Instagram today announced a long-awaited feature: the ability to mute posts.
Mute will let you hide posts from certain people without unfollowing them. To the offending party, things will look normal, but their annoying photos or Stories will no longer clutter your feed.
Perhaps you have a friend who doesn't know you can post up to 10 photos in one post and spams your feed with multiple posts per day (or Stories per hour). Maybe it's all selfies all the time, and you've had enough of their mug. Or maybe their all-too-perfect Instagram aesthetic is just Too Much.
You could unfollow them, but sometimes these people are family, roommates, people you see in real life, or co-workers, and you'd rather not have an awkward "did you unfollow me?" conversation. Until now, you just had to put up with them, but Instagram is now having mercy on us.
"With this change, you can make your feed even more personalized to what matters to you," Instagram said in a blog post.
Mute will roll out over the coming weeks. Once it's active on your account, tap the ellipses () on the top-right of someone's post and select "Mute." You can then select whether you want to mute only people's photo posts, their Stories, or both.
"You can also mute posts and stories by pressing and holding on a story in your tray, or from a profile," Instagram said.
On Facebook, which owns Instagram, you can "unfollow" people, which removes their posts from your News Feed but does not de-friend them. Twitter rolled out a mute feature in 2014, and extended it to notifications in 2016.