SoapZone Community Message Board

one of the band members of the band I love (Home Free).

I joined Instagram back in the spring of 2020. I generally don't like social media and have never been on Facebook, Twitter, X, Threads, Snapchat, whatever. But I wanted a place to post pictures for friends and family to see and I wanted to see their pictures in return, so I created a profile on Instagram. It was public for, oh, maybe 5 minutes and immediately a bunch of "people" began following me. I swiftly made my account private and booted the folks I didn't recognize. As those of you on Instagram know, you get suggestions for people to follow, usually based on if anyone you're already following is following them. For instance, just last week I started following (I'm assuming) a former SZ poster because posters I was already following were following her. However, I've been tripped up before. I follow, and am following, a person I thought was a cousin from Georgia based on the account's name but I recently saw her name in the comments section under a Home Free post so now I suspect she's a fellow fan. Frankly, I don't have much interest in following/being followed by every single HF fan and have denied a few requests from HF fans to follow me.

And of course there's the random "trolls" (bots?) who want to follow you, who all seem to be buff looking men with some kind of message in their bio about positivity or making the world a better place or loving the Lord your God. Yeah...no. (I mean, I DO love the Lord my God but that doesn't mean I want ALL His children following me).

Last week, I got a "follow" request from a person with the same last name as one of the band members. Her account is public; there's three posts, one of which is a picture of said band member and his sister with a caption reading "My two lovely kids". This tracks. There's also a photo of the poster holding a child that *might* be the band member's son (I'm 90% sure it is but I'm bad with faces <g>). The final post is a shot of the band. The poster doesn't quite look old enough to have a 40 year old son but eh, she could've been a young mom or maybe she just takes REALLY good care of herself (or gets a bunch of plastic surgery to make it look like she does). I check who's following the poster and three of the five band members are, including the supposed son. I started scrolling through who the poster is following; I didn't see any of the band members--not even her son--but there were a lot of names so I stopped scrolling. The account looks to be new.

About a day after I accepted her "follow" request and agreed to follow her, I got a long message addressed to "Dear fan", thanking me for my support of her son and the music the group is making. Um...OK. Today, I got a "hi Vicky!" message. Now I'm undecided if this is a legit account from the band member's mom and she's just really enthusiastic to connect to the fans (or really bored) or if this is someone else that I'd rather not be followed by. Right now, I'm ignoring the personal messages, waiting to see if more are coming.

Social media is hard, man <g>.