Instagram users will soon able to mute accounts without unfollowing them completely, good news for anyone who wants to secretly silence friends and family without them knowing.
The update is intended to give the application's millions of users greater control over what posts they see while scrolling through their feeds, the firm announced in a blog post today. Instagram stressed that muted accounts will never know they are being shunned, and they can quickly be unmuted.
It's a simple process. To mute an account users can tap the menu in the top corner of the post and chose whether to mute posts, stories or both. New images showed the feature will pop up next to existing options, including the share and block buttons. It will roll out "over the coming weeks."
The Instagram blog fully described the update. "With this change, you can make your feed even more personalized to what matters to you," it read. "When you mute an account, you can still see posts on their profile page and get notified about comments or posts you're tagged in. The accounts you mute will not be aware that you've muted them. You can always unmute an account to get their posts back."
In a separate enhancement announced Tuesday, Instagram revealed a new way users could share feed posts to their stories. "When you come across something in feed that inspires you—like a post from a friend raising money for a cause or a photo of a new design from your favorite brand—you can now quickly share that post as a sticker to your story for your friends and followers to see," it said.
The feature, now available on Android and rolling out to iOS in the next few days, can be accessed by tapping the paper airplane button under a post. From there, it can be added directly to a story. Additional refreshments being made to users' feeds will include a new "caught up" notice. That update, first reported by TechCrunch, is reportedly in the testing phase with no finalized release window.
Earlier this month, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom teased a series of changes were on the horizon.
"We're building tools that will help the IG [Instagram] community know more about the time they spend on Instagram—any time should be positive and intentional," he tweeted on May 15. "Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it's the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this," he continued. "We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously."
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