Instagram on Friday announced an update to DMs, the company's direct messages inbox, which will improve the experience for those who receive a lot of inbound messages, like creators and influencers. Now, the app is introducing tools that will allow users to sort and filter their "message requests" - meaning those messages that don't arrive in their main inbox, based on controls the user sets.

With new tools that would let them sort and filter by follower count, verified accounts, brands, creators, and many other criteria, it would make the creator much more effective in recognizing which are the more critical messages and those for which an answer would have more significance, since of them, could cause potential effects to their business or relationships.

There will also be a new "Story Replies" folder, so that you can access story replies all in one place.
The company said the changes come after hearing from creators around the world how hard it can be to manage their DMs.

"Now when you go to the requests inbox, sometimes it can be really overwhelming," said Instagram head Adam Mosseri, in a post on the social network. "So what we've done is added ways to filter down those requests to just see the ones that you're looking for," he continued. "There's a lot more to do to improve the inbox for creators and requests," Mosseri admitted. "But hopefully, this is one step in the right direction."

In relation to this, the "Sort & Filter" will become an overlay option on the inbox where you can then filter your requests based on recency or number of followers that help you see which one most likely was a message from another creator or brands seeking to make contact and discuss deals. They can also check or uncheck additional filter options about the accounts' verified or a business and a creator, with minimum followers counted or others for a while now.
They add that they would continue to develop their feature set in Direct messages for now.

Changes follow other inbox-related improvements Meta made earlier this week to WhatsApp, allowing users to filter their chats into customized lists.