If you’re in the habit of liking questionable content on Instagram, now might be the time to change your ways. Instagram is rolling out new features that will make it easier to see what your friends have liked on the platform.
The top-right corner of the Reels tab now displays a “Friends” section featuring their profile photos and pink hearts. Tap it to scroll through Reels your friends have recently liked. You can also tap their profile photo on that Reel to send a reaction to them via direct messages.
(Credit: PCMag/Instagram)
“We want Instagram to not only be a place where you consume entertaining content but one where you connect over that content with friends,” says Instagram Head Adam Mosseri.
This comes five years after Instagram dropped the “Following” feed, which gave people a quick view of their friends’ activity on the app. That included who they followed, the posts they liked, and the comments they made. Not surprisingly, that got messy real quick.
But these days, engagement is the name of the game. You could previously see if a friend liked a post or Reel if you happened to stumble upon it, but now it’s easier to find them in one place.
“We want Instagram to be not just a lean-back experience but a participatory one, a social one, one where you actually explore your interests with your friends,” Mosseri says.
This differs from what rivals are doing. Elon Musk’s X dropped the ability for users to see what content their friends were liking back in June 2024, allegedly to stop them from being attacked for the content they liked on the platform.
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It also comes as one of Meta’s chief rivals, TikTok, goes dark in the US. Reels are very similar to TikTok posts, but Instagram’s algorithm does not feel as targeted and personal as TikTok, for better or worse. With TikTok down, the company has a chance to attract more eyeballs, and to that end, Instagram will now let you upload Reels that are up to three minutes long, doubling the previous 90-second limit. Mosseri attributes the change to feedback from influencers and creators that 90 seconds was “just too short.”
TikTok expanded its video length to three minutes in June 2021 and later bumped it up to 15 minutes in October 2022, creeping into YouTube territory.
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About Will McCurdy
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