Scanning ahead…
Jon Devo on why social media habits might be changing sooner than you think
Instagram is dead, and from its ashes rises Vero? Vero is a social media platform I started speaking about a few years ago and mentioned here in DigitalCamera in 2020. Although it was created in 2015, Vero began gaining traction in 2018 as people grew frustrated with Instagram’s blind pursuit of trying to be all apps to all people, to the detriment of the creators who helped it become the fastest-growing platform on the planet in 2014-15.
But in the past year, a number of high-profile Instagram users have begun speaking out against AI-enforced engagement throttling and a move away from photography in favour of short-form videos. This has seen a wave of people jumping ship. Most notably, Canadian photographer and YouTube icon Peter McKinnon made a video about why he’s focusing less on Instagram and shifting over to Vero. Following his video, which has almost 1 million views as I type, tens of thousands of users signed up.
Vero is getting some things right that Instagram abandoned long ago. Essentially, it has a chronological timeline, it’s ad- and algorithm-free, and is designed in a way that encourages community. It’s everything Instagram used to be and more. The latest posts are at the top when you open the app. As you scroll through, you see older posts, just as you’d expect. It’s simple and it works.
Many of us have missed being able to attract meaningful engagement just from sharing photography. Images like this simply don’t have a place on Instagram anymore.
But Vero takes things further. There’s a distinct emphasis on the social aspect of using the platform: it doesn’t just allow you to post photos; it also lets you post links to websites, showreels or higher-resolution images. You can even create posts based on other content that you want to share, like games, apps and books. It feels like an app version of having your own blog.
Another aspect that works well is the ability to segment your posts between friends, family, associates, followers or the general population. Your posts are accumulated on three distinct profiles that you curate for those specific audiences. It’s less clunky than Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ and ‘Favourites’ functions. Choosing what to share with which audience is seamless and a great way to have a private, public and professional social media presence in one place.
If you want to discover new accounts, Vero allows you to search through ‘Featured users’ (celebs and influencers), but also makes it possible to search accounts under specific interests, including Music, Movies, TV, Games and Places. These tabs give users multiple ways to interact and find communities within it, much in the same way that forums do online.
When one platform is as dominant as Instagram has been for so long, it’s hard to imagine what will come next. But there will always be a new frontier for creative people to discover, explore and thrive within. Vero has been around for a while, but it has come into its own in the past year and looks like it has a bright future ahead of it. Will you be joining creators like Peter McKinnon and giving it a try? I’ve had an account since 2018, but I’d forgotten about it and had to password reset to access it again! If you do sign up, let’s connect; I can be found at vero.co/jondevo.
“What we know from experience is that there will always be a new frontier for creative people to discover, explore and thrive within”
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