This is a screen capture of my public profile on Glass. The URL for it is now at the top of each page here, but for convenience: glass.photo/matthewpiers

Glass is a subscription site, but profile pages can been seen by anyone, even if you don't have a membership for the service. That's where I've been putting a lot of my favourites from the past several years, including ones that I've never posted here, and some new ones that don't fit the format of my blog. So that might be worth checking from time to time, if you're so inclined, because Glass is going to have frequent small updates, while this site is reserved for larger and less frequent posts.

But Glass isn't a portfolio page – it's a social media service. And I'm really enjoying it for that.

Unlike Twitter, which I've been using for years, and unlike Instagram, which I never liked, Glass isn't a vibrant cacophony of garbage occasionally interrupted by something I'd actually asked to see. It's a site for photography by photographers, and possibly because it's a paid site, everyone there seems genuinely interested in what's happening around them. There are no ads, no videos, no influencers, no marketing, and no hashtags. Just photos.

Here's my Glass profile page again, with a small tweak – I've slid over one photo to reveal the photographer's name (it's me!) and a bit of the photo info. And that's how photos appear everywhere – timeline, categories, profiles – just as photos. No text. No clutter. When I see a photo I want to see larger, I don't know who took it until I've clicked on it. It could be anyone, someone famous or someone who's just posted their first image. And even then I don't know how many other people have 'appreciated' (✨) it. Or how many followers they have. I can see who follows them, and the photos from those people, but there's no count to quickly compare and rank people's importance.

I've been on Twitter for years, using Tweetbot with an expansive and carefully built block and filter list to make it bearable, and on Glass for two weeks. There's no comparison: for seeing and showing photos, commenting and getting comments, Glass is excellent. Glass is better now than Instagram ever was. And I'm very happy to say that Glass is filling that need for social-media time and keeping me away from the less healthy options.

I'm not leaving Twitter, because I am looking for more than photography. I use that site to follow musicians, authors, scientists, activists, urbanists, journalists, politicians, and yes, a few photographers. But I've drastically cut back the amount of time, the amount of interest, that I spend there.

I don't miss it. Instead I'm excited to see what new work I'll find on Glass, and feeling inspired to look at photos, and create some new ones myself, because of it.