Instagram testing group mention feature for stories

SAN FRANCISCO: Meta-owned Instagram is testing a new group mention feature that will allow users to tag more than one person in a story using a single mention.

In a post on his broadcast channel on Friday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said: "We're testing a way to tag a group of people in a story using a single mention. Once you create a group mention, it can be reused by anyone in the group to automatically tag everyone in any new stories.

"So if you're on a summer trip with friends, you can more easily include everyone without needing to tag each person individually."

This feature will be helpful, as tagging multiple people in one mention will make stories cleaner and less cluttered, providing a better viewing experience for followers.

Last week, the platform had released a feature that better protects users from unwanted DM requests.

With this feature, people who want to send DM requests to users who don’t follow them will face two new restrictions.

First, users will only be able to send one message to someone who doesn't follow them, as opposed to sending them an infinite amount of DM requests. Second, DM invites are now just text-based, which means that users can only send photos, videos, or audio messages to people who don't follow them after the recipient accepts the invite to chat.

Last month, Meta had introduced real-time avatar calls for Instagram which will help users when they don't want to show their real faces during video calls and want a third option between camera-off and camera-on.