Instagram Is Introducing Three New Feeds So Kiss Goodbye To Cutting Down Your Screen Time

Instagram’s getting updates, and no, it’s not another gently-stolen-from-Tik-Tok video feature. In fact it includes the return of a long-lost love: the chronological following feed, which is great news for everyone who enjoys seeing content from people they actually know. Praise be to the metaverse.

Insta’s announcement is that it’s feed will be split across three different tabs, each showing you a different combination of content. You’ll be able to select what feed you want to view from the top left corner of the app.

The first is the Home feed, which is what Adam Mosseri (the head of Instagram) described as “the Instagram experience you know today”.

“[This is] where we rank content based on how interested we think you are in each and every post to try [to] make the most of your time.”

I’m unsure that I’m making the most of my limited time on earth by spending it looking at people who have more beautiful lives/dogs/houses/children than me but alas I am no tech-xpert.

There’ll also be more suggested content in the Home feed, so if you’ve clocked on to Instagram showing you posts from accounts you don’t follow, expect more of that.

There’s also the Favourites tab, which’ll show you all the posts from what Insta describes as a “curated list of accounts”: aka your family and friends. Hopefully this means you won’t have to scroll for 15 minutes through meme accounts screenshotting Tweets before you see pics of your friend from highschool’s new baby.

Mosseri described Favourites as a series of accounts you want to ensure you don’t miss updates from.

The final tab is your Following, which’ll be a chronological list of posts from all the accounts you follow. So basically, because the Home feed is going to have more and more recommended posts over time, the Following tab gives you an out and will let you see posts in order.

Mosseri essentially put the changes down to user experience.

“It’s important to me that people feel good about the way they spend time on the app and I think giving people ways to shape Instagram into what’s best for them is the way to pursue that goal,” he said.

Personally I think that would mean deleting any account with more than 7,000 followers, but I understand that I’m not getting paid the Silicon Valley big bucks.

I actually really like the idea of being able to opt out of recommendations, so shout out to Insta for making a rare social media update that might actually make its app more usable.

There’s no definite launch date for the new feed, but Mosseri said that tests will be coming out in the next weeks and Insta’s hoping to launch the full experience in the first half of 2022.

So all hail the return of the chronological feeds, and start brutally culling which of your friends/co-workers/family members/meme accounts will make it on to the esteemed Favourites tab. LBR, Insta’s just reinvented MySpace’s best friends list.

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