Instagram starts testing multiple audience lists for Stories

Meta-owned Instagram is working on new ways to post Stories on its platform. The social media giant is testing multiple lists that users can create while sharing Instagram Stories with their followers.

"Today, we started testing the ability to share your stories to multiple audience lists. This allows you to share stories to smaller groups and gives you more control over who can see your stories," Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on his broadcast channel.

"As someone who uses Close Friends often, I’m pretty excited about being able to create additional lists for the people in my life."

You have two options if you want to share a Story on Instagram right now. One way is you can share your Story with all the followers on your account and it will be visible to everyone if your Instagram account is not set to private.

The other option is to create a 'Close Friends' list so you can share your Instagram Story with a limited number of people. Not just Stories, the Close Friends list lets you limit content access for the images, videos, and Notes you post on the platform.

You can add or remove anyone from your Close Friends list at any point in time. It's worth noting that no one, even if they follow you, can request to be a part of your Close Friends list.

Instagram says on a support page that the multiple audience lists feature is "only available in select locations." The upcoming feature will let you create dedicated lists for specific people with custom names. For instance, you can add all your siblings and cousins to one list or create a list to share food-related Stories with your food walk buddies.

Users who are part of a specific list will see a green star icon and the name of the list when viewing your Story. Moreover, you'll be able to share a Story with more than one list at the same time. There will be a shortcut button at the bottom of the screen while creating a story to quickly pick the last used list.

The Instagram head ran a poll on his broadcast channel asking people whether they would use the multiple lists feature. Out of the total voters, around 7,800 users (at the time of writing) said they would like to see the feature in action, meanwhile, around 3,100 users were okay with Close Friends.

In recent news, Meta is reportedly working on an ad-free version of Instagram and Facebook for EU residents that could go live in the coming weeks. ChatGPT's prominent backer Microsoft has partnered with Meta to integrate Bing Search with Meta's recently announced AI chatbot.