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Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

I used to browse through my instagram feed a few times per month. Just to keep updated about those friends who often posted there. Now it's mostly crappy shorts and I can't even find the "friend feed" anymore. No idea if it's just well hidden or completely gone. Now I don't use it anymore at all.

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It is so well-hidden, in fact, that there is no visual indicator that it exists at all, so you cannot be blamed for thinking it is gone. On the homepage (house icon) tap the Instagram logo and select "Following." It will present you with a chronological feed of posts from only those you follow.

Again, there is NO ARROW or any UI to indicate this is possible. You used to be able to set it as the default view, but that has been eradicated it seems.

Wow, I've been using instagram for 5 years and I just learned that there's a following-only feed. I had always just assumed that Instagram was designed in bad faith to always interleave posts from people you didn't follow to try to capture your attention. It's incredibly annoying that I can't set this as my default.

You just discovered OG Instagram. The feed used to be just your friend's posts and nothing else. Maybe an occasional ad, but the first few years it was mostly ad free if I remember correctly.

I've found it. I'm quite sure the drop down wasn't there a few months ago.

But the sad reality: nobody is posting anything anymore. I follow around 500 real people I know in person, and in the last 30 days they published only a few posts. Very short feed.

So instagram became something completely different over time, and I still opened it occasionally, because I associate it with old memories. To feel closer to people I lost touch with, or didn't see for a while. But instead I get bombarded with BS and ads (and the occasional "real" social media post), without me consciously noticing the change for years.

This is why I don’t understand why my family/friends keep wanting me on Facebook or Instagram. It’s not about keeping up with each other. They just want it to be slightly easier to send me memes. But if I wanted to browse memes, I could just go do that. I don’t need them sending me their feed with a bunch of jokes that are funny to them, but not me.

I have a lot of unread messages on those platforms. And I'm not going to check if it's just stupid memes, or if some more personal messages hide there. Googling my name puts my contact details and phone number on the first page. So anyone who wants to get in touch should be able to.

I was on it for the comic strips, but the rest of it is so noxious to me that I don't want to go there just to get a feed of comics.

Oh well, there's always GoComics :) It is missing a lot of the new ones that are on Instagram, though.

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