To my fellow deskworkers with fake laptop jobs: Our national nightmare is over! After I complained earlier this week about how Instagram links don’t “unfurl” in Slack, Meta has made a fix to solve the problem!
I wouldn’t ever actually admit to enjoying the workplace chat app Slack (that would be horrifically uncool). But the data speaks for itself.
In 2024, I was Business Insider’s second most prolific Slack poster, which is incredibly embarrassing and not a compliment at all.
Look, I love chatting! I love sharing links and musings with my colleagues! Fire me! (To my editor reading this: Please don’t, I promise I’ll get back to work.)
But despite this, there’s one was one thing that stymied me over and over — and I know I wasn’t the only one out there who was plagued by this problem.
Until Friday, when you posted an Instagram or Threads link into Slack, it wouldn’t “unfurl” with a preview. Basically, it looked like this:
Business Insider / sadness
If you’re unfamiliar with Slack (or don’t paste social media links into Slack because you use it like a responsible professional), the thing is that posts from X, LinkedIn, Reddit, and even BlueSky have actually always worked!
For example, an X post — which does unfurl — looks like this:
Business Insider
What’s frustrating is that Instagram had used to work on Slack. I remember those glory days! It was probably only two or so years ago — my guess here — that it stopped working.
So why was this happening? If X and Bluesky could do it, why couldn’t Instagram and Threads?
Earlier this week, I asked both Slack and Meta about why this had been happening. Slack responded to me with a pretty technical explanation that suggested the ball was in Meta’s court to make a fix. When I first published this story on Thursday afternoon, Meta hadn’t responded to Business Insider.
But to my extreme joy, on Friday morning, a PR person from Meta updated me that Meta had indeed fixed the Threads issue and was working on a fix for the Instagram unfurls. When I checked, indeed, Threads now works! I eagerly await Instagram unfurling, because I have so many annoying memes I need to send to my coworkers over Slack.
What’s the lesson here?
Well, for one, I should probably spend less time goofing off on Slack and get back to real work. But the truth is that Instagram and Slack are both things that I enjoy looking at (I also have a group chat with friends on Slack, which is “fun” instead of “work”), and the fact that these two services weren’t seamlessly connecting was a point of minor frustration, especially since it seemed something that must have been a doable technical fix.
The real lesson I’m taking away is that occasionally, being an extremely squeaky wheel and whining a lot about a very minor issue gets results. Continue squeaking!
