In the age of the ubiquitous digital image, Instagram may be the most apt platform to meet the expectation of “snapshot culture” (Serafinelli 2018), that is, the pressure to record all potentially relevant moments of one’s life on the go, to enhance them and to order them into a carefully crafted, publicly displayed sequence, as to create an aesthetic narrative of one’s evolutive persona. My essay analyzes the semiotic structures of Instagram as intertextual, interdiscursive and intermedial spaces which allow users to read content of interest to them and to narrate an aestheticized version of themselves. Both aspects of the literary potential of Instagram are underscored by a common feature: virtual interactions with other users, who represent both fellow readers and an audience. This implies that engaging with content and narrating the self always includes some degree of dialogism and co-construction of meaning. Users can demonstrate elevated levels of literacy in the discourses of social media culture and traditional bookish reading, and they can actively use Instagram’s semiotic structures for two reading purposes: to create ad hoc communities of interests wherein they can co-create popular literary genres and read content dialogically; to draw on narratological conventions and intertextuality to fashion aesthetic self-narrations, to which other users, as readers, can respond.