Instagram Stories, the company's well-received clone of Snapchat Stories, both of which let folks share photos and videos that remain visible for 24 hours before disappearing into the digital ether, has already won over at least one group of dedicated Instagram users: corgis.Opening Instagram this morning, less than 24 hours after Stories became available, I couldn't help but notice that many of my pet corgi Winston's buddies have already started flooding the zone with Stories content. (In addition to being my pet, Winston is Motherboard's official corgi and a one-time on-camera correspondent.) Lilothewelshcorgi, for example, has a two-part Story showing off some cool tricks, including a pretty righteous "paw" and a heart-melting "roll over." Another two-parter, this time from Duncanthecorgi, shows the little guy sleeping at the edge of the bed in front of TV. The caption? "Netflix and snooze." And in his three-part Story, Drewbertcorgi can be seen walking around with a stick in his mouth. A stick!
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"Having a dog as ridiculous as a corgi, they are constantly doing something silly so it's nice to be able to share a more candid side of life with Elvis," said Elvispawsleythecorgi owner Sebastian Barrotta. (Like me, Barrotta is known as a "corgdad" in the lingo of the online corgi community.) Barrotta also noted that Instagram Stories opens up the ability to share photos and videos of his pet that are a little more rough around the edges than he would ordinarily share."Sometimes when we're taking pictures of Elvis for Instagram the final product needs to look polished," he said, "whereas with features like Stories we can add an element of 'behind the scenes' content which could actually be kind of neat to share with our followers.""I value quality over quantity, but the downside is that many candid moments are not shared with the public," said Drewbert the Corgi owner Jialu. "The Stories feature is the perfect solution that allows me to share some of these unrefined—but still precious—moments of Drewbert with his fans."The early Stories posted by fellow members of the Instagram corgi community pretty closely resemble the "culture" of Stories you'd find on Snapchat, with plenty of wacky captions ("MAHM IM HUNGRY" screams one, in green font, from Gatsbyandscoutcorgis) and hijinks (like Aimithecorgi begging for scraps in the kitchen) to go around. It's precisely this culture clash, between the highly polished aesthetic encouraged by Instagram and the "accept me for who I am" veneer of Snapchat, that has some corgis wondering how long the fun will last."Once I figured out it was essentially Snapchat, I was still a little confused why Instagram decided to add it," said Jackthecorgipup owner Rachel. "Isn't Instagram 'instant'? I may use [Stories] depending on the moment, if we take Jack out or have a special moment, but I like the original use of Instagram and may not use it often."The release of Stories comes about two months after Instagram demoralized a good slice of the internet by changing the order in which photos and videos were displayed. Instead of merely presenting the most recent photo or video at the top of the feed (as God intended), Instagram took a page from parent company Facebook and made it so that the order was based on criteria like "your relationship to the person posting and the timeliness of the post." And while plenty of people complained about the change—at least one Google Chrome extension, called Oh My IG, was created to restore the "normal" timeline when viewing Instagram on the web—Instagram proved its resilience shortly thereafter by reaching its 500 millionth user.