Ello - a new app to play with

I've used Instagram for quite a few years now and I love it. You post a nice photo, say what you want about it and people say nice things in return. It has a few annoying things like not being able to post links so you have to add [LINK IN BIO] at the end of a post if you want people to read a blog post or visit your website. 

But in the main, I love it. 

Or I did, until I was one of the 'lucky' few who Instagram decided would like to try out their new algorithmic method of deciding which posts might be important to me and instead of my feed being in chronological order, my posts were all over the place. I hated it. Here was Facebook all over again deciding what I wanted to see and in what order. 

I took part in the 24 hour boycott. I've left feedback with the company in the hope they might change their mind about this. 

But now I've just discovered a new app called Ello and I'm warming to it already. It seems to combine the best of all the other social media apps. You can post just text and interestingly you can add bold or italics and you can also add a link to some text so each post is like a mini blog post in effect

You can add a photo and then continue typing, again like a blog post 

Each post has stats at the bottom telling you how many times it's been seen, comments, loved, you can repost and pull up the interactive menu for sharing

When you post a photo 

You can tap on the photo and it fills your screen 

And better still, you can zoom in on the image which is one thing that's always frustrated me on Instagram if I'm trying to spot some detail in an image 

You can choose to have a traditional layout for your feed 

Or you can choose a Pinterest style of feed 

You can also 'star' people you follow and their posts will then appear in a second feed so you can make sure you don't miss posts of certain people, or friends/family. 

That's what I've discovered so far in less than 24 hours! And I'm liking it. It may be goodbye Instagram. Ello is branding itself as 'the creators' network' so it might be that I can't move my business Instagram over, but at the moment that is still in chronological order anyway

Let's see how it goes. You can find me on Ello @joannakent where I'll be showing my quilting and quilt inspiration 

Joanna