Jason Fried wrote about finding a positive experience when he joined Instagram:

Every scroll through Twitter puts at least one person’s bad day, shitty experience, or moment of snark in front of me. These are good happy people – I know many of them in real life – but for whatever reason, Twitter is the place they let their shit loose. And while it’s easy to do, it’s not comfortable to be around. I don’t enjoy it.

Every scroll through Instagram puts someone’s good day in front of me. A vacation picture, something new they got that they love, pictures of nature, pictures of people they love, places they’ve been, and stuff they want to cheer about. It’s just flat out harder to be negative when sharing a picture. This isn’t a small thing – it’s a very big deal. I feel good when I browse Instagram. That’s the feel that matters.

— Look and Feel and Feel by Jason Fried

I too have recently joined Instagram. I was curious to see what all the fuss was about and having discovered a few good accounts that embrace my different interests, I was surprised at the diversity of content on Instagram. Put it this way, it's no longer selfie central or at least it doesn't need to be.

I've always been doubtful about my coming back to Twitter and seeing how positive a difference it would make on me. Truth be told, I've not been that active, and I've purposely kept the number of accounts I've wanted to follow down to a minimum but there's still a number of issues I have with Twitter.

The ongoing changes to the time-line on the web interface makes it difficult to use. With tweets being promoted and inserted, I just can't easily follow what's happening. Not a big problem as I mostly read my time-line using the Echofon OS X app.

One feature of App.net that I really like was that I could verify my own account. This still isn't the case with Twitter, and the rules for having your account verified depend on a number of factors. Whatever the rules are, you can't help but notice that it's usually famous people that get verified status. I would like to see Twitter allowing users to verify their own accounts as well as a filter that only displays content from verified accounts. It would be one way to filter out the nonsense and garbage on Twitter and get back to the content that really matters.

Given my tweets have been infrequent recently, I don't have the number of spam accounts following that I did in the past, but it's still an issue. I did a clear down of my followers recently and found a couple of questionable accounts.

My experience on Instagram has been extremely positive and the visual aspect of the network is something that is much more enjoyable to flick through than Twitter is. It's just a more pleasant place to be.

My following list is biased towards mountain biking and fixies of course with a smattering of notebooks, the NFL and National Geographic plus a few Internet celebs whose work I enjoy.

Initially I'll be keeping my account private. If you request to follow me and I know you, I'll approve it. If I don't know you, you don't get approved. Sorry, that's just how it is for the moment.