The source – techcrunch.com
Instagram today is making a chronological feed available to all users, as earlier promised, alongside another new feed-filtering option that will allow you to scroll through posts from your favorite accounts.
The features had been launched into limited testing starting in January but will now reach Instagram’s global user base by the end of the day on Wednesday, March 23 – a faster rollout than usual.
Users will be alerted to the new options, Following and Favorites, from a pop-up at the top-left of the app, under the word “Instagram.” From there, you can tap on which feed you want to view.
There are now three options for viewing your Instagram feed:
- the main, algorithmic Home feed;
- the chronological feed (Following);
- the new Favorites feed, which consists of accounts you choose.
Typically, this latter feed would include the accounts of best friends, family and perhaps some favorite creators. But you could use this option to curate any other set of Instagram accounts you wanted to easily view separately from the main feed. Users can have up to 50 accounts set as Favorites.
In addition, when scrolling through the main Home feed, posts from those accounts on your Favorites list will now rank higher and will be designated by a star icon.
In both of the two new feed options, Following and Favorites, posts will appear in chronological order without any other ranking involved, Instagram notes.
But there is one big caveat to these new options: neither Following nor Favorites can be set as the default.
