u/AnnieSBS

I’m genuinely trying to understand how this is supposed to work.
Almost every time I post a regular Reel or carousel, the vast majority of my views/impressions come from my existing followers. Sometimes the non-follower reach is literally close to zero.
My account status is all green and my content is original and focused on a specific niche. My followers do engage, but Instagram simply doesn’t seem to test most of my regular posts with people outside my existing audience.
Trial Reels are basically the only time I can reliably see Instagram showing my content to non-followers.
And that’s what I don’t understand: if Instagram doesn’t show a post to people who don’t already follow you, how exactly is a small account supposed to grow?
I understand that not every post deserves huge reach. But there’s a difference between Instagram testing something with non-followers and deciding not to distribute it further, versus barely testing it outside your followers at all.
Has anyone else experienced this? Did anything actually change it, or is organic discovery on Instagram just extremely difficult now?
I’d especially love to hear from smaller accounts that managed to break out of this cycle.

There’s a lot of content explaining how to grow your account, what to do and what not to do etc etc. Algorithm likes this and doesn’t like that. Actually I don’t understand if things are working certain way, why some good content has few likes/comments or followers and some bad content has hundreds of thousands? Also, I see people who have like 12K followers and they make some post with CTA asking for a comment. How is it possible that this person has literally zero comments and 8 likes? If this person is exposed to non-followers and some of the followers, how is it possible that there’s nobody who would interact? Even if the post is bad for example?

All together makes me think what’s the point in having followers? And isn’t it all about luck and not about following some trends and rules?

I occasionally boosted my posts. Not very often, and it used to have high estimated reach numbers. Now it’s like 300-400 no matter what budget I set. I googled and of course found this “problem” is already present for a number of weeks.
There’s no point in running ads like this so my question is if everyone knows or could find info on this? Is this now how it’s going to be or it’s some weird glitch?

Also, it seems like everything is getting worse. I see some accounts with average or not really “wow” content having ridiculous amount of followers and likes…what’s with that?

Sorry if this subject already appeared in discussions but I’m just not experienced with this and wondering what’s going on.