Instagram is rolling out the long-awaited Reposts feature and, for US users, location sharing on the Instagram Map.
The new capabilities should be available if you update the app from today.
Instagram is rolling out two important updates that have been on many people’s most-wanted lists for years, although one of them is initially US-only
The app now enables US users to share their location with friends and other contacts, while users worldwide are also getting the long-awaited reposting feature that was first promised way back in 2022.
The Reposts feature enables you to repost public reels and feed posts. They'll be placed in a separate tab in your profile so you can see them easily. All reposts will be credited to the original poster and you can add your own comment in a "thought bubble".
The Instagram location sharing is opt-in and enables you to share your last active location with chosen friends. You can also see content from friends and creators on a map interface rather than in a feed.
The app update introduces a new tab in the Reels section, too. The new Friends section shows public content your friends have interacted with.
Instagram’s new features: pros and cons
Instagram offers decent controls on the location sharing: you can choose to share with Friends (followers you follow back), Close Friends, Only Selected Friends, or nobody.
You can also choose not to share specific locations, or not to share them with specific people. And if you're a parent supervising a teenager's app, you can control what sharing they can do.
The arrival of normal reposting is way overdue and very welcome – the previous workaround was to share a post to your Story, which is time-consuming and clunky – but I do wonder how this will work in practice. Instagram says to creators that reposts "may be recommended to that person’s followers, even if those people don’t follow you". The key word there is "may".
That suggests reposts will be just as subject to the infamous algorithm as your own original posts. In recent years, Instagram has become much more focused on "surfacing" content by skipping the people you follow and showing you content from people you don’t.
For me that raises an interesting question: who will see what you repost?
Many Instagram users have been complaining about their post visibility for a very long time now, so where will reposts fit it to this? We'll find out soon enough – the repost feature arrives in the app from today.
