Instagram is becoming even more Reels-centric with a new home screen navigation, cementing its shift away from being a place to post personal photos for friends.
You might not like this. But we’ll get through it.
It’s OK to mourn an app that you once loved. People miss MySpace and old Tumblr. I still believe GroupMe was the best group messaging app I’ve ever used. Embarrassing to admit it, but I still miss old Twitter.
So it’s OK to feel sad that Instagram isn’t a place for photos anymore. I give you permission to grieve without being accused of being a corny, out-of-touch, avocado toast-posting millennial.
But the writing has been on the wall for a while now that Instagram is much more focused on showing you Reels and beefing up its DM features. You’ve surely noticed that your friends are posting to the grid less often — if at all. In fact, posting to the main feed has gotten so rare that there’s a whole new set of unspoken rules about how to make those posts — the precise order of a photo dump for the month, what is grid-worthy or not, etc.
And very likely, you’re spending less time on your main feed anyway, and spending more time in Reels. And unless you’re an influencer yourself, you’re probably not really posting that many Reels (if ever) — that’s for the pros. You like to just sit back and scroll, like TikTok.
This is exactly what Instagram has known for a while: Instagram is mainly a place for Reels and DMs, and the main action on there now is watching Reels and DMing them to your friends (which I certainly do!).
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, has known this for a long time now, and he’s said as much over and over, including in an interview with my colleague Peter Kafka recently.
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On Wednesday, Instagram said it now has 3 billion users and is planning changes to its navigation bar to focus more on Reels and DMs.
Bloomberg reported that it’s also testing a version of the app in India that opens to the Reels tab directly instead of to the home photos feed. This would be somewhat similar to the new iPad version they released — the first time they ever released an iPad-specific app! — that opens right into Reels.
(Notably, TikTok is currently banned in India, so a version that is extremely focused on short-form video in India makes even more sense, since the field is wide open.)
It feels like a lifetime ago (OK, it was only 2022) that Kylie Jenner and others lamented changes in Instagram’s algorithm that gave more recommended content and videos in your feed.
“Make Instagram Instagram again” was the rallying cry of many an influencer vexed by a sudden drop in their reach. But regular people were also frustrated by seeing fewer of their friends’ posts in their feed.
It probably didn’t help that at the time, Reels felt like a hasty clone and backwater — a place for TikToks that had been posted a week ago, or viral garbage. Now, Reels has caught up and feels fresh and fun — and the proof is in the ways that people are compelled to DM each other. Instagram added two weird (and, as far as I can tell, underused) features for Reels sharing: a way to view a feed of videos your friends liked, and “Blend,” which is a way to share your own algorithm with a friend in the DMs (this feature is weirdly fun, but use both at your own peril that your friends will discover you’re a total weirdo).
As Instagram evolves more and more into an Island of Doctor Mosseri TikTok/WhatsApp chimera, it’s OK to feel sad about what we lost. It’s not the photo app it used to be, but what else about your life is the same as it was in 2018?
Things change. The internet is rarely forever.