Could the number of new Instagram followers indicate a change in habits?
I was catching up with an old friend recently, and we ended up talking about how much our social media behavior has changed over the years, back then, most of the accounts we followed were people we knew personally, but now our feeds are filled with creators, niche communities, news sources, and pages related to specific interests, looking at the newest accounts someone follows can sometimes highlight a new hobby, a developing career interest, or even a future travel plan, at the same time, plenty of follows happen out of simple curiosity and never lead to any real engagement, that balance between meaningful interest and casual browsing made me wonder how accurate these signals really are, do you think tools like recentlyfollowed provide useful insight into evolving online interests, or do following lists often tell an incomplete story?
I remember doing a late-night cleanup of my social media because my feed felt messy and overloaded, and I started unfollowing accounts way too quickly without really thinking, the next morning I wanted to bring back a couple of pages that I actually used for ideas, but their names were completely gone from my memory, while searching for a way to trace my recent activity, recentlyfollowed and it helped me understand how people keep better track of follow changes, after that, I stopped treating unfollowing like a random purge and became much more careful with it.