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Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

Instagram has been requiring viewers to sign in after browsing a certain number of pages. Bibliogram is a way to bypass this registration wall.

List of instances: https://git.sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram-docs/tree/master/docs/...

Source code: https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/

Similar services

Invidious (YouTube): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21535562

Nitter (Twitter): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744

Teddit (Reddit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206

Related software

UntrackMe (Android app that converts links from Instagram and others to alternative front-ends): https://framagit.org/tom79/nitterizeme

Privacy Redirect (browser extension that redirects to these front-ends): https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

Barinsta (open source Instagram client for Android): https://github.com/austinhuang0131/barinsta

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It doesn't work though, and hasn't for a while, and likely never will [0]:

Timeline loading blocked

Instagram is refusing to provide data to this server.

This server will only be able to load the first page of timelines.

This error is permanent.

[0]: https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/cadence.moe/gemlog/2020-12-1...

Yeah, I am just starting to see 1 star reviews on my repost app (https://github.com/sschueller/easyrepost) . It's totally broken now. Good thing I open sourced it and gave up on monetization in part to HN horror stories of people building business on top of other services like Facebook.

I'm going to abandon this and move on to maybe working on a Pixelfed android client instead.

The thing is, what if you leveraged the "cloud" of people, to build a p2p instagram cache/clone perhaps on IPFS or some other p2p store or mesh, where the seeders are people with IG accounts who are logged in, and that living network of people then can feed out data to overyone else logging in to the "rebel front-end". That would be cool. It seems that kind of thing would be unshut-downable and with enough seeders, unstoppable and complete.

It's a cool idea but falls down when you start thinking about how to discover what Instagram ID has what content ID in the P2P store. Torrents have trackers, IPFS have 3rd party indexers, DC++ have hubs.

Not so. What if lookup for content is implemented as a distributed skiplist. Each node has a limited vertical slice of the skiplist. The skiplist info distributed among the nodes doesn't have to be consistent for it to work. When a new node enters the network it reaches out to peers, and randomly selects some peers to be 'in peers' and some to be 'out peers', gets their skiplist slices, and generates a slice that's between the others. If a node has content (ie, is a seeder), then it inserts those contents into the skiplist. The insertion changes propagate by peers exchanging info. It's a rough idea, but I think it would work or could be made to. Then to lookup a piece of content, you do a normal run on the skiplist, but each node your local slice is connected to is actually a peer. And sort of like DNS, you're connected to multiple inconsistent versions of the lookup paths, and you can run a lookup across more than such path. When data is found, it is sent back through the path.

You've basically reinvented DHTs but with the extra feature of supporting range queries, which this use case doesn't need anyway :)

DHTs still have bunch of limitations that doesn't make it suitable for a really global and humongous hash table. I think your skiplist would have the different problem of making queries and lookups inconsistent based on node uptimes and such.

Hehehe. I'm not an expert in this stuff, but thanks for your feedback! :p :) xx

Inconsistent definitely. We could probably engineer our way out of this. ;p ;) xx

If you have any recommendations for how we solve this p2p lookup problem I'd love to hear it! ;p xx

Had a similar experience myself when 3 years ago IG and FB blocked all third party access to the API and my “best time to post” and scheduler apps all broke.

Does anyone if there is any case law on this? Are you legally allowed to create 3rd party clients for various services?

Craigslist v. 3Taps may be related/interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.

> case sets a precedent that allows businesses to use the CFAA to keep public data away from competitors

You're generally allowed to create them, and the service provider is generally allowed to change their service in ways that break them.

It worked right before I submitted the link to HN. This may be the effect of a temporary traffic surge.

The software is open source, so anyone is able to start a new instance, as others did for Invidious and Nitter.

Edit: Added list of instances to GP. For some reason, the main instance is still working for me.

I have tried it locally and various hosted instances several times over the last few months and while it occasionally works that error is more common than not.

Teddit.net for reddit works amazingly though.

Thanks, I've added Teddit to the list.

I'm hoping that the attention will help Bibliogram improve.

Improve how? It was already pretty good. The entire user page and even Instagram TV was supported. But the current situation is not Bibliogram's fault.

More attention would encourage people to host new instances and help find workarounds for Instagram's rate limiting. There are also some features that are being worked on, such as a search function:

https://todo.sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram-issues/6

Why not make a free software replacement for the mobile app instead? Surely there's no way to block that.

https://github.com/austinhuang0131/barinsta/ is one such alternative client

that seems to be fairly unreliable as well. some days it works, most days it doesn't

Works consistently every time for me, it relies on the web version so if the web version is working, it works (and if the app doesn't work it is because the web version is down).

can someone do this for linkedin? tired of clicking on profiles from google only to be presented with the login wall. you shouldnt be allowed to treat googlebot better than you treat humans, that opens up all sorts of chicanery

It won't be long before they're just another pintrest.

Facebook is going to need to keep something it bought alive or it might struggle to keep the lights on.

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