Bibliogram, Open-source front-end for Instagram, is being discontinued
cadence.moe
cadence.moe
Of course, it's open source so it's not like it's "discontinued" in the same sense as if gmail were to be announced to be discontinued. The official server will even remain online, just with current limitations (like viewing profiles being blocked by facebook) not being fixed for the foreseeable future.
So a three-way arms race, with the author fighting a similar battle in parts against the bots that is being fought in the other direction with their bot and fb/insta.
The enemy of my enemy may still be a pain in the arse for me!
> Of course, it's open source so it's not like it's "discontinued"
Aye, if there is enough value in it for someone else (who has the time and relevant skills) they'll pick up the reigns directly (if the author agrees) or in a fork – as happened when youtube-dl stagnated a bit.
> The official server will even remain online
And there are other instances. Or you can spin up your own if you don't mind (or want to try fix) the existing limitations & future breakages.
My personal Bibliogram instance has been blocked for months. With Instagram blocked as part of my wider PiHole block on Facebook's domain and public Bibliogram instances shutting down soon, I guess I'm going to just ignore Instagram links from now on.
Thankfully there is still no (and I hope there wouldn't be) tech related Instagram posts.
wouldn't it be the same as if someone just copy the link and open it in a new tab/window?
Why?
Edit: also see the relevant discourse in this other thread (especially that comment here): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32686866
I've always viewed this argument as a very poor one. This essentially mandates that all very successful online enterprises become government arms. When does Instragram/Twitter/Facebook, once made a "public platform", become free of these new responsibilities? Is Twitter free to shut down tomorrow once they have public fiduciary responsibilities?
I'm all in favor of additional regulation to encourage/reward/enforce "openness", especially with respect to data originating from users (photos, ...). But saying these companies have any responsibility to the social good is pure foolishness.
Also: we are talking about Instagram, not about Pornhub — I guess the nature of the service would certainly play a role in that argument (e.g. think about messengers).
What I do think myself is that beyond a certain size platforms should have it harder, should be held to higher standards, should fulfill more requirements etc. Because naturally bigger platforms will have it easier than their smaller competitors and it is in our interest to balance this out. Whether APIs are part of this, I don't know. Haven't given it much thought.
It doesn't. You can always split up before you grow too large, and remain private.
There's precedent: once you're a monopoly, you have extra responsibilities to the social good, like splitting up or getting regulated.
In some smaller communities, it is also has a monopoly on social media in general and instant messaging.
This is even more problematic, because such platforms have a positive feedback loop of user acquisition. Many users have no option but to use them, because all their contacts are using them.
In any case Instagram is certainly not in a monopolistic position at the moment unless you try to twist the sense of words to fit a narrative.
Basically, if we ever want to get the Internet back into the users hand, we need to decouple the "service" and the "storage" parts. Companies shouldn't be allowed to hold user data hostage.
The more able I am to interact with an interface programmatically, the more easily I can exploit it and turn it into a giant database.
People don't use Bibliogram (or other alternatives) to access unauthorized data (all it displays is the same data visible on the web or via the app), it's to be able to browse without being stalked by Facebook and avoid their dark patterns.
This is more or less how the Cambridge Analytica fiasco started. And yes, this was seen as a privacy problem.
Private accounts (where you have to approve followers manually) exist and as far as I know nobody is calling for making those public. A hypothetical API would still require the credentials of an approved account before returning data of such accounts.
> But it’s not all that hard to exploit this by creating a popular page that lots of people end up sharing some data with
I don't understand what this has to do with an API? You can create a phishing page now.
> This is more or less how the Cambridge Analytica fiasco started. And yes, this was seen as a privacy problem.
Cambridge Analytica created a malicious website that requested access to people's accounts and they granted it. Not only is it on idiots that approved the OAuth consent form, but it doesn't seem like it's got anything to do with what the parent comment was proposing? As far as I know all he was calling for is to provide an API that returns the public data that you can already get via the official web UI or app.
This is a diverse Forum and people have various opinions.
To be honest I think they would have. I just don’t think they’ve fully thought through the consequences. Worse, maybe they have thought about the consequences, but are ok with being outraged at both ends of things. Lots of people get mad and try and skirt any security/password protection measure, but also get just as mad when they inevitably get hacked because they’ve skirted all the security measures. But even after that still won’t use the security measures because of the “inconvenience”.
I printed money using this to automatically take good usernames as they became available.
Tunnels would've been too slow for my purposes.
> Can you set external IP per request?
Yeah, of course. You can just use the IP_FREEBIND socket option.
If you're able to find an edge and exploit it in numerous disparate markets, I bet you'd be amazing in algotrading.
Also, what platform do you use to sell these things? How do you know the buyer won’t just take the credentials and not send payment? Or how do they know you won’t take payment and refuse to hand over the credentials?
No, not really. I get the occasional nastygram from Hogan Lovells, but just shrug them off. I don’t do anything interesting enough for them to bother litigating.
> Also, what platform do you use to sell these things?
There are many, swapd.co is a good one.
> Or how do they know you won’t take payment and refuse to hand over the credentials?
Reputation, there are also a plenty of reputable escrow services available.
They simply don't want users to be able to access their own data and use it elsewhere in the internet that they can't see, control, and sell.
This is exaggerated by services that login to your accounts to scrape your data for you being illegal under the CFAA.
What a shame for the web.
What is webmssdk doing?
The source is interesting.
That’s false, you can download a copy of your own data from settings.
That amount of hostility to scrapping and 3rd party clients feels like that they want to be in control of the data not you.
They also had a list of things they dont support, with reasons why. Meta interfacing were listed (including to bibliogram), and typically with links to fire-bot takedown requests to kingdom come. No one else has anything like this. Very very unique company.
Bibliogram was a great project but I think Instagram is too aggressive about trying to protect its walled garden. It's a losing battle. Easier to just realise that, for most people, Instagram doesn't add that much to your life anyway.
I don't use an alternative Web frontend for YouTube, but on Android I use NewPipe.
And like sibling said, nitter.
Both are trivially easy to self host a private instance and with privacy redirect or a similar extension they just became my default way of opening twitter/reddit links.
No it's not. People who formulate laws are specific, unless they're either creating a law that is intended to be ignored, or if they're creating a law meant for selective enforcement.
You can check every constitution and law code all day, you're never going to find anything telling anyone not to impede the attempts of an application not to constantly scrape their webpage. This kind of talk is purposeless.
What prompted me to mention incentives in the first place is that the GP's framing of the problem is a common narcotic. Online is/ought-type complaining reduces the potential for action since the emotional need for signaling is already fulfilled. It's a trap I've fallen into many times myself. In itself, it's more dangerous at scale than any public mockery of regulation.
Before asking me to consider a donation, consider cutting the silly referrer based moan about the the site that referred me to yours so I have to jump through a hoop to see the content.