mrstressful/instacircle — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-05-18
Get a daily Discord digest of Instagram posts and stories from people you actually follow back.
Receive a Discord alert whenever a new Instagram direct message arrives, without checking the app.
Reduce noise from algorithmic feed content by prioritizing mutual-friend posts first.
Self-host a personal Instagram monitoring tool instead of relying on a third-party service.
| mrstressful/instacircle | 0xallam/my-recipe | 0xhassaan/nn-from-scratch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 0 | — | 0 |
| Language | Python | Python | Python |
| Last pushed | — | 2022-11-22 | — |
| Maintenance | — | Dormant | — |
| Setup difficulty | moderate | moderate | moderate |
| Complexity | 2/5 | 2/5 | 4/5 |
| Audience | developer | general | developer |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Uses an unofficial Instagram API client, which violates Instagram's terms of service and risks account restriction.
Instacircle is a pair of self-hosted Python scripts that read your own Instagram feed, stories, and direct messages, and forward a filtered version of them to Discord using webhooks. The main idea is to separate posts and stories from mutual friends, meaning people who follow you and who you follow back, from everyone else, so you can see what people you actually know are posting without scrolling through the entire algorithmic feed. There are two scripts that share one logged-in Instagram session. The first, digest.py, runs once a day, pulls your home feed and stories, sorts everything into friend and non-friend groups, and posts a friends-first summary to a Discord channel. If you have ten or more friend posts it shows them all, and if you have fewer it pads the summary out with some non-friend content so you still see ten items. The second script, monitor.py, runs every ten to twenty minutes and checks your Instagram inbox for new direct messages, posting an alert to a separate Discord channel whenever something new arrives, while ignoring your full existing message history the first time it runs. The README is direct about the risk involved: both scripts use an unofficial, reverse-engineered Instagram client library rather than an approved API, which goes against Instagram's terms of service and could get an account flagged, rate-limited, or restricted, so using a secondary account is suggested for anyone uncomfortable with that risk on their main one. Setup involves installing the Python dependencies, copying an example environment file and filling in your own credentials, running each script once by hand to confirm login works, and then scheduling both scripts with cron. Sensitive files like the session token and saved state are excluded from version control, and the README warns that if the session file is ever exposed, you should change your Instagram password right away. No license file is included in the repository yet.
Self-hosted Python scripts that filter your Instagram feed, stories, and DMs to mutual friends only and forward them to Discord.
Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, instagrapi, Discord webhooks.
Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.
Mainly developer.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
double-check against the repo, no cap.