Social
Instagram's friends-first feed test is a tacit admission that Reels went too far
A new default view puts people you follow back on top. Creators are nervous.
For three years Instagram has been quietly turning into a video app. Now it seems to be checking whether that was a mistake. A test rolling out to a slice of users makes the home feed lead with posts from people they follow, pushing recommended Reels further down.
The change sounds small. It is not. The recommendation-heavy feed was the company's answer to TikTok, and it worked on paper: more time spent, more video watched. It also made a lot of longtime users feel like strangers in their own app.
The friends problem
Instagram started as a place to see what your friends were up to. As recommendations took over, many people stopped posting to the main feed at all and moved their real lives into Stories, close friends lists and group chats. A friends-first feed is a bid to win those posts back.
Why creators worry
For creators who built audiences on recommended Reels, the test is unnerving. Reach from strangers is how small accounts grow. If the feed shifts back toward existing follows, discovery could get harder for anyone who is not already big.
Instagram will likely try to split the difference, keeping a discovery lane while restoring the friends feed. Whatever it lands on, the test is an admission that more video was not the same thing as a better app.