This is either an exciting or annoying update, depending on your personal perspective.

Today, in a Broadcast Channels chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced that you can now post GIFs in Instagram comments.

As you can see in these example screens, you can now search and share GIPHY GIFs in the comment stream, providing another way to respond to Instagram posts.

Which feels like it should have been a thing years ago – though Mosseri did also note that it’s ‘a bit of a ‘finally’ feature’.

It’s even more unusual when you also consider that Instagram added the capacity to reply to Stories with GIFs back in 2020, while you can also use GIF stickers within Stories themselves, so interacting via GIFs has been a thing on IG for some time. Just not in comment streams – though Instagram has also worked to keep its comments as clean and text-based as possible, with no linking options or other tools.

But now, you’ll likely see twitching images of reaction GIFs whenever you scroll down. That could facilitate new creative capacity, and provide more ways to engage with fans.

It’s not a major shift, especially given that GIFs are available in comment threads in most other apps. But it’s another consideration.

GIFs in Instagram comments are available in the latest version of the app.