Instagram Followers

 Social Media used to be a place for you to see what your friends are up to. For most people, that ship hasn't sailed, but its a kayak on a yacht. When we get on Social Media now you have your friends, yes. You also have creators, businesses, and unrequited connections. All of those things are well and good if you use Social Media in that way. But if you are using it to keep up with your friends something has to change.

What's Going to Change

Following people that don't follow you. That is what is going to change. You may have good intentions with following a celebrity, business, person. I would argue that the usefulness of that follow is doing more harm than good. No, the content that they post is not harming you. Them having your attention over your friends is.

You attention everday is Finite

Attention is not an unlimited resource. What is given, is taken from the pool to give. This is literally within the construct of time. You will only have so many rotations around the sun. Every rotation, aka day, will end. You attention can only be spread out across the minutes of the day.

It's your choice on how to spend you time/attention. I know I will like to give it to the people who at least know of my existence. Secondly, confirm on the platform that we are connected. I personally will like to give my time and attention to those few.

One may say. David Goggins is a good follow because of motivation. What about the organizations page with updates. I say checkout their website. Subscribe to their newseletter. Join their GroupMe. Just don't intermingle their buisness with your attempt to connect with friends. The lines will blur. You will find yourself not seeing much of your actual friends on Instagram.

Below I have a workflow to grab the people not following you. I should take about 30 mins - 1hr with some coding experiance to grab. After I got the list I went through removing all the people that did not follow me.

Get list of people not following you

Don't want to do this? I will do it for you for $1. If you account is private I will need your credentials. Or follow _quindarius on instagram.

Update

Instagram really did not like me doing that as a service for people. Even only using my own cookie. I will drop the code later so if you want to do it yourself you can. All it takes is one bash script. 

 +-------------------------------------------+
 |             Instagram Signin              |
 |                                           |
 |    +---------+ +----------+ +---------+   |
 |    | Cookie  | | USER_ID  | | APP_ID  |   |
 |    |         | |          | |         |   |
 |    +---------+ +----------+ +---------+   |
 |                                           |
 +-------------------------------------------+
                        |                     
                        v                     
               +---------------+              
               | Curl Request  |              
               |               |              
               +---------------+              
                   ^ |    |  ^                
              +----+ |    |  +---+            
              |      |    |      |            
          Use Next   |    |  Use Next         
              |    +-+    +--+   |            
              |    |         |   |            
      +-------|----|---------|---|-------+    
      |       |Instagram Account |       |    
      |       |    v         v   |       |    
      |    +----------+  +----------+    |    
      |    |Following |  |Followers |    |    
      |    |          |  |          |    |    
      |    +----------+  +----------+    |    
      |        |                |        |    
      +--------|----------------|--------+    
               |                |             
               v                v             
        +--------------+ +--------------+     
        |Following.txt | |Followers.txt |     
        |              | |              |     
        +--------------+ +--------------+     
               ------+    +------             
                     |    |                   
                     v    v                   
                 +--------------+             
                 |Process Files |             
                 |              |             
                 +--------------+             
                        |                     
                        v                     
         +---------------------------------+  
         |People-Not-Following-Me-Back.txt |  
         |                                 |  
         +---------------------------------+