Instagram is a hostage situation. It has photos and videos from the people in your life, but it will only show them to you occasionally—most of the time you get algorithmically-chosen slop. This means you can scroll for hours on this so-called social network and learn very little about the people you care about.
Maybe you like slop, which is up to you. If you miss your friends and family, though, there’s a hidden way to get them back. Just head to https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following in your browser. This will show every post by the people you follow, with the newest posts first. Scroll until you see something you’ve seen before, then close Instagram. The way it used to be.
I recommend bookmarking this link and using it every time you feel like browsing Instagram on your computer. You’ll get the social benefits of keeping up with your friends without the time sink of scrolling. Win-win.
But what about on your phone? Honestly, I recommend not browsing social media on your phone, but if that’s not an option for you, there’s still things you can do. You can find this timeline in the official app by tapping the Instagram logo in the top-left corner, then tapping “Following”. There’s no way to make this your default timeline in the official app, so I recommend using your phone’s browser instead. Bookmark the link above and use that when you feel like looking at pictures.
I tried adding this alternative timeline to my home screen as a web app but it didn’t work—Meta rigged it so that all such shortcuts re-direct to the slop timeline. But I did manage to make a Shortcut for the iPhone that will open the correct link in your browser—download that here. Add it to your home screen and you’ll have a slop-free Instagram, available in one tap. You can even change the icon to a camera.
Android users: I don’t have as elegant a solution for you. I recommend making a bookmark in your browser. If anyone in the comments comes up with anything I’ll update this piece.
Gosh, I wonder why they don’t make it more obvious that this is an option.
It’s a mystery…
@JustinPot Re:
As much as I would like to blame Meta for rigging things in their favour, this is an issue with how all browsers implement installable web apps. They always open to the website’s suggested homepage (from the manifest metadata), regardless of which URL you were at when you installed. I have the same complaint about my Mastodon web app: I want it to always open to notifications, but the installed version on my phone always opens to the home feed.
To my knowledge, there’s no built-in way to override the web app home URL (other than using a regular old shortcut to open the site in a web browser). Not sure if there are any decent extensions that support it.
It almost feels like a glitch that this exists, which is a sad, sad commentary on where we’re at.
I can’t disagree.