There is a version of Instagram where you only see posts from the people you follow, in the order they posted them, with no suggested content from strangers and no recommendations built from what you lingered on last Tuesday.
It is not a rumor, a third-party app, or a setting hidden behind a developer flag. It is two taps from the home screen, and it has been there for years.
It also will not stay on. Close the app, reopen it, and you are back in the algorithmic feed. That single design decision is the reason a feature most people do not know exists has suddenly become the subject of legislation on the other side of the world.
Quick facts
- Tapping the Instagram wordmark at the top of the home screen opens a menu with Following and Favorites
- The Following feed is reverse chronological and shows only accounts you follow
- It resets to the algorithmic feed when you close and reopen the app
- Australia’s “My Feed, My Way” proposal would let users 16 and over set their preferred default feed
- Platforms that refuse could face fines of up to 109.2 million Australian dollars
- The broader Digital Duty of Care draft would switch off recommendation algorithms and infinite scroll for under 16s entirely
- Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the average experience “gets much worse” without ranking
- Mosseri estimates uptake in markets where the option exists sits in the low single digit percentages
Where the switch actually is
Most people never find it because it does not look like a setting. It looks like a logo.
Alongside Following there is Favorites, which narrows things further to a list of accounts you choose by hand. If you follow 800 people and actually care about 30 of them, Favorites is the more useful of the two, and it is the one almost nobody sets up.
There is also a middle path for people who do not want to abandon recommendations, only steer them. Under Content preferences there is a section called “Your algorithm” where you can list topics you want more of and topics you want less of. It is genuinely effective for subject matter, less so for individual accounts, where blocking, muting or tapping “Not interested” on a suggested post works better.
Why the reset matters more than the button
A setting that does not persist is not really a setting. It is a detour.
Instagram launched the Following and Favorites feeds in 2022, and at the time the company was explicit that they could not be made the default. Four years later that has not changed in most of the world, with one instructive exception: in the Netherlands, European rules obliged Meta to let the non-personalized feed stick. The technical capability plainly exists. What has not existed is the obligation.
Australia is now trying to create one. The proposal, called “My Feed, My Way,” would require platforms to give every user aged 16 and over an actual choice of default feed, delivered through a push notification rather than buried in a menu. Non-compliance carries penalties running to 109.2 million Australian dollars. It sits inside a broader draft Digital Duty of Care framework that would go considerably further for younger users, switching off recommendation algorithms and infinite scroll for under 16s altogether.
That under-16 provision will sound familiar to anyone who read about California’s new child safety package, which bans algorithmic feeds and autoplay for the same age group. Two jurisdictions on opposite sides of the planet have independently arrived at the same conclusion about feed mechanics and minors, within days of each other.
Mosseri’s counterargument is better than it sounds
Adam Mosseri has spent the week arguing publicly against the thing his own product already offers, which is an awkward position to hold and, to his credit, he has not hedged much.
What the head of Instagram says happens
“If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers,” Mosseri said. “Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more.”
He describes the average user experience as getting “much worse,” says demand comes from a “vocal minority,” and puts uptake in markets where the option already exists in the low single digit percentages.
The mechanics of that claim hold up. A purely chronological feed rewards whoever posts most, and the accounts that post most are rarely your friends. They are brands, publishers and anyone running a content schedule. Remove ranking and you do not get a quiet feed of people you know. You get a firehose sorted by posting frequency, which is its own kind of manipulation, just a dumber one.
Reported figures suggesting engagement can fall by as much as half when users switch are also entirely plausible, and here is where the argument gets slippery. Engagement falling is presented as evidence the experience got worse. It is equally consistent with the experience getting less compulsive. Those are not the same finding, and only one of them is measurable from inside Meta’s analytics.
Research on ranking systems keeps landing on that ambiguity. When researchers examined why X users kept seeing content that irritated them, the answer turned out to be that replying to something teaches the system you want more of it. The algorithm was working correctly. It was optimizing for a signal that had stopped meaning what it was assumed to mean.
The Following feed has existed since 2022. What has never existed outside a handful of regulated markets is the ability to make it stick. Photo via Pexels.
Where the other platforms stand
| Platform | Chronological option | Does it stay on |
|---|---|---|
| Following and Favorites, via the wordmark menu | No, resets on app restart in most regions | |
| Threads | A Following tab alongside For You | Varies by version and platform |
| X | Following tab beside For You | Generally remembers the last tab used |
| TikTok | Following and Friends tabs | No, For You is always the landing feed |
The pattern is consistent. Every major platform offers the escape hatch, and none of the ones built primarily on recommendation will let it become your front door. That is not an oversight in any of these products. It is the product.
What to actually do about it
If you want a calmer Instagram today, the realistic advice is not the Following feed, because you will lose it the moment you close the app and you will not remember to set it again. Build a Favorites list instead and get in the habit of opening that. It survives the same reset problem, but a short curated list is worth the two taps in a way an 800 account chronological firehose is not.
Then spend five minutes in Content preferences telling the algorithm what you do not want. That setting does persist, it applies to the feed you will actually be looking at, and it does more day to day than any amount of toggling between tabs.
The larger question is not going to be settled by anybody’s settings menu. Instagram has demonstrated it can make a persistent non-personalized feed work, because it already does so where the law requires it. Australia is testing whether that requirement spreads. Mosseri is probably right that most people will not use it. He is also arguing very hard against giving them the option, which is a strange amount of effort to spend on a feature he expects a vocal minority to ignore.
