blocks ads and I think lets you disable shit like Reels. You could also try using an RSS feed with proxygram, although I’ve found the public instances to be unreliable and I’m not sure if it still works. Otherwise, you’re going to need to somehow convince them to use a certain Mastodon instance instead (offering to host one for your local area might make people more interested, but even then good luck with that).

Its not perfect, but you can anonymously browse Instagram using imginn.

There is also proxygram, which is similar to imginn, but if you don’t want to set up your own instance, you can use others via the Libredirect extension.

How about you read about it in the local newspaper?

If you’re lucky they have an Atom or RSS feed somewehere. (Even if it just may be one from their back-end so they can show the articles on their news page). You could then put that in an RSS reader of your choice.

If you have some scripting experience you could check out Newsboat. You can use a script as source there, and that script then scrapes the their website and generates an Atom feed from raw HTML parsing.

My Nextdoor app is full of local events. Maybe yours is too?

I’ve seen Nextdoor for parts of Los Angeles and it’s full of garbage, making it less useful. It really depends on how your neighbors are using it.