Show HN: A free Instagram story viewer that lets you watch anonymously | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A free Instagram story viewer that lets you watch anonymously

instagram-story-viewer.org

46 pointsdeep_signal19 comments

Be careful with sharing this URL in your Instagram DMs. I built something similar a few weeks ago for watching Instagram reels, shared a link to it with someone on Instagram, and my account instantly got suspended because this type of stuff violates Instagram's TOS and they crack down really hard on it.

How can that be, aren't Instagram Dms end-to-end encrypted, curious on how they find these kind of messages

They make the app that stores the plaintext at each end... they don't need to decrypt your messages across the wire to read them.

Ah I understand now, thank you. So they can actually read it just not in transit but from the app, isn't that a security violation?

A what violation?

I kid. But only sorta.

They advertise e2e as something that is to secure your messages and no one can read it including them, just got surprised when I realized they can view all the messages before transit, I never even thought that that they can do that before encryption

They control the software doing the encryption & decryption - they could ship your private keys to themselves if they truly wanted to be evil.

Who would know?

All e2e encrypted apps can do this. It's the price you pay for a completely closed ecosystem that coddles you at every turn because you're too much of a little bean to know what real security is.

Edit: this isn't a dig at you, it's a dig at how google and apple treat you

I didn't know that they are able to do this, now that I know it just makes perfect sense.

If a user has an IG tag in their description, clicking on it leads to https://anon-viewer.com/?url=. Is this site just a warpper around that website? Hmm

How can you use this to view a reel when you don't know the username?

Sorry, the server is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

I had an account suspended for a few days a while back when trying a similar product

I’ll never use anything that automates use in a meta or google product from my accounts again

I've been using modded versions of Instagram on my Android device for a few years now. Never had an issue, but I do get there is a risk.

Which one is usable now? I was briefly using AeroInsta and Instander as an experiment, worked well, but afair they are not very up to date? I can provide temporary email if you don't want to post it.

AeroInsta still works. MyInsta is another, works well for blocking Reels and Explore sections. AeroInsta doesn't have that feature as far as I know, but has cool features like menu options to copy caption text and comment text.

Doesn't look to work

Specifically "Please try again later..."

for anon stories I use insta story viewer io

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