so there's someone who lives in Brazil and thinks my email address is theirs. i get emails in Portuguese, often from .br domains, asking me to confirm my signup for various services or sending me receipts for online purchases. and they've tried now about 5 times to make an instagram account with my email address. i eventually made an account myself just to park on the email address... but this week, i got ANOTHER instagram confirmation request! turns out that, while google considers namename@gmail.com and name.name@gmail.com to be the same thing, instagram does not. so i had to sign up for a SECOND insta account, with name.name. (i do not want any instagram accounts.) this is incredibly irritating for me, and it must be frustrating for them as well. anyway, this most recent insta signup attempt appears to be an account co-administered by two people for their young niece. and they listed their main account names! (it is absolutely wild to me that instagram allows you to start posting without confirming your address. even more wild that the account is still up.) so now i want to send them a message essentially saying, HEY, this is NOT your email address, please stop trying to use it to sign up for things. i've been relying on google translate to read their posts and things, but i would like an actual Portuguese speaker to help me compose the message. (also, if anyone could walk me through how to send a message on instagram, i'd appreciate it. i've never used it at all, and all i know is you have to be following the person? or possibly be mutuals?)
I’m pretty sure you can send anyone a message, following them or not, as a response to a story they have up. If they don’t have a story up you do need to be following them but they don’t need to be mutuals - I haven’t found any settings that can make it so only mutuals can send messages.
that's very helpful, thanks! if you send it as a response to a story, is this a public message, or a private/direct message type thing? i'd prefer to contact them via pm/dm, if possible.