An Instagram rival sees a surge in popularity

2015 until this month, Vero was little known with fewer than 200,000 users, according to CEO Ayman Hariri. Then cosplay members started posting photos of elaborate costumes and makeup. Photographers, tattoo artists and others followed. Last week, Vero was approaching 3 million users, Hariri said.

Vero had gotten so popular that some users reported widespread outages and error messages. Vero said it was working to keep up in response “a large wave of new users.”

Vero works on Apple or Android mobile devices and is free — at least for now. The company eventually wants to charge a subscription fee.

There are no ads, and the service promises “no data mining. Ever.” That means it won’t try to sell you stuff based on your interests and habits, as revealed through your posts. Of course, Facebook started out without ads and “data mining,” and it’s now one of the top internet advertising companies. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and started showing ads there the following year. You either make everything available to everyone on Instagram, or make everything visible only to approved friends. Vero lets you set the privacy level of individual posts. If you don’t want something available to all users, you can choose just close friends, friends or acquaintances. Vero shows friends’ posts in chronological order rather than tailored to your perceived tastes, as determined by software. Instagram got rid of chronological presentations in 2016, a change that hasn’t gone well with many users. Newcomers like Ello and Peach can quickly become popular as people fed up with bigger services itch for something new.

But reality can set in when people realize that their friends are not on the new services or that these services aren’t all they promised to be.

RICHARD DREW/AP Instagram users fed up with ads and the lack of granular privacy controls are flocking to the Vero app, center.