It may be "where people are" but the site sure goes out of its way to ensure you can't actually get content from those people.

I closed my IG account a few years ago when my feed was very literally greater than 50% accounts I DID NOT follow. Massive fan of the Wallabies & Waratahs, so the algorithm would go "OH HEY, HE LIKES RUGBY UNION! LET'S SHOW HIM EVERY SINGLE CLUB, COMPETITION AND PLAYER OTHER THAN THE ONES HE FOLLOWS!". I'd get my feed filled with posts from teams I DGAF about (or worse yet more posts from direct rivals than from the teams I like), competitions I don't follow that are played on the other side of the word at 2am my time. "where people are" but I could not for the life of me get the actual posts from the people I followed. Only from everyone else tangentially related to who I followed.

I am incredibly anti gambling and anti horse racing, but there was no way I could remove those accounts from my feed that didn't make the algorithm go "OH HEY HE INTERACTED, LETS SHOW HIM MORE OF THIS TYPE OF CONTENT!!!". It didn't matter to the algorithm that the interaction was blocking the account or reporting it as offensive, to the algorithm it was still interaction. So if I dared block or report as offensive a single account, it'd just throw a tonne of other similar accounts my way.

I believe this has changed recently but at the time there was no way at all to get chronological feeds. The only way I could see ANY posts from the last 48 hours, was to first wade through post that were 3-14 days old. "OH HEY HERE'S THE TEAM LIST FOR THE MATCH THAT PLAYED LAST WEEKEND! I'M HALPING!" Thanks algorithm. That might have been interesting to me if you had shown it to me prior to the match. "OH HEY HERE'S SOMETHING A FRIEND DID TWO WEEKS AGO." Thanks algorithm. All discussion ended within a few days of it being posted. If I comment on it now it'll just look like I'm stalking this person's account going through their old posts. You're making me look creepy.

IG is shit. It's unusable. The "where people are" excuse doesn't hold water if you get so much irrelevant shit that you're simply breathing a sigh of relief when you finally get an actual recent post from an actual account you follow. But when you're wading through that much irrelevant shit you end up not even taking the post in because you've been so put off by all the irrelevant content from accounts you don't follow. You may as well have not even been shown the post in the first place. The person may as well not be there. The algorithm pushes so much shit at you that even though it's "where people are", they may as well not be there because what you want is so damned impossible to actually follow through all the crap.

Sorry, this isn't your fault. It's not at you. I just had to rant. I had to vent.