Latest Instagram Update Brings Back Chronological Feed And New Favorites List
The latest Instagram update has finally brought back one of the community's most asked-for features, a chronological feed. Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram, took to the app's website on March 23, 2022 to announce the update. The new view has been in the works for a while now, and Instagram shared plans to add the two additional sorting options to your home feed back in early 2022.
The new chronological feed, which is just called Following, is basically a breakdown of the latest posts from accounts that you follow. The system will list them chronologically by default, so there shouldn't be any setup needed in order to sort your timeline that way. Favorites is like Following, in that it also displays things chronologically, however it is only made up of 50 accounts that you've hand-selected to be those you're most interested in.
Mosseri said that Instagram also plans to add even more recommendations to your feed in the future. As such, it looks like Favorites and Following will be ways for you to keep up on the most recent posts from the accounts that you follow. He did not share any plans to make Instagram's default home feed chronological at this point in time.
A feature fans have been asking for
In June of 2021, Mosseri wrote a massive post explaining how Instagram's "algorithm" works to determine what posts it should show you. At the time, Mosseri said that Instagram had removed chronological ordering from the feed due to a drop in how much content users were actually seeing. "[As] more people joined and more was shared, it became impossible for most people to see everything, let alone all the posts they cared about," Mosseri explained.
He then claimed that people were missing 70% of the posts that were included in their feed. He also noted that almost half of posts from the user's close connections were being missed too. That's why Instagram moved to the new formula that ranks posts based on what the user cares about the most.
Despite the good intentions behind it, though, users have been looking for chronological order to return to the photo-sharing app for quite some time. Many have even moved away from the app because of the changes that Instagram made to the feed. Even though it isn't the default home feed, seeing the return of chronological ordering as an option should be a nice boon for many users who felt that the new algorithm wasn't showing them what they wanted.