But you can't turn that mode on as a default, and it essentially kicks you from the normal app hierarchy into a separate barebones screen. I find it's all for naught anyway because my friends have long since stopped making regular posts on Instagram, it's more common to use stories.
This sort of garbage is just yet another reason why I don't want to be on these platforms. "Oh, you prefer it this way? No, fuck you, we know better as to what you want."
> my friends have long since stopped making regular posts on Instagram, it's more common to use stories.
Ugh. I don't know what my friends have been doing these days on Instagram, but the last thing I want to spend my day doing is watching short-form video clips posted by my friends. The photo stream (yes, with occasional short videos), was wonderful.
Heading to the home page, opening the menu, and tapping "See More" reveals a "Feeds" option. Tapping the "Feeds" option then reveals the chronological feed.
Posts are the stuff that appears in the main feed and your profile permanently (unless you remove it manually)
You can also get into the difference between posts are reels but... they've kinda fuzzied that over the years.
That said, I go through cycles of removing the app and reinstalling it later because it gets addictive.
Hell, you're trying to make Instagram be what Instagram used to be. Back in the early (pre-Meta) days, it was just a reverse-chronological feed of the posts from people you followed.
A decent part of why I bailed on Instagram back in 2019 or so was because it had stopped being this for a while (posts reordered, some not even shown, so many ads).