The chronological feed may be returning to Instagram in some form.
In a tweet, Instagram’s PR team explains that the social media platform wants to provide users with “meaningful control over their experience.” To that end, it has been experimenting with different ways of arranging users’ feeds. One method, called Favorites, would let users choose whose posts they’d like to see higher up in their feeds. Another method would display posts from followed accounts in chronological order.
These sorting tools aren’t rolling out right away, and they won’t be forced on users. “We want to be clear that we’re creating new options — providing people with more choices so they can decide what works best for them,” the PR team said.
The topic came up yesterday during Instagram Head Adam Mosseri’s appearance on Capitol Hill, where he explained to a Senate subcommitte that Instagram has been working on a chronological version of Instagram “for months now,” with a target launch date of Q1 2022.
Instagram switched away from a chronological feed in 2016, and now relies on its algorithm to serve up a feed that’s based on user activity and other mysterious factors. There’s no way to just see the most recent posts first and scroll back in time. There were hints it was testing a chronological “Latest Posts” feature in early 2020, but that feature never materialized.
This reintroduction of a chronological feed could help address concerns surrounding the impact of Instagram’s content on young users, as people could—in theory—avoid algorithm-driven posts and videos, and just “Take a Break” when they come to the end of their feeds.
Facebook, whose parent company Meta also owns Instagram, currently allows people to select people and Pages who appear first in the newsfeed by going to Settings & Privacy > News Feed Preferences > Manage Favorites.
