The Chronological Feed Makes a Glorious Return to Instagram

For people who originally adopted the platform way back when, the chronological feed is what Instagram had that was differentiated it enough from then-rival Facebook who quickly gobbled it up in an acquisition.

It was basically Facebook with photos and, in many ways, was a whole lot more fun.

Since then, the platform has undergone a raft of changes, one of which was to the vaunted chronological feed in favor of something that attempted to serve up relevant content based upon previous behavior on the app.

And, in many ways, this approach works better in terms of discovering new accounts you may not know about. But it also robs the app of some of its here-and-now relevance. After all, who knows when the picture you’re looking at was taken and, further, whether the associated account is still active, relevant, and a host of other issues. In essence, it made it very difficult to determine whether what you were looking at was relevant now or not.

Adam Mosseri hopes to change that with some new options in the future, one of which includes a chronological feed.

“We want people to have meaningful control over their experience. We’ve been experimenting with Favorites, a way for you to decide whose posts you want to see higher up, and we’re working on another option to see posts from people you follow in chronological order,” he tweeted.

In addition to this, the company is rolling out some new parental controls as well as the “take a break” feature we’ve discussed. Another new feature includes a more finely detailed collection of settings to “manage your account’s digital footprint.”

You can check out the new updates at this link right here.

Do you think a chronological feed improves the Instagram experience or is the bespoke content served up on the fly a better approach for “discovering” other accounts? Let us know your thoughts on Instagram’s changes to its feed in the comments below.

Check out some of our other photography news on Light Stalking at this link right here.

[Instagram]