So Long Path, the Social Media App That Made Way for Instagram

Path was the original Finsta. The social media network, obscure everywhere else in the world, but massively popular in Indonesia, was like a safer, less filtered version of Facebook. It was a place where Indonesians could be themselves, in front of their 150 closest friends. And soon, it will be gone forever. But do we even care anymore?

Indonesians took the news with the expected level of nostalgia. Path was, after all, a big part of all of our lives between the years 2010 and 2015. And, because no one uses anything but Instagram anymore, we posted all these nostalgic goodbyes on the very app that helped cause Path's downfall. Isn't social media sorta fucked up? It's like posting a selfie with your new boyfriend with the phone that your old one paid for.

“I reinstalled Path for old time’s sake," said Dennis Reinhard shortly after news of Path's shutdown hit his Facebook feed. "I was feeling nostalgic. I also saved a lot of old photos."

But what made Path so popular in Indonesia in the first place? I know it can seem like a lifetime since you last logged into Path, but try to remember how different the social media landscape was back then. Facebook was already in decline. It was full of political buzzers arguing all the time and people trying to sell us stuff. The problem then, like now, was that Indonesians were a bit too lose with those friend requests and we all typically had upwards of 1,000 friends on there, few of whom we actually ever met IRL.

Instagram was too new and too curated at the time. Every image was saturated with some weird color filter and people were only posting their best stuff. No one was brave enough to just post a selfie in a crowded rush-hour bus or a bowl of half-eaten instant noodles yet. Every photo had to be about the aesthetics and be 100 percent on-brand. If you were a traveler, you should post photos from your last trip to Gili Lawa or the Colosseum (in Rome, not the club in North Jakarta). If you were an intellectual, your posts should be the book you're current reading next to a cup of a coffee. You get the idea.

That's why Path was such a breath of fresh air. It was private, limited to 150 friends, which made it the perfect place to rant or shitpost without worry that your post was going to get out there in front of the entire country.

You could also use it to brag and show off how intellectual or edgy you were. Path had this one feature where we could post what we were reading at the time. Is there any better way to low-key tell everyone else how smart we are than that? It also allowed you to do the same with what you were watching and listening to, which made it the perfect space to show off how obscure and edgy your tastes were (you know, like movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and books by Haruki Murakami).

So what happened? Well, for one, Instagram got more "real," with the invention of Finstagrams and the addition of Instagram Stories. Then, as social media like Instagram caught on with more and more Indonesians, it became too much of a chore to keep up three-to-four different social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Path). At least one of those was bound to be forgotten, and while Facebook sorta sucks these days, it still has meme pages like S E M I O T I KA A D I L U H U N G 1 9 4 5, Qasidah Memes for All Occasions, and instant noodle fan pages. Path doesn't have any of those, so, so long Path.

"[Path] was fun because I only shared my moments with a few closest friends," Dennis told VICE. "But soon people I only barely knew were adding me on Path, and it felt like I had too many social medias to update. It got tiring. It’s time-consuming, too. So I started to leave those that I didn’t really need."

Soon Indonesians were as interested in Path as the rest of the world was… which is to say we weren't that interested in it at all. And Silicon Valley, which is obsessed with money not nostalgia (unless nostalgia = more money) figured it was time to shut it down. It was good while it lasted, and despite it's lack of popularity abroad, it helped change the game (Path had those emotional responses to posts looooong before Facebook did after all), and give everyone a safe space to rant.

So join me in a saying a semi-tearful so long to Path… in an Instagram Story.