All one can really do is accept that SF has been altered from top to bottom by soulless algorithms and their somehow even more soulless creators, and decide whether a platform’s dopamine juice shot is still worth the squeeze.
Although Instagram is still the second (or third) largest social media platform in terms of user base behind meta sister-site Facebook (and WhatsApp if you’re the kind of freak who counts it as social media), the app has been in a state of uncertainty for several years. Users post fewer photos these days, leading to a 2025 UI redesign that prioritizes Reels and DMs, two features that fueled the company’s growth in recent years. More recently, their heavy reliance on insecure AI chatbots resulted in hackers being able to hack over 20,000 accounts with prompts requesting password changes.
It’s these particular news pieces that make yesterday’s post from Instagram head Adam Mosseri all the more curious. IG’s pivot to focus on the reels last January changed the entire grid of three columns of stacked squares to three columns of stacked rectangles in an update. For many, this change was aesthetically displeasing and disturbing, but it was not the worst thing they were forced to endure. But for many of Instagram’s design-fixated creators — many of whom had spent countless hours carefully arranging their grid posts into a cohesive macro image — the image-altering format change crossed a line. With a caption that simply said “finally,” Mosseri’s post announced to users that a fix for the issue in January finally went live: Users can now rearrange posts on their grid.
No longer tied to chronological order, those who want to shuffle things around can long-press whichever grid post they want to move, then tap “Reorder Grid” in the menu options and move it to its new position. Once the layout is to your liking, don’t forget to save those changes.
Although this feature was requested because the grid was still all squares and shuffling tiles around doesn’t really negate the cropping massacre caused by forced aspect ratio re-standardization, a win is a win, right? Soon, we’ll probably remember the days when we were limited to pinning three posts to the top of our profile as bizarrely primitive, just as we regard the app’s early years today, when over-saturation and garish filters were carelessly applied.
<a href