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Instagram wants to be more … social.
The Meta-owned platform announced on Wednesday that it is rolling out three new features in an effort to help its users better connect with their friends.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to the app on Wednesday that the company wants “Instagram to be not just a lean-back experience that is just fun and entertaining, but also a participatory one.”
One of Instagram’s new features aimed at helping people connect with their friends is a map where you can share your location. The map will show where you were last active on Instagram. And yes, that does sound a lot like Snapchat’s Snap Map (and it wouldn’t be the first time Instagram’s ripped a page out of Snapchat’s playbook).
The new map feature will be accessible in Instagram’s direct messaging (DM) inbox. The company has dramatically expanded its DM features in the past year or so, where the bulk of the app’s social interactions actually occur.
Sharing locations with friends and family has become commonplace for young people — especially Gen Z — with apps like Apple’s Find My Friends being a go-to for the generation. Meanwhile, new startups are also trying to tap into the social mapping craze, such as Bump, a French app from Amo, which was founded by the former Zenly team (a social mapping startup that was acquired by Snapchat in 2017).
Don’t fret if sharing your location on Instagram makes you want to run for the hills. You have to opt in to sharing your location with people, and you can choose who you share that location with (such as only followers you follow back, your “Close Friends” list, or a select few). Parents also have control over location sharing for teen accounts, Instagram said in a blog post.
Instagram’s map is available in the US and a handful of global markets starting Wednesday.
Reposts are finally here
Instagram announced two other features on Wednesday: reposts of reels and feed posts, and a global expansion of its “Friends” tab.
Mosseri said in the same video that reposts have been a “request for many years,” adding that the reason Instagram is finally introducing reposts is that the feed itself is already comprised of recommended content from accounts people don’t follow.
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Instagram joins rival TikTok, which introduced a repost feature back in 2022.
Instagram is also expanding the “Friends” tab for reels, which will now show reels that friends have either commented on, liked, reposted, or posted themselves.
Users will be able to start conversations with their friends using the “reply bar,” which triggers a DM. Instagram introduced more privacy tools for its friends tab as well, including the ability to opt out by hiding your likes, comments, and reposts from friends, or muting that content from people you follow.
The friends feed has already been rolled out in the US, and is now expanding globally.
Mosseri said this feature is “a way to explore your interests and your friends’ interests” and also “get to know a little bit more about” those friends. In addition to Instagram being entertaining, Mosseri said he wants the platform to be somewhere users “actually engage with and connect with the people that you care about.”
Just a few months ago, whether Instagram was more of an entertainment platform rather than a social network was front and center at Meta’s antitrust trial brought by the Federal Trade Commission.
One slide from Meta’s opening statement at the trial revealed that just 7% of the time spent on Instagram in 2025 was spent viewing content from friends.
Perhaps Instagram wants to turn that around.
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