You Can Now Reply to DMs While Still Scrolling on Instagram

Instagram announced a suite of new messaging features this week, including the ability to reply to messages you receive without having to leave your feed. Rolling out in various markets across the globe, Instagram has three new features for user-to-user interactions, as well as four new features for messaging threads.

The big addition is that ability to reply to messages you receive without even having to leave your feed. That’s very convenient. On top of that, Instagram has added in the ability to quickly share posts with friends by long pressing on a post’s share button. You can now also see who is free to chat at the top of your inbox.

What’s New

• Reply while you browse: Receive a new message while you’re browsing your feed? You can now reply without going to your inbox and losing your place. This new feature makes it that much easier and more convenient to chat while on the app.
• Quickly send to friends: We want to help people reshare interesting content without interrupting their Instagram experience. By tapping and holding the share button, you can effortlessly reshare posts to your closest friends.
• See who’s online: At the top of your inbox, you can see who’s free to chat at that moment, helping you find serendipitous opportunities to connect with friends.

For messaging threads, music previews are being added with support for Apple Music (Amazon Music and Spotify support coming soon), which lets you preview 30 seconds worth of a banging track.

A great feature for all you side pieces is a new silent messaging feature, letting users add “@Silent” into a chat which will then not create a notification for when the recipient receives a message. I see you, Instagram. There’s also a new lo-fi chat theme to play with to make things feel more “personal,” as well a poll feature for groups.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff in there.

// Instagram