UAI - Unfollow Accounts on Instagram

SUMMARY

Story
Throughout my time using the social network, I always followed several accounts for no reason. But now, it's time to do some cleaning, and the laziness pops up (who never?). The scenario could be described as: I had a lot of things I want to still follow (like my friends) and a thousand others that I do not remember that I followed and don't want anymore (sorry in advance to a lot of cat pages).

At first, I thought of doing this process all by hand (and it did for a few minutes), I realized that the amount of accounts I was following, would take me a long time to finish.

I realize that there were some patterns within the process that I could automate in some way.

The first step was to extract the data. I used a little of my knowledge with Javascript to do the loading of all the things I followed. With all the accounts loaded, I made a loop to print them all on the console and so build own my database, see the section How i got my data.

During the extraction, I organized all the results with some criteria, like removing only the verified accounts (because at this moment there was no need for me to retrieve/unfollow them). Then I placed the results in an HTML file and added simple anchor links to open a new tab (this part was more manual, but with the help of Sublime, selecting all the lines and editing them all at the same time - at some point, I could automate it but not today!).

As I said, I did the next few steps a few times:

Clicking on the link
Opening
Waiting to load
Clicking on the unfollow button
Confirming
Closing the tab
And repeating (and dying of boredom eventually).
I talked about it with my wife and joked that it would be interesting for me to make another code to make this process faster, and as a good crazy partner, she gave me the strength (and a lot of coffee) to do it. Now here I am, writing how it came to be created. To bring to the code the unicorn in my head, I remembered a video that I had seen many years ago, which is about an AI to play the Google Chrome Dinosaur.

I thought about it because I wanted it to be in Node.js. I accessed the AI ​​video code on Git because I already knew it was in Node (for the sake of God's of Programmers).

There is a package called RobotJS, with good documentation and easy to understand. The package fitted my idea perfectly, and I started to automate this boring process of unfollowing accounts. As my idea is to be simple, it has a limitation that requires to be configured according to the resolution of my screen, OS, and the like, see the configurations below.

https://github.com/felipelssilva/unfollowInstagramAccounts

The latest version of UAI - Unfollow Accounts on Instagram is available on the Chrome web and is currently being used by 705 active users. The initial version was launched on 2021-02-28.

HOW TO INSTALL UAI - Unfollow Accounts on Instagram FROM A CRX FILE

1. Download UAI - Unfollow Accounts on Instagram CRX file
2. NOTE: Sometimes the browser may block downloading / installing CRX file from outside the Chrome Web Store. If so, you may need to download the ZIP file instead
3. In the URL bar, go to chrome://extensions
4. Enable Developer mode

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