Meta-owned Instagram is continuously working on implementing new features and tweaking existing ones. The latest addition from the company is vertically-swipeable stories. The change is getting tested with users in Turkey and is not yet widely available. It replaces the horizontal stories feed with a vertical one, similar to that of TikTok and YouTube Shorts. The company is also rolling out cross-posted views from Facebook. It's unclear whether this is a regional test or the feature is being made available to everyone globally.

As the screen recording in the tweet shows, the viewing process is pretty much still the same, except for the swiping direction. Personally I find this change a bit confusing, as the story thumbnails are placed in the top bar horizontally -- so you'd naturally expect the stream to move in the same direction when expanding them. It will take time to get used to it, but -- just like every other change -- users will adapt to it eventually.

Instagram is also making it possible to see a list of Facebook viewers when you cross post a story to both platforms. This further tightens the integration between the two services. It's unclear if this is a gradual, limited rollout or not. Meta has already added support for direct messaging Facebook users from Instagram and vice versa. So this new change isn't surprising at all, as Meta has been closing the gaps between them in different ways for a while now.

Are you affected by either of these two changes on Instagram? Let us know in the comments section below.