Scraping Instagram in 2026?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to scrape Instagram in 2026 and would appreciate advice from people who are actually doing it today.

The main requirements are:

* Fast (HTTP requests preferred, no browser automation if possible)

* Able to scale to hundreds or thousands of profiles

* Free or very low cost * Stable enough that it won't break every few weeks

The workflow I need is roughly this:

* Start with either one Instagram username or a list of usernames.

* Retrieve the accounts they are following.

* For each of those accounts, retrieve *their* following list as well.

* Find accounts that appear in multiple following lists. * Enrich the results with basic public profile data like follower count and bio.

One thing that's particularly important is future extensibility. I don't just want the fastest solution today—I want an approach that will support additional features later without requiring a complete rewrite. Some ideas I have are:

* Classifying accounts into niches or communities based on their follower/following graph.

* Detecting unusually high-performing posts or Reels (engagement anomalies) across a large set of accounts.

* Building creator relationship graphs and recommendation/discovery features.

* Potentially expanding into broader social graph analysis in the future.

For people actively scraping Instagram today:

* What approach are you using?

* Are there any maintained libraries or projects you'd recommend?

* If you were building this from scratch today, what architecture would you choose?

I'm not looking for code—just trying to understand what the current state of Instagram scraping looks like before I invest time building the pipeline.