5 ms·

You can’t lurk on Instagram anymore unless you’re logged in (2019)

31 points by annadane 6y ago

annadane 6y ago
I am getting very tired of Mark Zuckerberg buying up the internet.
- yosito 6y ago
  I'm thinking of posting my photos to something like https://micro.blog https://micro.blog instead. Or posting them on my Gatsby site which is just a little bit more work for me (since I'm a developer) but definitely lacks a little bit of convenience. The biggest thing that's hard to give up for me is the simplicity of Instagram's image editing features built right into the flow of making a new post. I don't use the predefined filters, but I've got a pretty good personal style that I've developed with the manual editing tools. Any tips on ways to reproduce this flow are welcome!
  - annadane 6y ago
    Pixelfed?
    - yosito 6y ago
      They don't even seem to have an app, so I'm not sure how that is a viable alternative.
jimrandomh 6y ago
For the past several years, my experience of Instagram (as a non-user) has been that occasionally I'll click on a link that leads there, and I'm met with a page that asks me to attach a phone number to my account. There is no option to log out (it seems to be an evercookie) and no option to refuse. So I leave, not willing to give them a phone number and not wanting to bother with an incognito window. If it's important, I'll ask the person who posted the link to repost the content somewhere else.
- andrepd 6y ago
  There are mirrors: bibliogram.
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  Instagram just tells me to login, I can't even view individual posts.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  It's really easy to scrape Instagram from outside the browser as a non-user. No API or Access Token needed. Two steps: 1. Get the profile ID, 2. submit query via GraphQL. For example, if the username is "fish" and we want the first 36 entries. 1. x=$(wget -O- -q https://www.instagram.com/fish/?__a=1|grep -o "profilePage_[^\"]*" |sed 's/profilePage_//'); 2. wget -O- -q "https://www.instagram.com/graphql/query/?query_hash=e769aa130647d2354c40ea6a439bfc08&variables={\"id\":\"$x\",\"first\":36,\"after\":\"\"}"
  - annadane 6y ago
    Do you enter these two commands sequentially?
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
      Yes the profile ID is needed for the GraphQL query
  - iggldiggl 6y ago
    While the API access isn't quite as limited as their regular website, don't they eventually block your IP after too many queries? At least that has been my experience when browsing via Imginn – eventually picture loading stalls and in the devtools you can see that in that case the GraphQL requests redirect to a login page instead of returning the desired data. At least that's where having a dynamic IP comes in handy :-P, and with Imginn some minimal fiddling with the page inspector (unhiding the "Load more" button again) lets you retry the query, so your infinite scrolling progress isn't lost.
nicbou 6y ago
I've seen this pattern repeated with many websites. Once they become popular enough to afford it, they lock all their content, disable their APIs, and start requiring their users to verify emails, share their phone numbers etc. Export options become hard to use, open protocols get squashed, API access becomes really difficult to get. It seems like the end game of any large website is to hold data hostage.

31 points by annadane 6y ago

annadane 6y ago

I am getting very tired of Mark Zuckerberg buying up the internet.

yosito 6y ago
I'm thinking of posting my photos to something like https://micro.blog https://micro.blog instead. Or posting them on my Gatsby site which is just a little bit more work for me (since I'm a developer) but definitely lacks a little bit of convenience. The biggest thing that's hard to give up for me is the simplicity of Instagram's image editing features built right into the flow of making a new post. I don't use the predefined filters, but I've got a pretty good personal style that I've developed with the manual editing tools. Any tips on ways to reproduce this flow are welcome!
- annadane 6y ago
  Pixelfed?
  - yosito 6y ago
    They don't even seem to have an app, so I'm not sure how that is a viable alternative.

jimrandomh 6y ago

For the past several years, my experience of Instagram (as a non-user) has been that occasionally I'll click on a link that leads there, and I'm met with a page that asks me to attach a phone number to my account. There is no option to log out (it seems to be an evercookie) and no option to refuse. So I leave, not willing to give them a phone number and not wanting to bother with an incognito window. If it's important, I'll ask the person who posted the link to repost the content somewhere else.

andrepd 6y ago
There are mirrors: bibliogram.
emptyparadise 6y ago
Instagram just tells me to login, I can't even view individual posts.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
It's really easy to scrape Instagram from outside the browser as a non-user. No API or Access Token needed. Two steps: 1. Get the profile ID, 2. submit query via GraphQL. For example, if the username is "fish" and we want the first 36 entries. 1. x=$(wget -O- -q https://www.instagram.com/fish/?__a=1|grep -o "profilePage_[^\"]*" |sed 's/profilePage_//'); 2. wget -O- -q "https://www.instagram.com/graphql/query/?query_hash=e769aa130647d2354c40ea6a439bfc08&variables={\"id\":\"$x\",\"first\":36,\"after\":\"\"}"
- annadane 6y ago
  Do you enter these two commands sequentially?
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    Yes the profile ID is needed for the GraphQL query
- iggldiggl 6y ago
  While the API access isn't quite as limited as their regular website, don't they eventually block your IP after too many queries? At least that has been my experience when browsing via Imginn – eventually picture loading stalls and in the devtools you can see that in that case the GraphQL requests redirect to a login page instead of returning the desired data. At least that's where having a dynamic IP comes in handy :-P, and with Imginn some minimal fiddling with the page inspector (unhiding the "Load more" button again) lets you retry the query, so your infinite scrolling progress isn't lost.

nicbou 6y ago

I've seen this pattern repeated with many websites. Once they become popular enough to afford it, they lock all their content, disable their APIs, and start requiring their users to verify emails, share their phone numbers etc. Export options become hard to use, open protocols get squashed, API access becomes really difficult to get. It seems like the end game of any large website is to hold data hostage.