I will never forget the time I was added to the Close Friends story of a girl I went on a single horrible date with, never to talk to her again. I was nearly a stranger to her, yet thanks to the exclusive, almost intimate access Close Friends stories grant you, I was given access to a great deal of her private thoughts. Maybe she forgot I was there, maybe she wanted the attention and to remind me that I’d “missed out,” but why would she have added me in the first place?
Close Friend Instagram stories would not have existed without finstas. Finsta, meaning “Fake Instagrams,” are private, secondary Instagram accounts where posters can be more vulnerable, less aesthetically pleasing, and more exclusive than they’d be on their rinstas, or “real Instagrams”. While your real Instagram featured airbrushed, all-too-perfect photos of your beach vacation outside of a resort you visited for the day just to take that photo, your Finsta hosted horrible selfies, captioned with complaints about the budget motel you were staying at.
You wouldn’t let just anybody follow your Finsta; they actually have to be trusted with seeing your posts about your secret boyfriend or with watching a video of you crying in your car. The Finsta was most popular from 2016-2020, with the advent of the Close Friends story in 2018 marking the beginning of the end for the Finsta era.
Close Friends stories allow users to post Instagram stories for a curated list of followers, making it as exclusive as they want it to be. Despite the junior high-esque implications of its name, Close Friends stories can be used to post anything. One of my friends posts in-depth vlogs detailing every aspect of their work and dating life on their Close Friends story. Another one just posts uncaptioned videos of her life, with very little distinction between what she posts on her regular story and her Close Friends story.
As an avid Close Friends story poster, I love sharing humorous tidbits from my day to day life with my five best friends from high school, my roommates, a girl I partied with in Chicago in 2021 and haven’t seen since, my four closest friends from my dodgeball league, a few too many college friends and so on. In total, I only have 41 people who are allowed to see my Close Friends story, and IMHO, they are getting a lot of good content.
They are the kind of casual, funny posts that I would’ve posted on Twitter once upon a time. Sure, I occasionally document emotional breakdowns on my Close Friends Story, but it’s never a video of me crying; It’s more like posting a blurry 3D picture of a Gatorade bottle with “If I Loved You” from Carousel playing in the background. If that’s not a step-up from the finsta era, I don’t know what is.
While my high school Finsta was nothing if not raw and emotional, my Close Friends story is more about being exclusive for the sake of exclusivity. None of these posts are so scandalous that they would be unacceptable to post on my regular Instagram story, so why do I choose to limit them to only my inner circle?
I can’t deny that it feels good to gatekeep. If I’m posting something a little vulnerable and revealing, I don’t want just anyone to see it. When I have someone in my Close Friends story who really shouldn’t be there (like someone you’ve been dating for 3 weeks that you added because they added you to their Close Friends story—rookie mistake) they are all I can think of when drafting a post: “What will they think?” “Is this too much for them to know?”
I also like how my Close Friends story makes my friends feel. My best dodgeball friend has asked repeatedly that I never remove her from my Close Friends story because she loves it so much. My friends from high school and college have told me that they feel much more connected to my day-to-day now than they did before I started posting there so often. My sister even says that my life seems incredibly glamorous and interesting when viewed through the lens of my Close Friends story, and that really makes me feel good.
My friends have this positive association with my Close Friends story because, on some level, it feels like they’re getting some exclusive tea that nobody else is privy to. In reality, the information distilled in my posts is not exclusive at all. It’s not as if I’m sharing anything on these stories that I wouldn’t have told my friends directly. Before I started posting on it so regularly, I would literally just say these things in social situations or over texts. Even though I’m posting things that aren’t dramatic or super unique, my friends feel as if they’re in on something exclusive and special.
The exclusivity of the Close Friends story is incredibly shoddy. All it takes is one person taking a screenshot of a story and sharing it publicly to end the party. You can be taken out of someone’s Close Friends list just as quickly and unceremoniously as you could’ve been taken out of someone’s Top 8 back in the MySpace days. It’s common for someone to add so many people to their Close Friends story that the exclusivity vanishes, and they no longer have any interest in keeping up with it. That’s exactly why I stopped using my Finsta: what’s the point if people who I’ve barely had a conversation with follow this supposedly “exclusive” account?
Some argue that social media exists to make people feel bad about themselves, but I strongly disagree. We’re all searching for the hit of dopamine that comes with our crush sliding up on our Instagram stories or our best friends hyping us up in the comments of our selfie. Social media apps like Instagram are incentivized to keep people on their apps, and they don’t do that by making them feel unwelcome. Features like Close Friends stories appeal to everyone’s desire to be part of an in-crowd, and it works! To some, being able to view an Instagram story that someone else cannot view is as close to being part of “the in crowd” as they’ll get.
While we might enjoy the feeling of soaking up the spotlight shone on us by our closest friends, all of this is an illusion, since we’d be having these conversations more directly with those people anyway. Really, all Close Friends stories are adding another blockage between what once was a real human connection in the name of exclusivity.
