Instagram isn't for your friends any more

Published 29 September 2026 · Updated 6 October 2026

You open Instagram to see what your friends are up to. Half an hour later you are watching a stranger tile a bathroom.

You are not using it wrong. This is what the app is now. In January 2025, by Meta’s own measurement, 7% of the time Americans spent on Instagram went to posts from their friends. On Facebook it was 17%. The figures come from Meta’s records, quoted by the judge in the US government’s antitrust case against the company. What filled the gap? In the judge’s words: “For the most part, short videos posted by strangers and recommended by AI.”¹

Strangers keep you longer

Friends used to fill more of the app. Between early 2023 and January 2025, the share of Instagram time spent on friends’ posts fell by more than a third. The share spent on Reels more than tripled.¹

Meta’s own tests show why. Facebook tried showing people more posts from friends, and fewer. Either way, “time spent on Facebook was virtually unchanged”. Then Instagram gave people Reels, and the time they spent jumped. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, told the court it was “insane”: “[N]othing I can think of ever moved time by 48 percent, or anything even close to it.”¹

Your friends are also posting less. An internal Instagram presentation put it plainly: “We are running out of [friends and family] inventory to show our users.”¹ Your friends’ posts, in other words, are inventory. Even Meta admits the shift: announcing a Friends tab for Facebook in 2025, it wrote that “the magic of friends has fallen away”.³

Not a plot, a business

The government argued that people wanted more from their friends and that Meta, secure in its monopoly, chose not to listen. The judge disagreed: people post less, and strangers’ videos are what keep them in the app. Meta won, and the government has appealed.^{1, 2} Nothing in the ruling says this is bad for you. It shows, from Meta’s own records, that the app is no longer mainly about your friends.

Try this

Do the sum: for every hour on Instagram, about four minutes goes to your friends. It is a US average, and your own share depends on how you use the app.¹

Then give those four minutes a better home. Write down the people you open Instagram for, and start a group letter with them. Everything in it comes from people you invited, so nothing competes with a stranger’s video.

See all the alternatives. We make one of them, DearAll, and it is marked as ours.

Sources

FTC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 1:20-cv-03590-JEB (D.D.C.), Revised Memorandum Opinion (Boasberg, C.J.), ECF No. 705, filed 2 December 2025, 89 pp. Court record; page numbers refer to this PDF. The 7% and 17% are Meta's January 2025 figures for the United States (exhibits DX 1152 and DX 1153), measured by Meta and quoted by the court on page 8, not an independent study; the opinion does not say how private messages are counted. Also quoted: page 2 (the ruling), page 14 (the change from early 2023), pages 31 and 32 (the FTC's claim about friends' content, and the internal presentation) and page 33 (the friend-content and Reels experiments, and Adam Mosseri's testimony). The case is about competition law, not wellbeing. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/MemorandumofOpinion.pdf
Docket, FTC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 1:20-cv-03590 (D.D.C.), via CourtListener: ECF No. 693 (redacted opinion) and No. 694 (judgment for Meta), 18 November 2025; No. 705 (revised opinion), 2 December 2025; No. 708 (FTC notice of appeal, D.C. Cir. No. 26-5028), 20 January 2026. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18735353/federal-trade-commission-v-meta-platforms-inc/?order_by=desc
Meta Newsroom, "Bringing the Magic of Friends Back to Facebook", 27 March 2025. Company statement. https://about.fb.com/news/2025/03/bringing-magic-of-friends-back-to-facebook/