Instagram is making a number of changes this weekend that will make it look more like TikTok, now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a law banning the app if parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell it. Those changes include extending Reels to three minutes in length and changing the long square grid on your profile to a rectangular layout, as Adam Mosseri announced in his Story and his Story, respectively. If you consider how some users have designed a certain look of their pages around the square grid, the latter will not go well with everyone.
And it’s not the third thing: now there’s a tab in your Reels feed that shows the videos your friends have liked or added Notes to, Mosseri shared on . Which means, of course, that your friends can more easily see what you like and interact with, too. Didn’t we admit that this was an attack back when Instagram removed them – and eventually removed them – from your followers? In any case, changes have already started to emerge. You will now see a button showing your friends’ activity at the top right of the Reels tab, which will bring you to a new feed.
Addressing the switch from the square grid in his Stories, Mosserri wrote it to match users’ posting habits. “I know some of you really like your squares, and square photos are kind of Instagram’s legacy, but at the moment a lot of what’s uploaded – both photos and videos – is vertical in its orientation, so a photo is compared to a landscape or a square, and it’s just too much to crop them,” he says. like this. “So I know it’s a change, I know it’s a little pain, but I think it’s a temporary pain.” He added, “I think people will be happy in the long run” that their posts don’t appear to be “violently terminated.”
Instagram already offers a TikTok-like view of user profiles under the Reels tab, but the latest move gives the images in the main grid a rectangular treatment (only in the grid, however, they will expand to normal size when you click. one by one). On making Reels longer, Mosseri said in another post that while Instagram has long focused on short video, “we’ve heard feedback that this is too short for those who want to share longer stories.” Previously Instagram only allowed Reels up to 90 seconds long, or you can work around this by sharing a longer video as a non-Reel post.
TikTok, which also started with a focus on short form, a few years ago, and in 2022. If TikTok really shuts down, users will look for a new home for that kind of content.