As with all things in life, the best way to use and enjoy a social media platform is to make peace with the inevitability that it will change, usually for the worse. Whether you outgrow the Internet humor of the early 2010s and eventually move away from Reddit or find your favorite platform bought by a fascist billionaire and overrun by Nazis and bots, you can’t and shouldn’t let that replatforming or self-diminishing of the quality time you had in the halcyon days. On the contrary, yearning for a return to that era is an equally foolish (and often reactionary) impulse.
All one can really do is recognize that soulless algorithms and their somehow even more soulless sci-fi creators have made a top-down shift, and decide whether a platform’s shot of dopamine juice is still worth squeezing.
Although Instagram is still second (or third) largest social media platform In terms of the user base behind Meta’s sister site Facebook (and WhatsApp, if you’re the kind of monster who considers it a social network), the app has been in a precarious state for several years. Users post fewer photos these days, prompting a UI redesign in 2025 that Prioritized Reels and DMsthe two characteristics that drove most of the company’s growth in recent years. More recently, its overreliance on unsecured AI chatbots resulted in hackers being able to hijack more than 20,000 accounts with messages requesting password changes.
It’s these particular bits of news that make yesterday’s post from Instagram boss Adam Mosseri even more curious. IG’s pivot to focus on reels last January turned the grid from three columns of stacked squares to three columns of stacked rectangles in a single update. For many, the change was aesthetically unpleasant and annoying, but it was not the worst thing they were forced to endure. But for many of Instagram’s most design-obsessed creators, many of whom had spent countless hours meticulously organizing their grid posts into a cohesive macro image, the image-altering format change crossed a line. With a caption that just said “Finally.” Mosseri’s publication. announced to users that a fix for this issue has been announced. in january was finally available: users can now rearrange posts in your grid.
No longer tied to chronological order, those who want to change things can long-press any grid post they want to move, then tap “reorder grid” in the menu options and move it to its new position. Don’t forget to save those changes once the design is more to your liking.
Although there have been requests for this feature since the grid was still completely square and shuffling tiles doesn’t actually negate the crop killing caused by forced aspect ratio re-standardization, a win is a win, right? Soon enough, we’ll probably look back on the days when we were limited to pinning three posts to the top of our profile as curiously primitive, just as we today consider the app’s early years, when flashy, oversaturation filters were applied with reckless abandon.
