My new application - UAI - Unfollow Accounts on Instagram
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 of my application.
If you liked the idea check out the code on my GitHub, and have fun unfollowing the kittens, puppies, cars, motorcycles, people, and the rest of things you didn't even think you were following!
