How to bring back the old chronological/following feed back on Instagram (and your favorites, too!)
Instagram's been notorious lately for their obnoxious homepage feed with lots of reels, recommended content, and people you don't follow.
Fortunately, there are ways to get the old feeds back and see pictures from people you actually follow.
Please keep in mind - Instagram is constantly updating and moving things around. This blog post might be outdated (in which case, feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do, but we're at the mercy of instagram here.
Any methods listed below can break or be moved/changed at any time, and I'll try to find a workaround, but nothing is guaranteed.
iPhone
Fortunately, on iPhone, Instagram hasn't hidden the feed yet. Click on the Instagram logo on your home feed (seen below) and a dropdown should appear, letting you pick following (Chronological), or favorites.
In addition, favorites are just people you follow that you put on a special feed. Click follow on their profile and click add to favorites to have someone appear on this list.
Android
The method and screenshots above seem to be the same on Android too. I have an iPhone personally so I can't speak much for it, but looking it up it does seem to have the same method to use the feed.
Feel free to let me know if it's wrong.
Browser
The latest Instagram layout update hid the dropdown for the following feed and favorites. There are a few methods to get them back.
kittyclickr userscript (Automatically redirect to following feed)
kittyclickr is a userscript by me that automatically redirects www.instagram.com to the following feed URL, meaning by default your homepage is the chronological feed.
It's an extremely light script that contains no trackers or ads, is fully open source, and you can look and see that all it does is redirect you to the following feed by default.
click HERE for more information and the download page.
URLs to load feed (Manually load following feed)
Although the dropdown might be hidden, you can still manually load the feeds or bookmark them if you want.
Chronological Feed - https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following
Favorites Feed - https://www.instagram.com/?variant=favorites
Past posts - https://www.instagram.com/?variant=past_posts
Those are all the methods that I know of for now. If you know any better methods, or something becomes outdated, please feel free to email me.
7/31/2023