Instagram has started rolling out Notes, a feature it has been working on for a few months now. The company hasn’t officially announced the feature but it is live for many Instagram users globally. As you might have guessed, it lets you leave a note for your followers.
Notes appear on the chat page that you can access by tapping the Messenger button at the top right corner of your Instagram home feed. Here, you’ll find a horizontal carousel of notes underneath the search bar. A “Leave a note” button with your Instagram profile picture on the left end of the carousel lets you create a note, followed by notes left by others. You can type a note up to 60 characters long.
You can either share the note with your followers you follow back or selected “Close friends”. Instagram will not notify them when you leave a note. They will only be able to see the note when they visit the chat page. The note will remain visible for 24 hours. People who can see the note can reply with a message. The replies are received in the main chat thread but with a quote that says “replied to your note”.
You can only post one note at a time. Instagram lets you update or delete your note anytime but you can’t post another as long as the current one is visible, i. e. it hasn’t been 24 hours since you posted it. Since Instagram notes are short (only 60 characters maximum), the full note is visible in the aforementioned carousel. You will see the person’s Instagram handle and profile picture along with the note. Tapping on the profile picture will pull up a message field from where you can reply to the note. This page also shows when the note was posted.
Instagram may still be testing the Notes feature
The Notes feature on Instagram started rolling out recently. It’s available on most of our devices running version 254.0.0.19.109 of the app. In its current implementation, you can’t disable the feature. If it’s available on your app, you will see notes left by your followers who you follow on the chat page. You can only mute notes on a per-user basis. You have to long-press on a note to mute all notes from that user. To unmute, you have to go to their Instagram profile and tap on the “Following” button. Here, you’ll find a Mute option from where you can mute/unmute posts, stories, and notes from that user.
As noted by XDA, who first reported this rollout, Instagram may still be testing Notes and could change the feature a bit based on user feedback. We will keep track of it and let you know accordingly. In the meantime, you can tap the button below to download the latest version of Instagram from the Google Play Store and see if Notes are available to you.
