even the "full" sized images are filled with compression artifacts and lose lots of quality after upload, not as badly as in facebook but still surprising and disappointing for a photo-centric app. i've tried a number of things to improve final quality but nothing worked well. if anyone has tips please share them!

It makes sense given the volumes of photos and bandwidth they have to deal with, but if they cared about visual quality they'd let users tradeoff number of daily uploads for higher quality/resolution but the know the vast majority views it on phones and couldn't care less.

There are probably UI patterns that could help balance the technical challenges bandwidth with the utility of high resolution images. Wikipedia for instance defaults to low resolution images but in 1-2 clicks you can access a high resolution view. This restricts the need to serve high resolution images to only the people who really do care about it.

It's not just bandwidth, it's also storage at instagram scale, but mostly because neither instagram nor the vast majority of their users find much utility in high resolution.

Bibliogram (similar to nitter.net for twitter and invidio.us for youtube) can help with some issues, mainly seeing pics fully without logging in. https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram There are a few instances up, and you can host your own as well.

I get a "this server is blocked by instagram" message on https://bibliogram.art

Even logged in looking at photos on a PC is utterly horrible, especially on a monitor with higher than HD resolution.

yeah that's the "terrible to begin with" part