Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
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Why would you say something like this? And why, as a journalist, would you report it? It's a transparent lie; nobody is going to be taken in by it. So why bother even saying it?
The community got mad when they tried to say this was to cultivate "a sense of accomplishment" when the goal was really to encourage players to buy lootboxes in order to skip the grind.
> nobody is going to be taken in by it.
Unfortunately, you don’t know that to be true. Relatives I’ve spoken with who own FB stock love to read statements like this to justify their position.
The lack of transparency around speech in your case only works against journalists when their credibility is questioned. They gain nothing omitting frivolous statements as opposed to printing them and letting members of the public point out how stupid they are.
All this says to people is that Instagram is getting more annoying.
It seems so blatantly ridiculous, and I feel like it does more harm than good, but they must have reason to think otherwise?
I agree with the other commentor. This term indicates it was done on purpose. It describes the stare of the power line. I think it's better than blackout.
This is important from a corporate legal standpoint because it makes you as slippery as possible. Words have a tendency to come back to haunt you.
"So, what I told you was true... from a certain point of view."
I think we'll find that their numbers are saying the loss of revenue of people leaving because they have to always login is far less than the uptick in revenue to be made from the changes this will allow. They rolled this out weeks ago in Australia, and would have been watching for the backlash.
I think (the following is pure speculation) this is just a first step of a number of changes around monetisation. This basically locks the backdoor, where they prevent people not on the platform from browsing feeds for free.
The real change is going to be when users (celebrities and businesses mostly) find they have to pay to reach all of their followers (who surprise, surprise now have to be logged in). They may not require "boosting" for under 1000 (or even 10,000) followers which will keep most users and wannabee influencers on the platform, even if they have to give a couple of dollars to Instagram when they push a product. You may find the advertisers end up just paying more.
It's the mega-users with multi-million followers they want to monetise, Users who get paid 10-100s thousands of dollars per post where Instagram doesn't get a cut despite being the delivery platform. Compared to what it costs for advertising on traditional media such as radio or TV, even a dollar to reach 10,000 followers would be nothing.
But you can't enforce payment when their followers can simply logout and view the feed for free. I would expect the popup appearing immediately rather than after a few scrolls to be implemented soon.
https://twitter.com/emin3mquotez/status/415206423342366720
That aside, if not now, when? If not us, who? Someone has to start it. None of my friend were on FB when I joined it.
Nobody really uses facebook because it's just so amazing, but because almost all of their friends and family are using it. (and facebook groups, many, many people use facebook for organizing meetups because it's free and... everyone's on it). It's familiar and easy, no complex things like federated servers to choose from. Just one central site.
In real life I told some friends I left facebook/twitter, and they were like "ok". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Few people are just going to stop communication with their social group over principles or whatever. I stopped using facebook because I was fed up, but it sucked not being in the group chats for the communities that I was involved in. I had to work harder to keep abreast of what was going on, and it still wasn't the same. If I had kept on organizing and hosting events it would've been impossible.
Things like meetups are possible on meetup.com, etc, for sure, but now I'm not privy to anything on facebook, and I have to pay to have my own group. Very few people are going to make that decision. I know people who still have fake accounts just to access fb groups, but not deal with the rest of facebook.
Bridges are likely the only feasible way forward, but even though mastodon has one for twitter adoption hasn't really happened.
App with Pixelfed support for Android: https://fedilab.app/
Public profiles are public on Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/ubports
Add https://fed.brid.gy/ & webmention support, so you'll be @your.domain@your.domain on activitypub (read: pixelfed, mastodon, gnusocial, whatever) so the "fediverse" can follow and interact with you.
Add h-feed markup for your website, so indieweb can follow and interact with you.
Keep RSS & Atom feeds, so anyone oldschool can follow you. I'd love to add keep pingback... but that is insanely spam-prone.
I'd love to see a switching guide for, say, Twitter, that specifically says "here's how to transparently follow people on Twitter, and here's how to have your posts show up on your old Twitter account". Or similarly, if you're switching from Instagram, how do you follow folks from Instagram and automatically post to Instagram?
Your question sounds like someone asking how a user of a newly opened Facebook account can follow people on Twitter. They're entirely different services. The federating, or not, is immaterial.
The first part is the alternative service.
Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, presented in a Twitter-like format and flow. People who use it do so because they want to avoid the restrictions and cultures of Twitter. They don't want to post the same content across the two services. They don't want to interact with Twitter. They want to be on Mastodon.
The second part is the federating of the service.
Instances of Mastodon are spread around, hosting a set of users on their individual servers. Each of those instances can then communicate between with the others, intending for you to be able to follow and interact with users on other Mastodon server instances as transparently as those of your local Mastodon server. They are still interacting within the Mastodon environment.
No, I absolutely understand how federating sites work, and don't need the condescension.
It's common, in many types of federated reimplementations of non-federated sites, to create special-case bridges that allow treating a large non-federated site as if it were following the federation protocol, precisely to help people migrate and to continue interoperating with users who are on the non-federated site.
In the specific case of ActivityPub, there are multiple bridges that allow following Twitter users as if they were part of the fediverse. Multiple Mastodon users I know have mentioned them. People just don't talk about them very clearly, or document them in migration guides. Hence my comment suggesting that.
If specific portions of the fediverse want to avoid ever interacting with Twitter bridges, they can absolutely do that, just as they can avoid interacting with other portions of the fediverse. But it would be helpful if potential new users had some information they could use to migrate more smoothly.
That sounds a bit like "why would you even want to run Photoshop on Unix? It's not open source! It's an entirely different philosophy!"
Many people balance different needs and values. Someone might like the idea of open federation but still need to follow people on Twitter for their day job, or simply follow a thousand interesting people that they don't want to simply drop just like that, to enter into a comparative wasteland.
Providing people with half-way solutions actually encourages more people to come and transition smoothly.
Because I am pretty sure it violates Twitter API use. Twitter has no incentive to allow data moving off their network.
The non-federated site has to play along with the federation standard for this to work. Just like Compuserve or AOL, which provided both proprietary "walled gardens" and (increasingly over time) interoperability with federated services like e-mail.
There seem to be two problems with replacing Instagram or Twitter. The first one is money to run servers, fight spam, handle subpoenas, etc.
The other one is having an authoritative directory. How is anyone to know that "ClearAndPresent" on Twitter is the same as "ClearAndPresent@SomeRandomInstance.mastodon"? An obvious way would be to send a DM to a Twitter account but it seems likely that Twitter would shut that down pretty quickly. We've all heard the stories of Facebook (and LinkedIn and ...) pillaging Gmail for contacts.
however, no-one but google actually has the horsepower to do it. You'll be playing an arms race with their devOps team if you try at scale, because they'll say you're degrading service and that IS illegal.
so, while it's a nice legal victory, it's a moot one for things like twitter.
Some bridges do exist (see Matrix connectors), and I agree that it should be a very high priority to add more of them and improve the existing connectors.
But it's also important to understand that, yes, they're messy, and will probably always be a little messy -- because the services they are connecting to don't play nicely with others. If Twitter had an amazing 3rd-party API that anyone could use to write a custom client, view content, export data, and filter posts, then it wouldn't be as big of a priority to get off of Twitter.
However, all of that being said, I too would like to see more guides here. I spent a long time following Matrix before I realized there were public Discord bridges that could be used without even hosting my own server.[0] I just never saw it mentioned anywhere.
The publicity/documentation around this stuff could improve a lot.
[0]: https://t2bot.io/
Kind of silly I can't find a good image sharing site in 2019.
Personally I'm using Instagram for casual "here's my life" photos where I don't care about compression or any of that, Flickr for more curated public photos, and Google Drive as a secondary private backup.
At that point imgur became less about easy photo sharing on reddit and others, and more about creating its own community.
It is decentralized and open source.
I loved the idea too, Mastodon is somewhat limited and if we can get more alternatives all the better.
I don't get it. You have it. You know the user wants it. You know the user wants it very much, enough to go through all that crap. Yet you are going out of your way to not give him access, making him so frustrated that any hope of "but he will crawl around more and do more stuff" is quickly replaced by "he closes the tab in anger at having lost 5 minutes" ...
I'm sure there are metrics showing that it works, or maybe that it doesn't lose enough people to be worth changing, but it is so unnecessary.
The ad blocking Pi-Hole provides is a nice bonus, too.
1: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...
It blocks search and image results by pattern, and also removes the URL tracker wrapping wherever possible.
I plan to release the image extraction module in a separate extension, so you can just click on the page area with the image, and it opens the image in a new tab. This way you will not need to do a reverse image search to get to the image, or manually look for it in the page source.
Especially as a site that specializes in hosting nearly exclusively non-original content, it's so ethically wrong for them to use such tactics.
Pinterest, Quora, Instagram, I never understood why people keep using these clearly unethical websites. Stop using them and other better alternatives will pop out, it's not like you depend on them like you depend on grocery shops or clothing stores. Voting with your attention is easy and cheap.
I despise it when this happens. The only solution is to create a gmail filter to catch the entire domain and archive it or mark it as spam. It's surprising how many companies willfully ignore the unsubscribe option.
I just created an account with an email but after few minutes of clicking around it locked me out. I can only use it again if I give them my phone number, too -.-
As if this wasn't enough of their invasive procedures my profile officially says "Account is blocked because of suspicious behavior".
This is some advanced trickery to fool users into giving them more data than they intended to do when creating a profile and it sucks.
There are more examples: Have you tried browsing Facebook or Xing as a user? It's all a really crappy experience.
It's a TLD and no service like ProtonMail. Gmail would be the next party I don't want to share information with - I know those are complicated preferences from a "normal" point of view but I don't like to spread my data too much.
I'm not saying this to defend twitter, this is definitely some aggressive, disingenuous behavior.
Just to be sure I also ordered a free SIM card so I have a spam phone for these kinds of services.
Thank you for the advice.
"If you need to reset your Twitter password, please request a new one here: https://twitter.com/account/begin_password_reset.
If your Twitter account is suspended or locked and you are unable to access it, please log in to your account and use the following form to get in touch with us: https://support.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=suspended...
Because my account is "temporarily restricted" neither of the cases matches so I think this is their kind way telling me to f-ck off or give them what they want. I don't like these kind of games and I'm thinking about not using their service after all.
Another entry for the hall of fame is Quora.
Someone should make a bugmenot browser extension...
Just want something simple where I can upload some photos, do a bit of light editing, apply a nice filter and share with friends. And also see a chronological timeline of stuff they’ve posted.
No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers.
Well aware this makes me sound old - and this hypothetical service will never make unicorn money. But I’d use it in a flash.
https://help.micro.blog/2017/instagram/
But they make it really hard to even see that they have photo / Instagram-esque features, and it seems mostly connected with their iOS app Sunlit:
I used to be a member but found the service very hipster & Apple / iOS centric. But it might be what some people here are looking for.
IG is the defacto "photo sharing" tool because it does all of these. What you are describing is closer to Imgur but they have comments and likes as well, simply because without there's no reason for people to come back.
And then there is also 500px, a bit more controlled but still very nice in my opinion.
Frankly I'm also slightly annoyed with Unsplash for reinventing the wheel with their own license instead of using standard CC licenses, reducing compatibility with other free culture projects.
Have you investigated paid options? Otherwise, it's kind of silly that people expect free image hosting years after everyone has started monetizing.
def generate_with_wand(self, wand_img: WandImage):
# create stripped down version of our image:
wand_img.strip()
wand_img.auto_orient()
wand_img.compression_quality = 90
thumb = wand_img.clone()
thumb.transform(resize=self.size)
thumb.save(filename=str(self.get_output_path()))Someone originally thought it would be a good idea to ignore EXIF data, and by the time someone else cared enough to address it, they were worried about breaking sites that had bad rotation EXIF data if browsers suddenly started honoring it.
Mozilla tried to add image-orientation: from-image CSS for this purpose, so sites could say "no actually the EXIF data really is good", but then no other browser vendor followed along.
So as usual, everything in computer science is just terrible for the sake of legacy compatibility with the first implementations ever made.
It works fine when you open the image directly, but it will not apply EXIF corrects for inline images (<img> tag). There are JS libraries that load the image as file data to read the EXIF data and apply the correct rotation, but those fail in some cases (HTTPS trying to load data for an HTTP-linked image, for example).
This just sounds like an excuse to yourself. It’s not hard to deal with this just strip out the EXIF data and bake the rotation into your images on upload. Problem solved, though I don’t know your experience level.
Images really shouldn’t be stored anyway with rotation data in the EXIF. By pre rotating it you normalize and make it ready to use in any context.
The EXIF should be stripped out and used for other sorts of analytics.
They HAVE the full res image. There's even bookmarkets to snag the image. What twisted product goal led to the current state?
[0] https://snap.as
Flickr is very good. Amount of users doesn't really affect my use-case, which is offsite storage and being able to send links to my friends/family.
In fact it is maybe the only service that I pay for.
Stack is PHP/MySQL so it'll run anywhere. I've been using for years now with no complaints.
The new api has no access to consumer (non-Business or non-Creator) instagram accounts.
Search results for comments of the last month https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
Having a tightly managed API would be just fine.
Good.
Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.
They will.
Does Instagram have a real person checking each one? If not, how would a computer verify that a photo ID was valid?
I don't think they care if it's "fake". They will still be able to uniquely identify you and correlate your activity against a number of other sources to build a more complete profile on you, including what you do on Facebook.
Not surprisingly, they do everything possible to make the desktop experience god-awful.
I ended up writing a Chrome extension to avoid that mess.[1]
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ig-video-controls/...
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/05a3fea080d06...
I have no idea if it is in that filter list or not as I don't use it but if you want to add the 'uBlock filters - Annoyances' list to your uBO setup follow steps below.
1. Open 'uBO Settings'
2. From within the uBlock Origin Dashboard, Navigate to 'Filter lists' tab (should be second tab)
3. Expand the 'Built-in' filter list options by clicking the '+' button next to 'Built-in'
4. Check the option for 'uBlock filters - Annoyances'
5. Hit 'Apply changes' button in top right corner
Yes this was a bummer too. I used it all the time. Now I use hashtags which aren't as effective and I'm sure they'll shut that down too. O well, nothing useful really lost.
They are available only to members now. Walled-off.
This action works directly against the best interests of Instagram users seeking to maximize their audience and reach.
Let's call this what it is: an anti-feature.
Stop using their user-hostile service? They need my eyeballs in order to sell me to advertisers. If they are creating features that turn users away, their bottom line may be impacted enough that they reevaluate their user-hostile business practices.
Then, they changed it to third-and second-degree connections only, so you had to be signed in. And now, it's completely unusable without an account.
Open an incognito window and try going to a linkedin profile. Then try it with google translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=af&tl=en&u=htt...
Odds are good you can still view the profile through translate because linkedin thinks you are google.
LinkedIn, Pinterest and others want to be indexed by google, but don't want the content that's indexed to be public. Google is ruining their own service by allowing this to continue.
On the other hand, you can't scrape YOUR OWN photos either.
A hair stylist I went to recently has an Instagram page. She did a great job, I’ll go bookmark her page in case I forget who she is. And that’s when I am met with a login page. Well, guess who now stands no chance of ever having an Instagram account? They might wear me down if enough friends send links that I click. “Hey, ya know, this looks kinda handy.” Now it’s all over a wall I don’t feel like climbing. Which is fine. I’m not mad, or much of anything, frankly. It’s another “service” I don’t have to waste time on.
But, boy, it strikes me as a strange way to pursue growth.
Try scrolling down a fair bit and you will see it. (happened to me on second "loading" of the next "page" of pictures)
So maybe it's still being rolled out or limited to some profiles?
Good thing I deleted anything Facebook related a while back.
I think where they're heading is to monetise reach, so for anyone posting they will have to boost the post for it to go out to N number of potential user feeds based on how much they pay, same as with Facebook.
All Instagram images and videos appear to be hosted a publicly accessible storage even those of private profiles. You just need to know the URL.
Is this security by obscurity really enough?
So it's true that it still requires:
a) a user who should have the URL give it to them
or
b) person 1 guessed the URL, like a password since it's usually a long url with a GUID of some type.
But is that acceptable for some reason? Easier development?
Because otherwise you need to:
a) issue one time/short lived token for accessing an image on S3 for instance, for all the images that will be shown on a page when a page loads for an authenticated user.
or
b) proxy the image requests by making an api endpoint for image names, authenticate those requests, fetch the image from a place only the server has access to and stream the image data back.
https://scontent-arn2-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/5932ec6f480e416a...
It's not obvious how likely it is to guess a valid URL, but even if it's just the first path, its still 128 bits (assuming a hexadecimal alphabet). According to [0] there are 50+ billion photos uploaded to Instagram. Even if we assume 10 000 billion posts (200x margin), 10^13 is a very small number in comparison to 2^128≈3.4*10^38,
[0]: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/
(In the the URL above I've changed one character, yielding it invalid, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to figure the missing one out.)
You can make off with millions of dollars in bitcoin by guessing numbers correctly. It's public and yours for the taking.
If my secret is kept at "example.com/sadf23s[...long uuid...]" then that is not an example of security by obscurity, any more than a username/password combination is. Indeed, my long url is almost certainly much longer than the majority of user's username/password combinations.
It is potentially sharable, if that's something I'm concerned about, but that can be managed via cookies, timeouts, single-use urls, etc. And I also might be ok with it being sharable, just not discoverable. (e.g. Google Sheet's distinction between "anyone with a link can access" sharing and "anyone on the internet can find and access.")
"Security by obscurity" refers to relying on some part of your architecture or code being obscure. E.g. hoping that no one knows what static salt you use in your simplistic hashing function, or hoping that no one learns that there is a page called "s3cr3t-admin-access.html" that lets you get into your site without a password.
The usual test is: if an attacker had access to all my source code, could they get in? In the case of randomly-generated uuids as urls, the answer is "no."
"System security should not depend on the secrecy of the implementation or its components."
At the moment its instagram.com logins have 35% or lower success rate.
LOL, no.
Not sure why people still don’t understand that.
Wikipedia - community backed
Hacker News - we are the product. It's an ad space for ycombinator.
Surely the saying absolutely applies to free mobile games, free raffles at a car dealership, or free loyalty cards in stores. So it's not specific to "services."
I don't like the change, but it's about 36 photos which is quite reasonable.