how to send an instagram reel without doxxing yourself
thank you for wanting to send me an instagram reel! I appreciate it. There's some fun stuff on instagram that I never see, and your gesture is so kind. However:
instagram shows your instagram account when you share content. It's fine when it's me - I don't care who you are - but if I reblog that post or answer that ask, it'll show your instagram profile - linked to your tumblr profile - to the public!
There are a couple of ways to avoid this. Let's take a look at an instagram URL.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/20Dasdasdaadfgdfg3j /?igsh=MXsssmFa5zadfffY4aA
after "reel", there's a long string of characters that represents the actual reel you want to send me, which I've represented here in pink. that is the address of the reel. That's all we need! You can just send me that.
Next, you'll see the green part. there's a question mark, with "IGSH" (that means instagram share, hopefully triggering your memory) and an equals sign. The stuff after the equals sign is your profile.
When I tap on this link, before showing me the reel, it first tells me exactly who you are. I can't see the video until it makes me click away from your face.
So, since presumably we aren't that close, and you don't want your tumblr to be linked with amysocialsecuritynumber's more public presence, you'll want to sanitise that link! That means removing all the sharing information so it just acts like a normal link.
The easiest thing is to simply remove the part of the URL that I've indicated in green:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/20Dasdasdaadfgdfg3j /?igsh=MXsssmFa5zadfffY4aA
But if you're on a mobile device, that isn't always easy, so you can paste it into something like LinkCleaner first:
that one's nice, because it gives you the option of seeing what the cleaned link shows to people.
In addition to protecting your identity, especially if I'm careless and just reblog something without checking (I am so careless, honestly) it makes things a bit easier for me.
theartofmadeline
gummygunk
