If you truly wanted to stop people from looking at your feed, the only option was to make your account private. Even if you blocked someone, if your account was public, they just needed to bring up your account in a private browser window to access the entire feed. Instagram is now testing a feature that will provide users with public accounts with some more control over who can see their feed.
Instagram has long offered the ability to remove followers to users who have private accounts. If they remove someone from their pool of followers, that user instantly loses access to their feed.
It appears that an increasing number of public accounts have received this feature as well. The “remove follower” feature is now rolling out to a large number of users on Android initially. A spokesperson for Instagram has confirmed to The Verge that this feature is being tested.
While it won’t prevent someone from accessing the feed from a private browser window, what this feature will do is that it will remove people who you no longer want in your pool of followers anymore without informing them.
Blocking them has the same result but in that case, users can quickly find out what they have indeed been blocked. They won’t know when someone removes them from their followers’ list and their content won’t subsequently appear in that user’s feed. It’s unclear when this feature will be widely rolled out, including for users on iOS.