Comment by Workaccount2 4 days ago
Anyone who uses instagram should be abundantly aware of this. The default behavior of the app became "Serve you all content we think you would like, in the order we think you would enjoy it". This pretty much means "You may or may not see the content of channels/people you specifically follow".
The app went from just showing you a stream of posts from people you follow, to just showing you a stream of posts it thinks you would like.
I have the opposite problem. Every time Instagram starts in the background (allegedly to check for feed updates but probably to get my geolocation) it uses so much memory it pushes out things like my on-screen keyboard. No doubt Meta has figured out ways to manipulate Android to get priority over the keyboard, and only tested it on the very latest phones.
I use it exclusively for announcements from certain brands with e.g. seasonal rotations or sales (small shops, especially, are often way more consistent about updating one or more social media accounts, often Insta, than their website, if they even have a website) and it's such a pain in the ass for that reason. I don't trust ads or their "algorithm" to promote quality (I reckon they're more likely to promote rip-offs and fly-by-night operations) so I super don't care about anything else they want to show me, even if it's directly related to the kinds of brands I'm following. I deliberately do not do new-stuff discovery in the app, because they have incentives to screw me.
The only thing I want out of it is to see the posts made by the accounts I'm following, since the last time I checked. That's 100% of the functionality I care about, and the app goes out of its way to not deliver it.
What is worse is that the feed is generated on the fly. Switch apps for a second and your os kills instagram in the background, and you might not ever find those posts it showed you a few minutes ago ever again.