In a move that absolutely nobody saw coming (except everyone), Instagram has rolled out a new feature called "Instants" - disappearing photos and videos you can blast to your entire friends list at once. Sound familiar? It should. Snapchat has been doing this since approximately the Stone Age of social media.
Look, we're not here to shame Meta. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Silicon Valley has basically built an entire economy around cloning whatever's working until the original dies or gets acquired. It's basically the circle of life, but for apps.
So what actually is this thing?
According to Lifehacker, Instants work pretty much exactly how you'd expect - you send a disappearing image or video, and it vanishes after being viewed. The key twist here is that you're sending to your entire friends list, not just select people. Which is either a fun low-stakes broadcast tool or an absolute chaos machine, depending entirely on who your Instagram friends are.
If your friends list is a carefully curated collection of close pals, great. If it's an archaeological dig site full of coworkers, that one person from a 2019 networking event, and your mum's neighbour who followed you by accident - maybe think twice before firing off that spontaneous disappearing selfie.
The disappearing content arms race continues
This is part of a longer pattern where every major platform eventually bolts on ephemeral content features until the whole internet just feels like one big anxiety dream you can't quite remember. Instagram already has Stories (which are, let's be honest, also Snapchat Stories). Now Instants join the mix, covering slightly different ground by going directly to friends rather than sitting on your profile.
The argument FOR this feature is actually pretty reasonable - sometimes you want to share something silly and dumb without it living on your grid forever. The dopamine hit of consequence-free sharing is genuinely appealing. No permanent record, no overthinking, just vibes.
The argument AGAINST is that Meta now has yet another vector for keeping you glued to Instagram, generating engagement data, and making Snapchat's entire value proposition slightly more redundant with each passing quarter.
Should you use it?
Probably? If you're already living your life on Instagram and have a friends list you actually trust, Instants seems like a harmless and kind of fun addition. Just maybe audit that friends list first. Nothing kills the spontaneous disappearing photo mood quite like accidentally sending it to your old boss.
Snapchat, meanwhile, is somewhere sharpening its dog-ear filter and wondering where it all went wrong.
