• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Originally an app designed for sharing photos, Instagram has solidified itself as the most popular social media platform in Meta's family of apps, reaching 3 billion monthly active users across the globe, according to a Threads post shared on Wednesday by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The new figure showcases Instagram&'s skyrocketing popularity over the past three years.

The 15-year-old platform, now synonymous with short-form videos and social shopping, has gained 1 billion monthly actives since 2022, and 2 billion since 2018.

It's difficult to compare Instagram's user engagement directly with singular Meta apps due to the company's insistence on sharing user numbers for its family of apps as a whole. Last quarter, Meta reported 3.5 billion daily active users across Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger.

However, the company has shared updates over the years. Facebook, for example, hit 2 billion daily active users in 2023, while WhatsApp surpassed 2 billion monthly active users over five years ago, in 2020.

“If you look at the last few years, almost all of our growth has been driven by DMs, Reels, and recommendations,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in an Instagram video. “Because of that, we're going to continue to focus on those products and reorient the app more around DMs, Reels, and recommendations over the next couple of months.”

Mosseri added that the platform will begin testing a way for users to “tune” their algorithm by adding and removing topics based on their interests.

The tests will initially focus on Reels, starting with a redesigned navigation bar, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Meta also plans to run a test in South Korea and India that will invite Instagram users to set Reels as their default feed for the app instead of photos.