Instagram swoops in with 3-minute Reels and rectangular profile grids as the TikTok ban gets real

Instagram is rolling out a bunch of changes this weekend that will conveniently make it look a lot more like TikTok, which now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the law banning the app if parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell it. Those changes include extending Reels to three minutes long and changing the longstanding square grid on your profile to a rectangular layout, as Adam Mosseri announced in an and on his Story, respectively. Considering how some users have crafted a specific look for their pages around the square grid, the latter isn’t likely to go over well with everyone.

Nor is the third thing: there’s now a tab in your Reels feed that shows you videos your friends have liked or added Notes to, Mosseri shared on . Which means, of course, that your friends can more easily see what you’ve been liking and interacting with, too. Didn’t we already agree this was kind of invasive back when Instagram had — and eventually removed — of the people you follow? In any case, the changes have already begun rolling out. You’ll now see a button showing your friends’ activity at the top right of the Reels tab, which will bring you to the new feed.

Addressing the switch from the square grid in his Stories, Mosserri chalked it up to aligning with users’ posting habits. “I know some of you really like your squares, and square photos are kind of the heritage of Instagram, but at this point most of what’s uploaded — both photos and videos — are vertical in their orientation, so portrait versus landscape or square, and it just is a bummer to overly crop them,” he said. “So I know it’s a change, I know it’s a bit of a pain, but I think it’s a transitional pain.” He went on to say, “I think that people will over the long run be excited” not to have their posts appear “aggressively cropped.”

Instagram already had offered a somewhat TikTok-like view of users’ profiles under the Reels tab, but the latest move gives photos on the main grid the rectangular treatment too (only on the grid though, they’ll expand to normal size when you click them individually). On making Reels longer, Mosseri said in a separate post that while Instagram has long focused on short-form video, “we’ve heard the feedback that this is just too short for those who want to share longer stories.” Instagram previously only allowed Reels of up to 90-seconds long, though you could work around this by sharing a longer video as a non-Reel post.

TikTok, which also began with a focus on short-form, several years ago, and in 2022. If TikTok really does shut down, users are going to be looking for a new home for that type of content.