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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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

Letters and talking IRL.

Telegram.

Phone call, SMS, RMS, WhatsApp, discord, signal, snapchat, Skype, teams, RSS, Facebook, pixelfed, ect