Instagram just introduced Instants, a stripped-back, unfiltered, ephemeral photo-sharing app designed to bring spontaneity back to social media.
Instants lets you take a photo or video directly in the app, add text if you like, and send it to mutual followers or your Close Friends list, without allowing any edits. This also means no uploading from your camera roll because that would let you curate, and curation is precisely the enemy here. Recipients get one viewing window, and the content disappears after 24 hours.
The feature itself isn't entirely new, since Instagram had been testing something called "Shots" and "Candid" inside the main app before quietly rebranding and spinning them into a standalone experience.
It's impossible to talk about this without acknowledging the ghost of Snapchat past. Meta and Snapchat have a rivalry that is, by Silicon Valley standards, almost Shakespearean; spanning more than a decade of Meta building Snapchat-like features into its own products, Instagram Stories being the most successful and most obvious. Now, with Snap in a financially precarious position, Meta appears to be sensing an opening, and Instants is the latest move on that particular chessboard.
Instants aims to recover that original intimacy, the feeling of sharing something with people you know, rather than performing for an invisible audience. It's the same intuition that made BeReal briefly compelling, that made Snapchat feel refreshing in its early days, and that makes close friends Stories on Instagram a feature many people actually use most comfortably.
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