On June 9th, fashion blogger Michelle Rothenburger posted on Instagram a suggestion for a wedding guest outfit she proudly outsourced from thrift shops for 32 Euros – including a Ted Baker floral straw envelope clutch, and a pair of vintage hot-air balloon earrings and necklace for which she paid 6 Euros each.

Then, Rothenburger vanished from the Meta-owned platform.

For the rest of the month, the Switzerland-based creator who used to post three times a week on Instagram for her 20k+ followers did not upload any content. And no one would see what Michelle was wearing or finding in second-hand stores for the whole month of July, either.

The influencer was not sick, nor had she lost her password to access her Instagram account created four years ago.

Like thousands of users across the globe, Michelle Rothenburger took a break from Instagram after the content she regularly posted on the platform started to stall, making her doubt how much time she was dedicating to a social media outlet that was no longer bringing her feasible engagement.

“I used to spend between 4 and 6 hours creating each post. Now I try to spend no more than 30 minutes. My reach has dropped by around 75% in the last few months and it just feels like a monumental waste of time” – says Rothenburger, who moved from North America to Switzerland in 2018.

Taking a break: blogger Michelle Rothenburger didn’t post on Instagram for several weeks

Unbeknown of the break taken by the fashion influencer in Switzerland, Trish Martin, a digital marketing specialist based in Australia, was conducting her own social media experiment in June. She decided to stop posting any content on Instagram for 30 days and document the journey using rival network TikTok.

“I am leaving Instagram…for all of June!” – Martin announced on the last day of May. “I am doing a massive marketing experiment. Instagram is where my people are and it’s a big part of how I generate revenue. So, to completely ditch it for a whole month? Well… it’s not comfortable. But moving outside of our comfort zone is where we grow”, the content creator explained before signing off for the next four weeks.

During June, Trish would make daily updates about her life without Instagram and share them via TikTok and her email list. A month later, to her surprise, her Instagram account gained more followers from not posting anything than it did when she was uploading content daily.

“Instagram is going to play a very different role in my world from here on out that is for sure, and that’s exciting! Change is important in marketing; you’ve got to move and adjust with it. And if you focus on seeing change as an exciting thing instead of scary, imagine the opportunities that could come.”, celebrates Trish, who is back on Instagram but with less regularity in her content.

“I am definitely not leaving Instagram or anything. It still plays an important role in my business. But my strategy around it will be very different and it is no longer going to be my main social platform. After the experiment, things will never be the same again”, says the founder of the online business community Chromatical Club.

Over in Somerset, a county in South-West England, content creator Emma Shoesmith has noticed a lack of engagement in her posts since January, for which she hires a professional photographer once a year to shoot images for posts and online courses.

“I used to run a production company. So, apart from spending £500 on photos per year, I create all the content, from designing promo posts to shooting my own videos. I enjoy it and I’ll always try and repurpose it on YouTube or in my emails and not solely rely on Instagram to get my work seen”, explains Shoesmith, who went on to take drastic measures:

“I also unfollowed everyone on Instagram as a test to see if my engagement changed. It felt like quite a radical act, only reserved for people like Beyonce”, says Emma, referring to the American singer who has just released her seventh album, Renaissance, after a six-year hiatus, and who follows zero people on the platform. Like Beyonce, 20-year-old singer Billie Eilish also doesn’t follow a single person on Instagram, despite having over 100m followers herself.

Taking control: coach Emma Shoesmith regained focus after mass unfollowing people on Instagram

“Once I unfollowed everyone, I cut all the sketchy energy ties and my creativity started to flow. I can now keep myself focused on my own work and not get side-tracked by what my peers are doing. My plan is to come off it completely in the future. However, I need to have my marketing eggs in other baskets before I completely make the switch” – anticipates the content creator who pivoted to business coaching and mentorship in 2020, when the global pandemic swapped away clients and axed marketing budgets.

Michelle, Trish, and Emma have never met each other and share different interests.

The common thing between the three women located in different parts of the globe is Instagram, and how it is no longer a place they spend much of their time after a significant drop in the engagement witnessed across in-feed posts on the platform. And these digital creators are far from being the exception when it comes to Instagram users seeing less and less likes, comments, or followers interacting with their content.

Earlier this year, a research study released by social media scheduler company Later highlighted the dip in engagement numbers of in-feed posts, as Meta continued to push Reels as a priority on the platform: there was a 44 percent decrease in the average engagement rate for an in-feed post on Instagram from 2019 to late 2021.

“I remember when Instagram used to be fun. You would post a photo and the likes and comments would come pouring in. There was an incentive to keep your content coming regularly and frequently”, recalls Michelle Rothenburger.

For the past few months some content creators were finding solace in TikTok and its phenomenal reach; Others have decided to take their content to other social media platforms, while setting a deadline to quit Instagram.

“Instagram is dead to me. I recently announced that from September I will only be on TikTok and LinkedIn. In the past couple of weeks, I had 0.2% engagement on Instagram vs 500%+ on TikTok, plus thousands of new followers. It is a no-brainer”, confesses diversity and inclusion consultant Vanessa Sanyauke, founder of Girls Talk London, an organisation partnering with businesses to help them connect to female workforces and expand opportunities in male-dominated sectors.

Not everyone is thrilled to be on the Chinese ByteDance-owned platform, though.

“I only have a work Instagram but noticed that the only decent engagement had been from reels, and it limits the way I want to engage with followers. I only really use it for stories now, as a lot of my feed has been random accounts that I don’t even follow or have anything to do with”, says Saziso Phiri, a creative producer based in the UK.

“With the area of work that I am in, I am having to rethink how I approach social media content for my business. I attended a workshop on TikTok for business, specific to my industry, but having deleted TikTok about 18 months ago I am still a bit reluctant about returning”, ponders Phiri, who is also the founder of The Anti Gallery, a curation and artist development platform launched in 2016 to engage art outside of formal art gallery environments.

It probably doesn’t help that young adults who joined Instagram when it first came around, in 2010, are now in their 30s and with lots going on in their minds – namely bills, mortgages, and the perils of adulting in the real world. So, wrestling with a platform boasting more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide and an ever-changing algorithm that upsets most of them no longer seems to be a priority to consider.

“I am 38 now and there is a sort of boredom that has developed for me around software, it’s not quite as shiny as it used to be and my priorities have changed to making real in-person connections”, says Emma Shoesmith, who is about to start her first Telegram group for sacred life and business coaching.

Not happy: Chrissy Teigen told Instagram head that she doesn’t want to make videos

At the end of July 2022, amid concerns of users being unhappy with how Instagram has been discarding static content over the past 12 months after announcing, last summer, that the platform would no longer be a photo-sharing app, Adam Mosseri, Head of @instagram, tried to clear the air through using the format he wants people to use more: Reels.

“I want to be clear: we are going to continue to support photos. It’s part of our heritage,” Mosseri said while assuring users that he, too, loves photos. “That said, I need to be honest: I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we change nothing. We see this even if you just look at the chronological feed” – the executive tried to explain, while ignoring the fact that those still using Instagram will be more likely to engage with more videos thanks to the social media platform continuously twitching its algorithm and metrics to reward those posting videos with cash incentives and further exposure within the app.

Although Mosseri acknowledged that another Instagram update, a full-screen feed currently being tested for a small percentage of users is “Not yet good. And we’re going to have to get it to a good place if we are going to ship it to the rest of the Instagram community”, it is the negligence toward the photo format, and not how content is displayed on the app, that is displeasing former Instagram fans.

The attempt to justify Instagram’s updates and their push to get people posting more video content didn’t land well with model and actress Chrissy Teigen, who has over 38 million followers on the social media app. The TV personality complained on Twitter that she is no longer able to see photos posted by her actual friends – and they are not seeing hers. Mosseri who, according to the Financial Times, will relocate later this year and build out Instagram’s presence in London by hiring more staff to work at Meta’s new offices in King’s Cross, tried to play it down by answering that “Friends post a lot more to stories and send a lot more DMs than they post to Feed. If you want to make sure you never miss a feed post from a friend, add them to your favourites and they will show up at the top.”

Teigen wasn’t having it.

“The only people I know that post a lot to stories are the ones that know their photos get no engagement any longer, so they are doing the thing they find second best. If photos got the engagement they wanted, they wouldn’t do so many (mostly uneventful) stories.”, Chrissy rebuked straightaway in a tweet message. The interchange of public messages went on for a few more tweets where the only two clear things were how disappointed Teigen was with Instagram and how difficult the platform’s decision-makers are finding it to listen to its users, even the famous ones.

On August 1st, after seven weeks of complete absence, fashion blogger Michelle Rothenburger resurfaced on Instagram with a photo wearing 90s low-rise Diesel jeans she thrifted in Switzerland for 12 Euros. The blurred backdrop of the streets behind her was no different from her other 100s of photos posted prior to her break from the social media platform. But this time, the caption included more than the prices of the second-hand items used, it had a clear invitation for readers to check her blog… away from Instagram.

“Recently I have been focusing on Pinterest and it’s a great complement to my blog. I think brands would have much greater success, nowadays, if they focused their efforts on Pinterest rather than Instagram. I have already driven more traffic in the last few months from Pinterest to my blog than I think I ever did from Instagram”, highlights Rothenburger.

Since returning to Instagram, Michelle no longer has a regular posting schedule and doesn’t know when she will be posting again on the platform.

Since complaining to the head of Instagram that her friends can’t see her photos and telling Adam Mosseri that “we don’t wanna make videos”, Chrissy Teigen is posting more … Reels.