How to find your oldest recorded Instagram follows
Sort dated accounts you still follow using your Instagram export. See unknown dates and learn what an old recorded follow date can tell you.
Who did you follow first, according to this export?
Start with the Following list in your own Instagram export. InstaScope can sort its usable timestamps oldest first, and the Relationship Timeline can group the dated accounts by year or month. The first result is your oldest recorded follow among accounts still in that list, not necessarily the first person you ever followed.
If an account has no usable recorded date, its date stays unknown. It cannot be placed earlier or later by guesswork. JSON timestamps identify an instant, while supported HTML dates omit the timezone; records in either format may still be undated.
For a manual check, inspect dates in Following rather than Followers and order only usable dates. In the fictional public example, sample.fern has May 12, 2021 and sample.oak has January 1, 2024. Fern is the older recorded outgoing follow. The undated sample.pine and sample.sage cannot be ranked by age.
What the date does not prove
A dated entry does not establish that you followed the account continuously since that day; you may have unfollowed and followed it again. Relationships that ended are not reconstructed from the current Following list.
The year and month groups are counts of dated relationships in this export, not a chart of your historical follower totals. To inspect changes between two points in time, you need separate snapshots rather than one dated list.
Explore old connections privately
Request Followers and Following with All time coverage, preferably as JSON, and choose the ZIP on your device. InstaScope analyzes it in your browser without asking for an Instagram password. Use Relationship Review if an old connection deserves a closer look; any follow or unfollow decision remains yours.
Fictional outgoing Following, oldest recorded first
These invented records use the account list's date ordering. Undated accounts remain after the dated results; no age is inferred for them.
| Position | Username | Recorded date (UTC) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | sample.fern | 2021-05-12 |
| 2 | sample.oak | 2024-01-01 |
| 3 | sample.pine | Date unavailable |
| 4 | sample.sage | Date unavailable |