On Telegram, MyInsta is “instasmash”, Instaflow is “instaflowupdates”

There isn’t a functional open source frontend that I’m aware of, the best you can get is modded like MyInsta or Instaflow (or Revanced if you want open source mods)

I saw it as an open source Reddit alternative a few years ago and signed up, then left and went back to Reddit because nobody was using it. Then the API stuff happened, some Reddit users switched to Lemmy so I’ve been browsing it now, switched between a few instances and am now back here.

(I do wish it had more communities for specific topics and locations like Reddit has, and ironically a lot of FOSS discussion is still on Reddit also.)

Or use a distro that doesn’t come with ads

Yeah the exact thing you described happened here as well, it’s a tiny bit annoying although not enough for me to switch instances over

463k people actually liked that photo?