What’s in a “Friend”?

Technology often reconceptualizes our social infrastructure, and not for the better. Friendship is a great example.

Social media began as a set of platforms meant to connect us digitally, but it has evolved in a way that muddies the definition of friend by commingling it with the notion of followers.

Take Instagram: It is a confusing platform these days. Instead of following your real friends, you’re probably also following celebrities, brands, new outlets, and politicians. This causes connection bloat, the phenomenon whereby, over time, the number of people followed steadily increases. This, in turn, deteriorates the social experience of Instagram because the content becomes too diverse, too multifarious.

The median Instagram user follows 675 other users. This number has grown significantly since the launch of Instagram in 2010 and almost doubled since 2015 where it was estimated at 292, almost double. That’s way too many.

This is the paradox at the heart of the design of social media platforms whereby their technical limits push the increase of connection beyond a normal human limit. Researcher Christian Maier in a 2015 study dubbed this negative association with social networking sites “social overload.”

Meta, Instagram’s parent company, seems to understand this. Over the years, they’ve provided a set of new features aimed at creating zones of connection. Users, as well, have responded by creating new kinds

Instagram’s Friend Problem

There have been two main ways Instagram and its users have tried to solve the problem of connection bloat, and both of them have floundered.

The first is a visibility issue: Instagram suffers from context collapse. It is not uncommon to be looking at a reel of a cute monkey in Japan and the next be exposed to war footage in Gaza, all in the same moment, merely separated by a slight swipe.

With little to no focus, the algorithmic feed feels like a cacophonous amalgam of individuals, influencers and institutions. In order to curate their feeds, Instagram users started creating secondary Instagram accounts called “finstas.” It’s a secondary space where users restrict who they see and who can see them.

The function Finstas is to “upload a variety of content, including daily updates, expressions of emotion, personal interests, and other miscellaneous items, without the need for excessive caution” (Kang and Wei, 2020) whilst the first account presents “a positive self-image and engaging in conscious content curation.”

Finstas peaked in 2016, but it’s worth noting that researchers Fahimah et al. found that 67% of their subjects used their secondary accounts more than their main account due to the freeness it afforded them.

“Close” Friends

Faced with the rise of Finsta, Instagram decided to create a feature which could allow for selective visibility. Close Friends, launched in 2018, responds to the need for more private online disclosure whilst still keeping user’s attention on their main feed, where they are fed tailored ads (and how Meta makes money).

On April 4th, 2024, Billie Eilish added all of her 110 million followers to her Instagram Close Friends (ICF). The move meant to generate hype around the release of her album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” temporarily confused super fans who thought they had been added by mistake to the celebrity’s private inner-circle.

Of course, fans quickly realized this was part of a marketing scheme rather than a true extension of friendship. Eilish’s subversive use of the function further exposes how the very notion of friendship is murkied by social networking sites.

How do people use Close Friends?

To find out if Close Friends is working to deflate the connection bloat, I conducted a survey of 576 Instagram users to see how they used the feature. I found that out of the 500+ accounts, roughly 20% did not use Close Friends. The average of those who use the feature is 85 Close Friends. Additionally, over 47% of users surveyed had more than 100 Close Friends, almost a third of their followers. This speaks to a drift in the feature’s actual function for users.

In interviewing over 20 users, I discovered that what was meant as a tool for selective visibility has evolved into three main use cases.

• Ambient co-presence

Ambient co-presence is the “increased awareness of the everyday lives and activities of significant others through the background presence of ubiquitous media environments.”

Close Friends, for many users, acts as a novel form of ambient co-presence. We no longer call people to give them updates, so Close Friends works as a general missive to people we hope to keep in the loop on what is happening in our lives. With direct communication made difficult by busy schedules, the feature allows the passive creation of closeness through personal posts which are consumed at convenience.

In other words, it creates an always-available background channel where users can be quietly present for each other. This sense of ambient intimacy allows vulnerable sharing (posts about mental health, children, etc.) to occur in a supportive environment, blending personal disclosure with a feeling of communal closeness.

• Privacy Management

Selective visibility remains a main use case. Close Friends allows users to select who gets to see their intimate content. Interviewees described it as a way to avoid the collapse of contexts that defines the main feed. Some people are keeping certain juicy details away from partners, family and colleagues.

• Social Signaling

A third use case is social signaling. To be added to someone’s Close Friends list is often interpreted as a gesture of inclusion, trust, or status. Interviewees mentioned that the act of inclusion on the list signaled a new level of closeness. It’s read as an invitation to further a friendship or romantic interest.

Intimacy Management

I expected Close Friends usage to be related to its privacy function, but it seems to have evolved beyond the intended use case to become a novel form of digital communication. The feature has drifted from privacy management into intimacy management.

This was the most important finding: people are using Close Friends to recreate the limits that the platform removed. The public Instagram account has become too broad, performative, and contextually unstable. The private account solves only one side of the problem: it restricts who can see you, but it does not necessarily restrict what you see, nor does it restore a coherent social field. Finstas went further by creating an alternate social room, one where both visibility and attention could be more tightly governed, but ultimately fell out of favor. Close Friends is Instagram’s internalized version of that solution, but it is also a compromised one.

It seems evident that intimacy is built on reduction not accumulation of friends as the platform’s physics dictate. My research indicates that users understand this contradiction intuitively. They prune audiences, create secondary accounts, maintain Close Friends lists, and interpret inclusion in those lists as socially meaningful.

These practices show that the platform’s promise of connection has exceeded the human conditions of friendship.

The Physics of Connection on Instagram

Unfortunately, the curated lists for more intimate posting also swell and become bloated over time. A common refrain for users with over 100 Close Friends is that they would love to have a “close close friends” or in other words an additional “circle of privacy”.

Connection bloat does not stop. With every layer of the selective visibility architecture, the bloat carries through, requiring the expansion of the architecture. This impacts the way we communicate, because as these pathways get bloated we lose our means of intimacy with friends and loved ones.

Using Social Media with Human Intention

We have to be extremely intentional with how we use social media and its features, for the sake of friendship and meaningful connection.

Here are a few tips from my research:

Unfollow celebrities and influencers

Part of why we encounter context collapse on Instagram is because we’ve chosen to treat it like a place for both connection and entertainment. I believe there is nothing to be gained from following influencers and celebrities. By and large, they encourage consumption and make us feel worse about ourselves. Moreover, there’s an ever-growing list of notable people to follow, which increases the connection bloat. There simply is no need. Unfollow.

Do a yearly culling of your Followed list using services like InstaClean

We should treat Instagram like a garden. As the new year begins, cull, prune and clean: go through the list and unfollow people you met once and will never speak to again. It leaves room for more directed attention and a more focused context. Prune your tree so the leaves you love get more light, if you will.

Avoid using social media as a first mode of connection when networking, instead use website or email.

We tend to default to Instagram when connecting. It remains the best calling card for creative professionals and artists, but for others, try email or website or even the good old phone number. If the person wants to reach out, they will, if not they won’t and you won’t be subjected to their life updates for the rest of eternity.

Ultimately, we have, for the most part, accepted that these platforms are one of the main ways we communicate and relate to each other. But we cannot let their designs dictate the way we become intimate with the people we want to be close to.

As the spring approaches, it is common to prune one’s trees, find the branches which no longer help the tree grow, the parts that hinder it, and, cutters-in-hand, sever them from the tree. Pruning helps the tree focus its limited energy intentionally, it helps it grow. I call on everyone to do a social spring cleaning. Go ahead: Scroll through your lists and remove some people. They probably won’t even notice.

Illustrations by Sophie Mahoney