If your Instagram feed feels messy and chaotic, then a new feature currently undergoing testing may be just what you need.
Spotted in recent days by Jane Manchun Wong, an app researcher whose efforts have turned up plenty of other Instagram-related tidbits in the past, the feature lets you “group the accounts you follow to make them easier to manage.”
Instagram is testing to “group the accounts you follow to make them easier to manage”, such as:
“Least Interacted With” and “Most Shown in Feed” which are counted in the last 90 days pic.twitter.com/REykEoMqu5
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) October 19, 2019
In its current form, the feature lets you sort all of the accounts into various categories, for example, those you’ve interacted with least over the last 90 days (in terms of liking their posts or reacting to their Stories), and those that have the most posts in your feed, again over the preceding 90 days.
It will also group them together according to the kind of content they show, such as art or travel posts.
The resulting lists make it easy for you to scan all of the accounts that you’re following. If there are any posters whose content you no longer want to see, you simply tap the “Following” button beside their name to banish them from your feed.
While the feature could certainly go some way to helping you better organize your feed, we should emphasize that at this stage it’s merely in a test phase and therefore may never see the light of day. But if the testing is deemed a success, there’s a good chance it could land on Instagram in its current form, or slightly modified, in a future update.
As for changes that have made it to the app, Instagram recently made it easier for you to manage the data that you share with third-party apps and websites. If you’ve been using Instagram for a long time, it’s possible you’ve forgotten which apps and websites you’ve authorized to gather data from your account. In that case, the new feature gives you an excellent opportunity to review your Instagram settings and make any necessary adjustments to the way that you share your data with various online services.