One deep dive per section of the archive, in the order the questions actually come up: who was there, who you reached, what you said, what you made, what you did, and what you told the platform about yourself.
Who was in my life?
Almost your entire Instagram social graph lives in two files, and none of its history does. Here is every relationship list your export really contains, the set arithmetic that turns them into answers, and the three things it can never tell you.
Who did I actually reach?
Your Instagram export tracks actions between you and specific people. This is the volume half: not who is on your lists, but how much you reached them, what kinds of interactions you had, and the honest limits on that count.
What did I actually say?
Your Instagram export splits conversations into thread folders, and large threads are sharded across message_1.json, message_2.json and so on. This is how DMs, group chats and owned broadcast channels are reconstructed, and why unsent messages, media-in-thread and reactions can look odd if you read only one file.
What did I make?
Your own content is spread across several files. Posts, reels, stories, profile photos, recently deleted, watch history and DM media are all parsed separately. This is what each bucket is, how it is found in the archive, and what can look like a missing post when it is not.
What did I do?
The activity folder is the biggest and least obvious. Likes, comments, searches, story interactions, poll/Q&A answers, saved items, reposts, link history, ads, posts you viewed/interested in, note interactions and watch history are all separate files. This is what they map to in the archive and the rule that matters: watch history is consumption, not "your activity" in the same sense as actions you took.
What did I tell them about me?
Your profile details live in a few small files under personal information. The parser normalizes different shapes (modern string_map_data with label_values merged, and older simple objects), filters untrusted labels to avoid prototype pollution, and extracts only what is actually recorded.
Every post in this series uses data you already downloaded from Meta’s Download Your Information tool. Nothing asks you to upload anything, and nothing here is affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Instagram or Meta.