For all haters of algorithmic feeds in social networking apps, today is a big day. That’s because Instagram just announced it’s bringing back the chronological feed.
The new version of the app has two optional feeds, which you can get to by tapping on the Instagram logo at the top. The first is called Following, and this is the chronological feed of every post from every account you follow, while the other one is called Favorites and is pretty self-explanatory.
You can add up to 50 accounts as your favorites, and when choosing this feed you’ll only see their posts – also sorted chronologically. Additionally, posts from accounts in your Favorites will show up higher in the home feed. You can make changes to the Favorites list at any time, as people are not notified when you add or remove them.
And now for the bad news. Neither of these new feeds can be set as the default, at least for now. So every time you go into Instagram, you’ll still see the default algorithm-based feed, and if you want either the Following or Favorites feed, you’ll need to manually select that. Still, it’s a step towards giving users more control over their usage of the service.