Starting today, users will have the ability to repost public Reels and grid posts from other accounts. And similar to TikTok, reposts will be collected in a designated tab on your profile and sprinkled into the feeds of people who follow you. It’s a small but meaningful shift from how Instagram currently operates: until now, the most efficient way to share other users’ content was to repost it on your Instagram Story. Now, you can essentially reblog it.
Instagram is also pulling from Snapchat and adding an opt-in location map that lives in your private messages. The map shows the last active location for friends who have opted in to the feature; it also pulls content from specific locations, such as a music festival, where many people are posting from. It’s the Snap Map but redesigned for Instagram.
Mia Sato
I first rolled my eyes reading about this update – yet another feature nobody asked for added to the pile of bloat on Instagram. And yet after I saw it in the app, I instantly liked it. Maybe because I spend so much time on Twitter – who initially introduced this idea, despite the tech press going out of their way to ignore that fact nowadays – it felt instantly familiar and natural.
The implementation is somewhat odd. With a new dedicated button below posts next to Like, Comment, and Share, reposting is as effortless as liking. You can add comments or emojis later, as a quote-tweet equivalent. It was a good decision to separate reposts in a different tab on the profile, since for many this serves as a portfolio of sorts, and they would probably be reluctant to mix their own work with sharing other’s. How the interface shows reposts in the feed looks tacky though; Instagram adds a floating profile picture of the user who reposted on top of the post, obscuring part of it. I think that it would have been a much better choice to adapt the text underneath to say ‘reposted by X and others’ instead of ‘liked by…’, or even simpler ‘reposted and liked by…’.
Until now, many – me included – had used the ‘share to story’ feature as a substitute for proper reposting, so there was in fact some latent demand for something more native in the main feed. There are some subtle differences between the two: stories are ephemeral, disappearing after 24h, so they can be more casual, while reposts remain highlighted in their tab until you undo them, so in theory should have a longer shelf life and appear to followers who visit the app less frequently.
On the other hand, stories allow you to pick an image from a carousel post to share, which can be more impactful and personal, whereas reposting works on the entire group. It would be a neat idea if reposts of multiple-image posts would display the image you were on when you reposted, so if you scrolled to the third image of a five-image carousel and then hit repost, your followers would see that third image instead of the default first, to express something like: this is a great album, but this one was my favorite.
It will be interesting to see the dynamics that this new feature will spark on Instagram. Personally, I fear it will quickly become another tool that boosts existing popular accounts to the detriment of smaller and emerging creators, who simply don’t have the reach to gather enough reposts to break through the content deluge on the platform.
I don’t have much to say about the location map, I don’t even seem to have that feature on. It may not have launched in Europe because of the privacy implications, or it’s simply off because I think I disabled location access for Instagram on my phone, so it doesn’t have any data to pull for me. And of course, none of these updates are live on its website, always treated as an afterthought by Instagram.
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