Hi there. I'm trying to run a small Instagram scraping project focused only on my mutual followers, that is, people I follow and who follow me back (around 900 users). My goal is to analyze my own social network using Gephi.

I'm only interested in mutual connections within this group, I don't care about external links to people outside the 900. So far, I’ve used Instaloader in Python to get the user IDs of my mutuals, then accessed their profiles to fetch their following lists. I then compare those lists to my mutuals list in order to build the network graph.

To stay safe, I added random delays of 2–5 minutes between each profile lookup. On day 1, I analyzed 45 people; on day 2, I did 70. I always ran the script during my usual Instagram usage hours (not overnight or anything suspicious). However, when I logged in on day 3, I received a warning from Instagram saying they'd detected automated behavior, and that my account could be disabled if it continued.

Now I'm afraid to continue. I don’t want to lose my account. Creating a secondary account isn’t a real option because I’d need to follow those 900 people again and get them to follow me back, which is not feasible, especially since some of them have private profiles.

I understand Instagram won’t make this data easily accessible, but this is info I already have access to as a user, and I’m only using it to study my own network.

So my questions are:

• Is there a safer way to proceed?

• Should I continue using Instaloader but with way longer delays (like 1 user every few hours)?

• Is there any tool that can help me do this more safely?