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Yeah, I am just starting to see 1 star reviews on my repost app (https://github.com/sschueller/easyrepost https://github.com/sschueller/easyrepost) . It's total

Yeah, I am just starting to see 1 star reviews on my repost app (https://github.com/sschueller/easyrepost 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.

sprite 5y ago
Does anyone if there is any case law on this? Are you legally allowed to create 3rd party clients for various services?
- Bjartr 5y ago
  You're generally allowed to create them, and the service provider is generally allowed to change their service in ways that break them.
- antif 5y ago
  Craigslist v. 3Taps may be related/interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc 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
busymom0 5y ago
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.
graderjs 5y ago
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.
- capableweb 5y ago
  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.
  - graderjs 5y ago
    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.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      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.
      - graderjs 5y ago
        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

sprite 5y ago

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

Bjartr 5y ago
You're generally allowed to create them, and the service provider is generally allowed to change their service in ways that break them.
antif 5y ago
Craigslist v. 3Taps may be related/interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc 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

busymom0 5y ago

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.

graderjs 5y ago

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.

capableweb 5y ago
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.
- graderjs 5y ago
  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.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    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.
    - graderjs 5y ago
      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