You can hide your Instagram Stories from friends so that they don’t see anything of your daily activities. But you can also make sure that you don’t see the Instagram Stories of a certain friend anymore. We explain both options in this tip.
- Hide the stories of others
- Remove mute
- Hide own Story
- Only best friends
Hide Instagram Stories from or for yourself
If you use Instagram Stories every day, you may recognize the problem that sometimes there are friends who make very boring Stories. You do not always want to encounter this while browsing Instagram, but at the same time, you do not want to immediately follow the friend. Instagram has come up with a smart solution for this: you can hide Instagram Stories from specific friends. So this is actually a kind of mute button. You still get to see the normal photo messages from friends, but no longer the Stories.
Another problem is that you don’t want to show everyone your own Stories. For example, if you are bothered by a bully, you can hide your own Instagram Stories from this person. It is of course also possible that you do not want your parents to watch, or that you only want your very best friends to see your Story. We also discuss that in this tip.
Hide Instagram Stories from others
Hiding a friend’s Instagram Stories is actually very simple:
- In the Stories list at the top of your timeline, go to the friend whose story you want to mute. Or browse manually to the friend in question.
- Keep your finger pressed on the avatar for a little longer.
- Choose Mute at the bottom of the screen.
- Choose the option Mute story or Mute story and messages. In this case, we only want to muffle the story.
From now on you will no longer see Stories of the friend in question on Instagram, while his or her photos will just appear in your timeline.
Good to know: people you eliminate don’t notice it. They can’t request this anywhere on Instagram. If you still want to watch a story incidentally, you can. In the list of Story avatars, scroll all the way to the right. The people whose story you muted are on the far right and the avatar is slightly transparent. Tap the avatar to view the story anyway.
In the tip below you can read more about ignoring accounts on social media, including on Twitter and Facebook.
You can ignore people on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, without having to follow up on people. You remain connected to each other, and you can still send each other private messages, but the messages from this person do not appear in your timeline. In this tip, we explain how you can achieve this.
Hidden Stories yet again view, mute
It may, of course, be that you still want to view the stories later. You can cancel mute as follows:
- In the Story List list at the top of the screen, scroll all the way to the right.
- You see the avatars of your hidden friends very lightly displayed.
- Hold your finger a little longer on the avatar. From the menu that appears at the bottom of the screen, choose Unmute.
Hide your Instagram Story from a friend
Of course, it can also be the other way around: that you want to (temporarily) hide your own Story from a friend. For example, so that your ex cannot watch, or that your best friend cannot see how you are preparing her supreme party.
- To hide your Story from others, go to the screen to create a new Story by swiping left from your timeline.
- Click on the gear at the top left.
- At the top, tap Hide Story For.
- You now see a list of people who have viewed your story.
- Tick the people you want to hide your story from. This applies to all stories that you post from now on.
Another way to hide your Stories from someone is to swipe up from your own Story. You then see who viewed your story and then use the cross to hide your Story from someone.
In the aforementioned settings screen, you can always see how many people you hide your Story. These people are at the top of the list where you can select people, so you can easily uncheck them. People for whom you hide your Stories cannot see that you have done this. It just seems to them that you have no photos or videos in your Story.
Instagram Stories only for best friends
You can also choose to create a Story that is only visible to best friends. For this, you first make a list of good friends who may know a little more about you. When posting a new Story, indicate whether you want to share it with everyone or only with your best friends. You can read how to set up your best friends on Instagram in the tip below.