How to Clean Up Your Instagram Following List: A Gamer’s Guide

Open Instagram, tap your profile, and read the number beside Following. If you have been playing MMOs for a few years, that number is probably in the hundreds. Mine was 1,412 the day I finally looked, and I could not have named more than fifty of them.

The number itself is not the problem. What it does to your feed is. Patch-note reposts, giveaway pages, three accounts posting the same clip, a dozen profiles you followed for a single meme — together they bury the posts that actually matter: a dungeon route someone shared, a stat table that answers a question you had, a guild that is recruiting.

Cleaning up your following list is the cheapest feed upgrade available. This guide covers how to do it properly in 2026: using your own Instagram data export, reviewed in a private browser workspace, without ever handing your password to an app. It is written from the perspective of a Dreadmyst player and build-simulator maintainer, but the workflow applies to any gamer who wants a feed worth scrolling.

Following is a one-tap decision. Unfollowing requires a judgement call, so the list only ever grows. For anyone playing an MMO, the accumulation happens faster than usual, because gaming accounts come in clusters:

• Guild, clan and community pages, often several per game.
• Streamer and clip-aggregator accounts that repost the same highlight three times a week.
• Build-screenshot and theorycrafting pages that were useful once, during one patch.
• Fan-art accounts, tournament organisers and looking-for- group bots.
• Giveaway and follow-for-follow chains, which pull in a tail of empty accounts you never wanted in the first place.

In a niche community the effect is stronger. Dreadmyst is small enough that players follow every Dreadmyst-related account they can find — including ones that go quiet after a month. Multiply that across every game you have played and the list stops being a curated set of interests and becomes an archive of everything you were ever curious about.

There is a practical cost, too. The feed you see is shaped by what you follow, so a bloated list dilutes your real interests. And if you post your own builds, clips or guild content, a following list that has nothing to do with your niche weakens the signal Instagram uses to decide who should see your posts.

A cleanup is an audit, not a purge. You are looking for accounts that satisfy two conditions at once: they do not follow you back, and you no longer have a reason to follow them. An account that ignores you but still posts the best Dreadmyst theorycrafting on the platform is a keep. An account that follows you back but posts nothing you read is still worth a second look.

It is worth being precise about what is knowable, because this is where most Instagram apps mislead people. Two questions have no answer:

• Who viewed my profile? Instagram does not expose this to anyone.
• Who unfollowed me? There is no historical record of a relationship that ended.

The one thing you can establish precisely is the difference between your followers and your following at the moment you exported your data. That is a set operation on files you own, and it is verifiable — which is exactly why the export route is the one worth trusting.

The traditional “unfollow tracker” works by logging into your account as you. That is a bad trade for three reasons. It violates Instagram’s rules on automation and third-party access, which puts your account at risk of temporary locks or worse. You have no way to verify what happens to credentials you hand over. And the moment the app breaks — because Instagram changed a private endpoint — you are locked out of your own audit.

The export route removes all three problems. You request your own data from Instagram Accounts Center, you download the file, and you keep it. No login, no password, no OAuth screen, no account connection. If a tool ever asks you to enter your Instagram password to audit your following list, close the tab.

Everything starts with Instagram’s official download. It takes about two minutes to request and it is free.

1. Open Instagram and go to Settings and activity, then into Accounts Center.
2. Choose Your information and permissions and then Download your information.
3. Pick the account you want to audit and select Some of your information.
4. Tick Followers and following. This is the only category the audit needs.
5. Choose the JSON format and the All time date range, then submit the request.
6. Wait for the notification, download the ZIP, and keep it compressed — do not extract it.

Three things go wrong often enough to be worth knowing in advance. Export requests can sit pending for hours or even a day before the archive is ready. Download links expire, so save the ZIP to your computer as soon as it appears. And a request that only included photos or messages will not contain the relationship files at all — if the archive has no followers data, you simply requested the wrong category.

Inside the JSON export you will find your followers in one file and the accounts you follow in another. The comparison is straightforward: normalise the usernames so that case and stray whitespace do not create false matches, then subtract your followers from your following. Whatever remains is the list of accounts that do not follow you back in that snapshot.

You can do this by hand if you enjoy suffering, but there is no reason to. Instagram Cleaner is a browser-based non-followers checker built for exactly this file. You hand it the untouched ZIP, it opens the archive locally, finds the followers and following data, and returns a review list — no login, no password, and the file never leaves your machine. It also exports the result as a CSV, which matters more than it sounds: a spreadsheet is what turns an impulse into a considered decision.

If the workspace rejects your file, the cause is usually mundane: the ZIP was extracted before upload, the request omitted the followers category, or the download link had already expired and the file is truncated. Their breakdown of what each file inside the export contains is a useful reference when a result looks incomplete.

The list is a starting point, not a verdict. Bulk unfollowing everything the tool surfaces is the fastest way to regret a cleanup, because a one-way relationship is not the same as an unwanted one. Before you remove anyone, pull out the exceptions: people you actually know, guild mates, accounts you follow deliberately for research, and brands you genuinely want to hear from.

Work in batches and give yourself time between them. Review twenty accounts, close the tab, come back tomorrow. The accounts that still look pointless on a second pass are the ones worth removing. If you manage a creator, guild or brand account, keep the CSV — a dated record of why you made each change turns a vague feeling into something you can defend.

A quarterly cadence is enough for most players. The goal is not a pristine number, it is a list you could justify if someone asked you about any single account on it.

Gaming niches attract a specific kind of noise. Fake giveaway accounts, impersonators of well-known streamers, phantom “guild” pages with no members, and low-effort accounts that farm follows and then pivot to selling something. They show up in your follower list rather than your following list, which is why they need a separate check.

That check is a profile-signal review rather than a set comparison: a default avatar, a numeric username, no posts, an account created last week, or a following count in the thousands against a handful of followers. A bot followers checker lets you record those signals in one place, without mixing them up with the non-follower audit above.

Be honest about the limits. These are indicators, not proof. Plenty of real players use a default avatar and a numeric handle. Treat the signals as a reason to look closer, never as a reason to publicly accuse someone — especially in a community as small as Dreadmyst, where the person behind an odd-looking account is probably just a lurker who has not posted yet.

Here is where this connects back to the reason this site exists. In Dreadmyst, attribute points are effectively one-way. Spend them on the wrong stat and you feel it for the next twenty levels. That is precisely why we built the Dreadmyst Build Simulator — to let you test a build before you commit to it, instead of discovering the mistake in a dungeon.

Cleaning up your Instagram following list is the same discipline applied somewhere else. Do not unfollow blind. Export your own data, look at the difference, review the list against what you actually want in your feed, and only then act. Planning before committing is the entire habit; the build planner and the following audit are just two places it pays off.

If you are one of the players who posts builds, clips or fan art, a clean following list also makes your own page easier to take seriously. It is easier to follow a creator whose interests look deliberate. Once your feed is sorted, the fastest way to make your next post worth sharing is to get the numbers right first — start with the Dreadmyst class guide for an overview of every class, or go straight to the Paladin tank build and the spell cleric build if you already know what you are playing. For the endgame route itself, the full endgame guide walks through the dungeons from the minotaurs to the final four-player run.

A following list of 1,400 accounts is not a collection, it is a backlog. Fixing it does not require a sketchy app or your password — it requires your own export, a careful comparison, and the patience to review the result instead of reacting to it. Request the data, run the comparison locally, keep the accounts that earn their place, and repeat once a quarter.

Do it the same way you would approach a new character: plan first, commit second. Sort out the feed, then head back to the Dreadmyst Build Simulator and make sure the build you are about to post is actually worth the follow.