Introduction

401 Forbidden error when getting followers or folowees has been fixed. More changes are needed to make this project fully operational. There is a high chance that accounts with large amounts of followers/followees won't be able to get a full list of them.

PyInstaFollow is the simplest tool for finding out who is not following you back.

I know how these tools tend to be and how sketchy they always seem. For this reason I decided to create PyInstaFollow and publish it as an open source project.

So what does it do?

• Get a list of people following you (Followers).
• Get a list of people you follow (Followees).
• Compare the two lists and see who isn't following you back.
• (NEW) Backup old followers and followees lists.

Usage

1. git clone https://github.com/Yaw-Dev/PyInstaFollow
2. cd PyInstaFollow
3. pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Fill in your information on config.json

5/2/2026 update: Login method has changed from user/password to cookies. You can get access to your cookies by using the browser's Dev Tools or by using dedicated extensions (i.e: Cookie-Editor)

5. Finally just run main.py

All you have to do now is run "Get Followers" and "Get Followees" at least once. After that you can run "Compare" and get a list of everyone not following you back. Simple as that!

You can now set whether you want the login to happen on program start (every time) or only when using [1] or [2]. This will help lower API calls (login) which may have been useless if the user only wanted to run "Compare".

• You can do this by changing the login-on-start value on config.json

Warning: Using any of the features that require API calls may result in rate-limits or Instagram flagging it as suspicious behavior if done very frequently! Please use with caution.

Todo

• add an option for unfollowing everyone that doesn't follow you back (not possible with instaloader)
• write the output of "Compare" to a file
• beautify the cli
• make code less shitty

Contributions and suggestions are appreciated :)