Instagram wants to instill a sense of community with collaborative “storylines”

Instagram is reportedly working on a feature that would bring more interconnectedness and collaboration to its disappearing Stories. The Meta-owned app is cooking up Storylines, which would facilitate linked sequences of Stories uploaded by multiple creators.

Alessandro Paluzzi, a tech leaker known for uncovering upcoming features on prominent apps, posted about Storylines on his Threads account. Paluzzi — who previously spotted in-development Instagram updates like long-form Reels and multiple links-in-bio — posted a screenshot that explains how Storylines will function.

Creators will be able to append responses to Stories uploaded by accounts they follow. Their followers can then continue the chain by adding their own input. The posts that are part of a Storyline will “show up together,” per Paluzzi’s post.

Assuming that Storylines do eventually show up on the Instagram app, the feature will be part of Meta’s push to bring a greater sense of community to its photo- and video-sharing platform. Since the start of the year, Instagram has recognized the rising potential of creator-fan interactions by introducing a number of new tools. Creator-led accounts have been reshaped to facilitate two-way conversations, and the humble DM has been upgraded through 20 rapid-fire updates.

Another trend at Instagram HQ has been an increasing emphasis on formats other than Reels. Though the TikTok-style posts put up big numbers, they are potentially getting spun off onto a separate app. If that happens, Stories will become a more prominent format on Instagram. So if you want to know why Insta Stories are getting comments and Storylines, look to the intersection of creator-fan communications and non-Reels formats.

The idea of stringing together disappearing posts to create a narrative through-line is not exactly new. Snapchat experimented with that idea more than a decade ago by curating Stories collections during tentpole events like New Year’s Eve. More recently, BeReal attempted to build on its signature format by introducing RealEvents, a feature that examines large-scale happenings through multiple points of view.

If Instagram chose to draw inspiration from those platforms’ initiatives, well, it wouldn’t be the first time the Meta-owned app has played the copycat. But we have to give Instagram credit here — ultimately, Storylines is an original idea, and it could reshape the Stories format once it eventually gets a public introduction.