They WILL suspend your account

[FrobtheBuilder]

I used this thing for about five seconds and my account was permanently suspended. Seems incredibly unfair considering there's no real web client and they seem to have no plan to add one any time in the near future, but nonetheless I don't recommend using it. This is very disappointing.

[stevenlafl]

Weird, I've been using it with the same identical account since the beginning, and I made the account brand-new when I joined threads. Same with another account my friend is using. Did they send you an email? What'd it say?

[FrobtheBuilder]

What I got was suddenly logged out, then on the app, this:

No email.

[FrobtheBuilder]

Interestingly enough my alt account (on the same exact phone number) seems fine still.

[stevenlafl]

It says you can appeal - link them back here. Ridiculous since I haven't gotten banned. Nothing in this client tries to do anything the app can't.

Check your logins, is everything looking okay that you do recognize? Check instagram.com on the browser.

[FrobtheBuilder]

Yeah I appealed the thing. The only other possibly suspicious thing I did was install instagram on windows subsystem for android in order to confirm the login, since I couldn't seem to do it on the version installed on my phone. Every login request would instantly vanish with "no longer available" or "something went wrong". Getting banned for that doesn't even make sense either since it's still the official app!

[stevenlafl]

I see. Yeah, I do get logged out of every session except for the browser once in a while. Sometimes you can get the 'challenge required' notice and they make you go to instagram.com and dismiss the message.

What I've been doing is manually clicking "this was me" on every "unrecognized login" from a device I "don't normally use."

I found the TOS section they are citing:

https://help.instagram.com/769983657850450
The clause they cited is:

(iv) use any robot, spider, crawlers, scraper or other automatic device, process, software or queries that
 intercepts, “mines”, scrapes, extracts or otherwise accesses the Threads Service to monitor, 
extract, copy or collect information or data from the Threads Service, or engage in any
 manual process to do the same.

It would seem, using their own app could arguably break their own TOS. The intent is obviously to not crawl and scrape, and we are doing nothing but read to display and interact exactly like their own app.

And actually I've heard of regular people getting suspended for, well, using their app.

[FrobtheBuilder]

Yeah it's hard to say how unsafe the web client specifically is because it's impossible to know what kind of heuristics they're using but a stream of failed login requests that I literally could not accept might have tripped it... maybe? You can't actually explain what you were doing in the appeal, they just request a "selfie" of you with a code written on a sheet of paper. I do not actually use instagram and I definitely don't have any "selfies" there so it's not gonna be much use for "verifying" my account. I'm not exactly optimistic here, but at least I can just use my other account instead.

[stevenlafl]

I'm curious by this.

a stream of failed login requests that I literally could not accept

1. Why couldn't you accept them?
2. Were you ever able to actually USE this client with that account?
3. Was your alt account ever logged into this client?

[FrobtheBuilder]

Like I said, I couldn't accept them because opening them up just gave me a "this request is no longer available" message or "something went wrong". It only worked when I logged into instagram from windows subsystem for android on my computer. That's how I eventually managed to use the client with that account. Alt account was never logged in from the web client.

[stevenlafl]

Alright, yeah. I know that for example I can't create an account with the web UI, and I have to actually go to the mobile app. I think they literally make you click the link on your phone. Lots of stuff is broken it seems on their end related to instagram user flows.

[stevenlafl]

I've got an idea. I'll store the deviceID somewhere and reuse it. I'm going to try to use @junhoyeo's (very) incomplete API and contribute back a bunch of functionality that I wrote into the one I'm using here. I'll post fixes and test later today and tomorrow.

[FrobtheBuilder]

That might be a good idea. Instagrapi lets you reuse device IDs. Right now I'm kind of glad I used the official graph api for my instagram bot... if only threads had a real API.

[FrobtheBuilder]

They reinstated my account after review so it looks like I'm good. I still have no idea what the issue was.

[elijah-wright]

see #10, this is something that can happen. I think it might be heuristics? idk if junho has a fix for this

[stevenlafl]

see #10, this is something that can happen. I think it might be heuristics? idk if junho has a fix for this

I'm not sure, I'm leaving it alone for now and keeping the API, since I got 401'd using the other one almost immediately and never did on yours. I really have no idea what it actually is that's causing it. The app works great with threads.js 8.1.0, I tried updating it to the newer version and it didn't work, I posted something about getting an HTML response. I'll try it again later, I have a lot of things that are keeping me too busy at the moment.