Back then, posting felt less heavy, but more personal. Finstas, Close Friends and photo dumps all came along as new ways to make the app feel more engaging, but also as ways for us to change how much of ourselves we share, and with whom.
Sixteen years ago, Instagram started with a pretty simple idea: square pictures, a caption and a chronological feed. Since then, we’ve said goodbye to Tumblr, welcomed Snapchat, BeReal, X and TikTok, and watched our relationship with Instagram change along the way. Yet we’re still here, using it almost as if we have to. But what keeps us tied to it? And at what point does a platform become too transformed, too complicated, or simply too far removed from what made us like it in the first place?
The old days
We posted a lot of selfies. Like, a lot. The feed was about us. We used Instasize to keep the whole picture, added a Valencia filter, put some cute lyrics in the caption and threw in a few hashtags. Some people even had a second account for their more “artistic” photographs. And we knew pretty much everyone we followed.
The feed was chronological, and once you’d seen all the posts from the people you followed, Instagram would tell you: “You’re all caught up.” It was simple. After that, you could discover new things if you wanted to, but there was no endless stream of content waiting to keep you scrolling.
And the Activity section? It put everything on blast. You could see what your friends liked, which posts they commented on and who they had just started following. Still, we were so carefree.
Do all the Instagram updates help?
Today, we have reposts, Stories, Instants, photo dumps, multiple captions, music, polls, subscriptions, Close Friends and plenty more. Slowly, Instagram has become a little overcomplicated for what started as a social photo app. Of course, there are features we miss and others we genuinely appreciate, but posting itself seems to require much more thought now.
Posting anxiety is a thing many of us experience. The pressure to make our lives look perfect has never been stronger. Photo dumps might have replaced the single, carefully selected picture, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve stopped curating. Instead of one perfect selfie, we get ten carefully chosen images that are supposed to look like they weren’t carefully chosen at all. A nice outfit, a well-composed dinner, a holiday view, a few pictures with friends to show we’re having a good time. Random, but not too random.
Having a secret private account with the same posts as your main one, plus the next five pictures, just so you can plan your feed perfectly? Happens.
Having a Finsta so you can keep the nice aesthetic on your main account while using another one as a diary for your close friends, where you’re supposedly more like yourself? Normal.
Not posting anything, maybe keeping a couple of highlights so you look hard to get and hard to read? Usual.
Buying the verification check mark so people take you more seriously and your chances of becoming an influencer are higher? Worth it.
At least we think so.
There’s a certain irony in all of this. Finstas, Close Friends and photo dumps were partly about escaping the pressure of the main feed. They offered more privacy, less polish and a way to share things without making them available to everyone. But even these formats have developed their own unwritten rules. Being authentic has become something we can curate, too.
Everything for the algorithm
Today, your home page can be so optimised that you might not even see your best friend’s post for three days. You can star them, manually set them as a priority or turn on notifications for their new posts. But you’re probably not going to do that for everyone you follow. Alternatively, if you tap on Instagram at the top of your feed, you can switch to the Following view, which is chronological and doesn’t mix in suggested accounts and ads every few posts. Useful, yet somehow not something people talk about very often.
There are endless amounts of tips, hacks and tricks for working in favour of the algorithm: post at the right time, share the right number of pictures in the perfect order, use the perfect hashtags and find the right rhythm. You can follow all the advice, post more often than feels natural and optimise everything around the character you’ve created in your head. But if we all follow the same road, social media starts losing some of its original purpose: to share, to connect and to be yourself.
A feed can now look like a cheap glossy magazine, with ads appearing every few sections. A little chaotic, but still controlled and personalised. For each and every one of us.
Being aesthetic is nice, and almost necessary if you’re building a personal brand, promoting a service or managing the Instagram account of a pizza place. But this visual language has made its way into personal accounts, too. Our feeds increasingly resemble carefully managed products, complete with their own identity, content strategy and target audience. Somewhere along the way, the line between sharing your life and marketing yourself started to blur.
So, what are we posting for?
Maybe Instagram hasn’t completely lost its original purpose. We still want to share things, keep up with friends and have somewhere to put the pictures we take. But the way we do it has changed. The main feed became a portfolio, the Finsta became a diary, Close Friends became a private room, and the photo dump became a carefully disguised version of spontaneity.
We keep inventing new ways to post more casually, only to turn those into new formats with their own expectations. Perhaps the question isn’t whether Instagram has become too complicated, but whether we can still use it without thinking so much about how we’re being perceived.