Forget Instagram glamour — celebrate the banality of daily life with BeReal

How do you use BeReal, one of the top new social media apps? It’s simple: You and your friends get one (and only one) opportunity to post a picture a day, all at the same time. You can see what everyone’s up to in this small slice of the day.

It’s a social media app like no other. Let me walk you through what it’s like to create an account and use BeReal.

How to get started with BeReal

Teenagers and young adults have long complained about the social pressures created by Instagram. BeReal is the opposite. It’s a photo-sharing app that encourages you to post without phony poses or filters. It does this by getting you to post what you’re doing at random times of the day, exactly as it’s happening. No glamour, no influencers — just you and your friends’ daily activities.

You can’t get sucked into a bottomless pit of content, either. Even if you post daily, even if you have a lot of friends, it only takes a few minutes to see what everyone’s posted. 23 hours of the day, there’s nothing new to look at.

BeReal’s focus on authenticity has proven surprisingly popular. The app quickly amassed a dedicated following, becoming one of Gen Z’s favorite social media apps. TikTok’s TikTok Now is a knockoff feature, and Instagram is testing something similar with Candid Stories.

Create a BeReal account

Download BeReal from the App Store to get started. It’s available on iPhone, but not iPad or Mac.

To create an account, you start with your name, enter a phone number for verification, and create a unique username. You’ll also be asked to give access to your contacts so you can find friends and turn on notifications so you can be alerted when it’s time to post your BeReal.

Then, it’s time to post your first BeReal. Tap the notification that appears and get started. Take a picture of what you’re doing using the rear camera.

Now, you have just a few seconds to take a selfie. It doesn’t take both at exactly the same time — you can move the camera to get a better angle, which I didn’t realize at first. If, for example, you’re taking a picture of your dog on the floor, you don’t need to take a selfie pointing up at your face at a dumb angle. I didn’t know any better.

You can also retake the picture if you want.

After you take a BeReal, you can write a short description under the image.

Next, you can round out your profile by adding a profile picture, a short bio and your location. Tap Save when you’re done.

You can always change this later by tapping on your profile icon in the upper right and tapping on your name.

Tap on the people icon in the top-left to add friends from your contacts; scroll down to see recommendations for more friends. You can also enter someone’s username to look them up.

Make a BeReal post when you’re notified

On any given day, at a semi-random point in time, you’ll get a notification to post today’s BeReal. You have two minutes to post it ‘on time,’ but there’s really no penalty for posting late.

If your friends all post before you do, your friends’ posts will be blurred out. To make it fair, you need to take a picture before you can see everyone else’s.

React and comment on other posts

Like other social media, you can react to other posts, but BeReal works a little differently. You don’t just tap Like or pick an emoji — you also need to take a picture of yourself acting out the emoji. It’s a weird gimmick, but on-brand for a weird gimmicky social network.

You can write comments and reply to other comments on your friends’ posts, too.

Closing thoughts after a month of trying BeReal

If you read this article thinking, “Wow, that’s pointless,” or “I wouldn’t use that; I never do anything interesting,” you’re missing the point. It’s fun because it’s pointless and because no one posts anything interesting. It embraces and encourages banality.

If you’re reading this, you can add me on BeReal @dgriffinjones. It’s true that I haven’t been using Instagram; between Glass for sharing photography and BeReal for keeping up with my close friends, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. It’s a lot of fun, like Instagram used to be.

Will it explode with thousands of complicating features in pursuit of turning a profit like Snapchat or will it vanish faster than it arrived in the first place like Clubhouse? Check back in two years.

Wait a minute … how does it work again?

How exactly does BeReal figure out when to send you a notification? It sends a notification to you and all of your friends at once, but not everyone has the same friends. Doesn’t that mean that some of your friends have to get a notification at a different time? How does it group them together?

I was wondering if there was some complicated graph theory going on behind the scenes, but the answer is much more simple: everyone in the same time zone gets the same notification at once.

It sounds as if every user on the west coast of the United States logging on and uploading pictures to their servers simultaneously would be a recipe for disaster. If any engineers at BeReal would like to shed some light on how this doesn’t crash and burn every day with such a huge traffic spike, reach out!