Instagram can be made into something that is not just a mirror of your Facebook. If there's little difference between the two, you end up with the same problems - FOMO, envy, self-loathing. Instead, if you follow artists/photographers/creatives, you can find an interesting, beautiful world. Of course, there's a tension here. The more popular someone is, the more likely their feed is to devolve into brand endorsements. That commercial force corrupts.
So while its possible for instagram to be less superficial that Facebook, its a constant battle.
This is my primary issue with Facebook and one of the reasons I stopped using it. It's fine while you have a tight social circle, but once you have several social circles on Facebook, it's very difficult to navigate those kinds of tastes, whereas in real life it's never really an issue because the people never meet.
As another poster said, Facebook is most useful as a collection of contacts, but that usefulness is constantly at war with being able to express yourself.
I know G+ gets a lot of hate but the circles aspect seemed well implemented and made compartmentalizing your different social/professional circles much easier and more transparent. I wonder why FB doesn't allow something similar?
I've been tempted to join FB in the past, not to partake in the social activities, but as a tool to manage my contacts, but I'm incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of my different social groups and my professional contacts sharing the same connections to me. If I could completely separate different circles to ensure they have absolutely no overlap or ability to see my other connections I would probably use FB.
Instagram is really toxic.
I would argue that they don't - you only think they do, and that's the real issue. Not judging as I've been in that mindset myself. I'm a pretty self-concious person but I truly don't think people our age care about likes. You mentioned being mid-20's which I also mentioned in my post in case this issue came up. I understand that children and teenagers care about likes (and I've seen articles with evidence to back that up) but I think by our age that's gone (or didn't ever really exist that strongly as we were too old by the time social media went super mainstream).
Edit: Thought you were the parent who mentioned they were mid-20's, just realised you are not the parent. Curious what age you are (roughly even, if you don't mind) as I think that has a lot of bearing on this conversation.
Intsagram was a nice tool to see cool pictures and keep in touch with artists. It was like a hi-res Tumblr without the drama and the crap of Tumblr. Then I decided to start uploading photos and follow people in know in real life and that was the biggest mistake I did.
In addition to what you said, Instagram is really toxic. Because I followed lot's of people, my following/followers ratio was something like 350/80. I heard some people talk about how sad it is that I only have 80 followers. One time I followed someone I know and she didn't follow back, and I when I asked her why she didn't follow back, she said that she didn't know it was me (I didn't use my real name) and she thought I was some random ass loser because I didn't have many followers.
I later realized that in real life, people judge you based on how many likes you get and how many followers you have. It's now about the content, it's about how popular you are. If you don't get likes and followers you are seen as a loser/not cool.
That's what made me delete my Instagram account. Not to mention how shitty the app is when it comes to battery life. People complain about the FB app being shit, but IG is not that much better. It consumes a lot of battery life and has so many irregular activities and runs a lot in the background.
Most of the visually enticing bragging has moved onto Instagram, where the content is front-and-center and all about the number of hearts, imitating the style of celebrity influencers: beach scene with brand cocktail, friends taking a multi-selfie at an event, etc.
Conversely, my Snapchat is full of relatively mundane stuff: morning selfies with makeup on point, silly antics at a party, funny faces and filters.
To me, Instagram is actually the most frustrating, as it's the one that amplifies discrepancies between the popularity of your friends the most. For those of your real life friends who attract a lot of likes, it makes you feel like an increasingly irrelevant fan of a rising celebrity; while those who get very little validation are attract solely the sympathy heart, and often get deleted at the end of the day, leaving both the poster and you dissatisfied.
For these reasons, Instagram is a bad fit for people who are self-conscious about their relative lack of popularity, which is -- let's face it -- quite a few people. On the other hand, it's a great fit for people who, for whatever reason, can get plenty of likes from strangers and friends alike: no wonder it's the favored platform for social media influencers and their sponsors.