Instagram brings back the much-requested chronological feed

Instagram is introducing major changes on how users view their feed on the app, as the company looks to bring back the much-requested chronological feed to its platform.

The Meta-owned video and photo sharing service is introducing two new feed options - Favorites and Following - that will enable users to quickly catch up on the posts from their favorite accounts or accounts they follow, starting with the most recent posts.

This launch comes a few months after Instagram head Adam Mosseri had promised to offer a chronological feed option during his testimony before a US Senate panel in December last year, where he fielded questions on the child safety issues on the platform and its impact on young people.

Instagram has been facing scrutiny since late last year over leaked internal research that said the app adversely affected some young users.

The company had initially offered a chronological feed to users in its early years, however it switched to an algorithmic-driven feed back in 2016. A chronological feed displays the latest posts to users, sorted by time, from the accounts they follow on the platform.

Instagram's move to an algorithmic feed is however widely disliked by users, since they complain that they are missing a lot of posts from their friends and family or see a lot of old posts at the top of their home feeds.

How will the new feed work?

Following today's announcement, Instagram will start offering three different feed options to users - Feed, Favorites and Following. It has been testing these feed changes since January this year.

Feed will be the default home feed that will offer users a mix of photos and videos from people they follow along with recommended posts. Instagram said they will provide more recommendations to users to their feed based on their interests over time.

Favorites will show users the latest posts from a list of accounts they manually choose, similar to how it currently works on Instagram Stories. One can add up to 50 accounts to this list and make changes to it at any time. Posts from accounts marked as Favorites will also show up higher in their home feed along with a star icon, the company said.

Meanwhile, Following will show users posts from the people they follow in chronological order. One can access these feeds through a drop down menu on the top left corner of the app's home feed.

That said, it doesn't seem like one can choose these chronological-based feeds as the default feed at present. In comparison, Twitter currently allows users to choose between an algorithmic feed or a chronological feed as the default feed on the platform.

"We'll continue to build features like Favorites and Following to give you more choice and control over what you see, and help make the time you spend on the app feel more intentional" the company said in a blogpost.