Instagram announces new ‘Favorites and Following’ feature as it warns it is changing how the feed works

(AFP via Getty Images)

Instagram has launched new ‘Favorites’ and ‘Following’ features, intended to allow people to make better sense of their feeds as they become more full.

The announcement comes as Instagram warns that it will be making “more recommendations to your feed based on your interests”, adding extra posts from accounts users have never actually opted to follow.

The app has already started inserting other accounts into the timeline that its algorithm, but has warned that more are to come.

As that happens, it will encourage users to sort the people they actually follow into “following” and “favourites” in the hope of allowing them actually see posts from the accounts they follow.

The options will be selected by clicking at the top of the app, where the Instagram logo is found. That will bring up a drop down, showing “following” and “favourites”.

“Following” works like the news feed does now, showing posts from the people you have chosen to follow. “Favorites” encourages people to pick the accounts they like best, to make it harder to miss their posts.

People will not be notified when they are added to or removed from the favourites lists, Instagram said. And putting an account in it will also make them more likely to appear in the normal feed, where they will be shown with a star icon.

(Instagram)

Both new feeds will be sorting chronologically.

Instagram claimed the changes were intended to “help make the time you spend on the app feel more intentional”. It has been making a number of significant changes to the app in recent months as it looks to keep growing amid competition from other apps such as TikTok.