It started with a screenshot someone sent me in a group chat. A girl I vaguely knew from online spaces, she ran a vintage clothing shop, had been building it for five years, drove to flea markets in Poland and Hungary herself to find things, photographed every piece at home, wrote about each one like it had a story. One morning her account was just gone. Instagram flagged it for intellectual property violations because she'd been posting photos of branded clothes she legally purchased and owned.
She appealed twice, with receipts and documentation. The automated system said no both times.
I read that and felt something shift in my chest, because I also have an account I've been building for a while, and I realized in that moment that I'd never once thought seriously about what would happen if it disappeared. Not in a practical sense. Not in a "what would I actually do" sense.
So I started thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the worse it got.
The thing nobody tells you about building on someone else's platform
When you spend years growing an audience somewhere, posting consistently, figuring out what resonates, building something that feels like yours, it's easy to forget that none of it actually is. The followers are the platform's. The content lives on their servers. The reach depends on their algorithm. And the continued existence of your account depends on a set of automated systems that have no relationship with you, don't know your history, and can make a decision about your work in a fraction of a second with no human involved.
Becky Stone ran one of the oldest jewelry accounts on Instagram, 95,000 followers, 11 years of posts. She woke up one day suspended because the system decided she was impersonating a well-known figure. She was impersonating herself. She'd been paying for Meta Verified, which promises "proactive account protection," and it turned out to be completely useless the moment something actually went wrong. She got her account back eventually, but only because her congressman's office made a call. Her congressman. For an Instagram account.
She said something afterwards that I keep coming back to: "People are half killing themselves to get more followers on Instagram, and there's no guarantee it will be around."
During the Meta ban wave in 2025, thousands of accounts were suspended in waves. A family account got flagged for child exploitation. The photos were from a holiday. A fitness coach lost multiple business pages overnight. A Birmingham personal trainer watched a three-year gym profile disappear, the ban notice labeling his workout content as something it categorically was not.
Most of them got their accounts back eventually. But "eventually" for some of them meant months. And something about having that label in the system, even temporarily, doesn't fully go away.
Why this is scarier than it looks
The thing that gets me isn't that platforms make mistakes. Of course they do, they're running billions of pieces of content through automated systems at a scale no human team could touch. Mistakes are inevitable.
What gets me is that there's no conversation to be had when it happens to you. There's no person to explain yourself to, no manager to escalate to, no process that feels like it was designed for you to actually win. There's a form. The form feeds into a system. The system has already decided. And if you're lucky, some other automated process eventually catches the error and reverses it, but the timeline for that is entirely outside your control and could be days or could be months and there is genuinely nothing you can do to change it.
I kept thinking: what would I do? Practically, actually, what would I do? I have no backup system. Everything is on the platform. If it disappeared tomorrow I would have no way to reach the people who follow me, no record of what I'd made, no continuity.
That's when I started actually looking for alternatives instead of just feeling bad about the situation.
What I found when I started looking
I'd heard of Nostr before but written it off as something for developers and crypto people. When I looked more carefully I realized I'd misunderstood what it actually is.
Nostr isn't a platform. It's a protocol, the same way email is a protocol. Nobody owns it. There's no company that can wake up one morning and decide your account violates their guidelines, because there's no central company and there are no centralized servers for your content to sit on waiting to get flagged. Your content is signed with a cryptographic key that belongs to you, which means it's verifiably yours in a way that doesn't depend on any platform's goodwill.
Nostr.blog is built on top of this protocol. It's a place to write and publish that works by these same rules. Nothing you publish there can be taken down by a platform decision, because the architecture doesn't allow for that kind of central control. If one server stops hosting your content, your content still exists on others. If you decide to move, your content and your identity come with you.
I'm not going to pretend this is a perfect solution or that it replaces everything. It's earlier and rougher around the edges than Instagram or Substack. The audience is smaller. But it's the first thing I've found that actually addresses the problem I was worried about, which isn't "how do I grow" but "how do I make sure what I build doesn't just vanish one morning because a system I have no relationship with decided something I can't appeal."
The part I think about most
There's a version of this that's just about business continuity, about having a backup, about not having all your eggs in one basket. That's a real and practical reason to care about this.
But there's another version that's about something harder to name. When an algorithm flags your family photos as something criminal, even temporarily, even incorrectly, something happens to how you feel about that space. A lot of people in the 2025 ban wave didn't come back after getting their accounts restored. Not because they couldn't, but because they didn't want to. The platform had shown them something about what their relationship with it actually was, and they decided they didn't want that relationship anymore.
I understand that now in a way I didn't before. The question I keep asking myself isn't "how do I avoid getting banned" but "why am I building something permanent on a foundation that can be pulled out from under me without warning or recourse?"
I don't have a clean answer. But I'm paying more attention to where things live now, and who actually controls them.
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