Instagram Now Lets You Make Your Stories More Private

If you are an Instagram user, chances are you interact with people you don’t even know in real life. The platform already provides an option for users to make their accounts and feed private, though it still doesn’t provide granular control over which of your followers gets to see what.

That’s changing today, with Instagram’s new Close Friends feature on Instagram Stories. The feature is pretty simple: you can have a list of close friends that you actually know and feel comfortable sharing things that you otherwise wouldn’t share with all of your followers. Once you create the list, you can post to your Close Friend stories instead of your main story that’s visible to all of your followers.

Close Friends stories have a green circle around them on the Instagram Stories feed, so they are very easy to identify. The feature is very similar to Snapchat’s Private Stories feature, and that’s not a surprise at all.

The feature is rolling out today on Instagram for Android and iOS.