The latest hot news among social media nerds came last month when Instagram rolled out a new way of checking up on your friends. As of 19 July, it became possible to find out when your pals are active on Instagram and when they’re available to chat thanks to a little green dot next to their profile picture in the app.
“DMing friends and connecting over the content you love is more fun when you know your friends are there to see it. This update gives you the ability to have more of those realtime conversations while giving you the control to hide your status altogether,” Facebook-owned Instagram said.
And you can only see this active status for friends who follow you or people who you’ve DMed before.
What the new green status dots look like
But what if you don’t want your mates to know you’re online? What if you want to lurk and mindlessly scroll through a thousand Instagram feeds in peace?
Well, it’s actually pretty simple to fix. You can easily hide your own status by simply clicking Options > Activity Status > Show activity status.
The flip side of this is that when you hide your own status you also automatically turn off the ability to see when your friends are active. Annoying but it’s probs what Jesus would have wanted if he was still knocking around today: ‘Thou shall stalk unto others if you would not have them stalk unto you.’
(Images: Getty / Instagram)
