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Bibliogram, Open-source front-end for Instagram, is being discontinued
- prvit 4y agolol, OP completely missed out on the biggest IG ratelimit bypass. You could just use IPv6 and make literally millions of requests per second from a single server with a /48. (Oh! And before that you could just spoof X-Forwarded-For) I printed money using this to automatically take good usernames as they became available.
- carabiner 4y agoHow much did you make total?
- prvit 4y agoA little over $2M, but that number keeps growing because I still have loads of usernames despite instagram patching the ratelimit bypass.
- ozarker 4y agoJesus, more power to you I guess
- M3L0NM4N 4y agoHoly balls
- carabiner 4y agoWhat are you doing now? Do you still have a day job?
- prvit 4y agoI've never had a day job, I've spent almost two decades funding my lifestyle with silly projects like this. Everything from large scale world of warcraft botting to instagram registrations.
- carabiner 4y agoWow. Where do you live? What's your net worth, if you're willing to reveal?
- anonymouse008 4y ago[edit] I’ll heed
- encryptluks2 4y agoThey are a scammer. Don't be surprised if you get scammed.
- prvit 4y agoUnnecessarily harsh, but I'm not interested in selling trainings anyway.
- carabiner 4y agoMan, do an AMA. This is more fascinating than 90% of what's posted here. If you're able to find an edge and exploit it in numerous disparate markets, I bet you'd be amazing in algotrading.
- from 4y agoIt may interest you to know that the guy you are replying to is Julius “zeekill” Kivimaki of Lizard Squad fame.
- FearlessNebula 4y agoAre you not worried about running into legal trouble with these things? It seems like a gray area. 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?
- 4y ago
- shard 4y agoI am guessing that the $2M is from selling the usernames? Are the buyers individuals who want a good username, or bot farms who just need a large number of accounts?
- cosmojg 4y agoYou brilliant bastard.
- nubela 4y agoIs there an email I can reach out to you at? Not for this particular use-case of IG but would love to pick you brain on rate limit bypasses.
- sprite 4y agoHow do you get a /48? Tunnelbroker? Can you set external IP per request? Curious how this works.
- prvit 4y agoYou could just get an allocation from RIPE for example, they'll give you a /29 without any justification required. Pretty much all dedicated server hosts will have a plenty of IPv6 space they can give you for a few $ per month. 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.
- sprite 4y agoThanks.
- icehawk 4y agoKnowing someone who ran a public bibliogram instance, using IPv6 and rotating through addresses of a cellular provider's /32 it was, at the barest minimum, possible, but really annoying as Facebook would lock down any /64 once it felt it had looked at too many profile pages, and the limits were just as tight, if not more so, as the v4 limits.
- prvit 4y agoYes, but you could easily defeat this limit by switching to a /48, which gives you 65536 /64 subnets. Of course, even bigger IPv6 allocations are easy to get.
- ddevault 4y agoMan, fuck that. Name scalping is wrong. This shit is part of why platforms lock down in the first place.
- unicornporn 4y agoIt's been nonfunctional for at least over a year. Changes to Instagram made impossible to bypass the wall protecting the garden (or landfill).
- rektide 4y agoI found a really awesome "public instance" vps node that had a bunch of utils & anonymous public interfaces webapps (nitter,...) running on it for all. 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jeroenhd 4y agoLooks like there's a referrer filter for HN. Copy URL and open in a new tab, I guess? 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.
- cercatrova 4y agoI use an extension to strip referrer stuff from the URL, works well
- donkarma 4y agoi just disable referer in my fierfox
- dspillett 4y ago> Before we start: If Bibliogram has been helpful to you, please consider making a donation! 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- textadventure 4y agoIt stands to reason that they don't care for HN referred donations as the hoop seems to be very deliberately put in place for a reason.
- blitzar 4y agoRather than a pissy referrer filter, why not redirect to a page full of ads.
- dspillett 4y agoA reason that is not explained, so I'm going to assume is something petty. There are a couple of instances of sites doing this (for HN and other referral sources) because people said things they didn't like about them (or just in general) on the platform.
- annadane 4y agoTake down some of the most egregious pages and disinformation? No, we (Facebook/Meta) will waste our time shutting down anything remotely challenging to our monstrosity we're trying to conquer the world with (see also: shutting down the NYU Ad Observatory, or any countless other examples)
- Bakary 4y agoWhat incentive have we given them to stop?
- annadane 4y agoIncentive? How about "don't be monopolistic assholes"?
- austinjp 4y agoThat's more of a suggestion than an incentive, though.
- Bakary 4y agoI don't really see the point of appealing to morality or to what ought to happen. They're not going to relinquish power willingly. Few individual do, and for groups it's vanishingly rare.
- lapinot 4y ago"don't be monopolistic assholes" is in the constitution and laws of several countries, it should not be an appeal to morality. The real problem is that at any point anybody does a move constraining internet corps, they get mocked by everyone as "regulating things to death". Yes that's the goal. Their death, in their current form at least.
- Bakary 4y agoThat might be true in the anglophone world, but plenty of other populations aren't hostile to the idea of regulating the internet, and I don't mean the totalitarian countries. The GDPR is a ray of hope in this regard. 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.
- fallingknife 4y agoReferrer filter, so I right clicked and "open link in new tab" but still referrer filter. Don't like that the browser sends that info with that option. That should be equivalent to copy/pasting the URL.
- nailer 4y agoOriginal contents : https://web.archive.org/web/20220901223055/https://cadence.moe/blog/2022-09-01-discontinuing-bibliogram https://web.archive.org/web/20220901223055/https://cadence.m...
- technonerd 4y agoI ran into the private profile problem with bibliogram ALL THE TIME. Even tho I was friends with them on instagram. So I just stop using it. It was broken most of the time anyways. It was a fun 3rd party unoffical API frontend that I added to my list of other ones I could self host. That amount of hostility to scrapping and 3rd party clients feels like that they want to be in control of the data not you.
- kornhole 4y agoThis should be an extra push for some to get onto https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/.
- txtsd 4y agoThanks. I didn't know this was a thing!
- TobyTheDog123 4y agoAnti-scraping technology is absolutely ridiculous. Modern example: TikTok. Have you seen webmsssdk.js? 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.
- jbk 4y ago> Anti-scraping technology is absolutely ridiculous. Modern example: TikTok. Have you seen webmsssdk.js? What is webmssdk doing?
- EdwardDiego 4y agohttps://www.tiktok.com/acrawler/webmssdk.js https://www.tiktok.com/acrawler/webmssdk.js The source is interesting.
- bashonly 4y agofor all of the requests to their api, it constructs a very long query string that is a basic fingerprint of your browser/os. then the query needs to be signed (or else the api returns a captcha), which is done by a blob of encrypted/obfuscated-beyond-recovery JS that uses a more comprehensive browser fingerprint to validate the query string and generate a token that is appended to the query. there's another required query param which involves an xhr to phone home so that presumably the fingerprints can be checked server-side. finally all of your fingerprint data is sent to their api where it lives happily ever after and you get some 15 second videos to watch
- ssizn 4y ago>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. That’s false, you can download a copy of your own data from settings.
- fariszr 4y agoThere is an OSS frontend for Tiktok. I added ARM support to it. https://github.com/pablouser1/ProxiTok https://github.com/pablouser1/ProxiTok
- lapinot 4y agoThank you cadence for all the hard work and inspiration. This wasn't for nothing. I would bet on a newleaf-style reboot (with gallery-dl, to tackle onto a bigger community) if i had to. I might try my hand at it at some point but i'm afraid i'm less dedicated than you are.
- lucb1e 4y agohttps://archive.ph/PpBHN https://archive.ph/PpBHN
- lucb1e 4y agoSince many people can't access the post anyhow, the short version of 'why' is: instagram keeps trying to block bibliogram (we can't have nice things), the author is tired of working around it, the author is also tired of fighting on a second front against the bots that try to scrape bibliogram. The bots also try hard to circumvent blocks that the author needed to put in place, rather than spending the time learning how to run their own instance and going to town on that. 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.
- dspillett 4y ago> The bots also try hard to circumvent blocks that the author needed to put in place, rather than spending the time learning how to run their own instance and going to town on that. 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.
- 3np 4y agoReminder to anyone who might want to peruse or fork the source in the future: Sources still available at https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/sources https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/sources but as with anything may become unavailable at any point.
- nomilk 4y agoNever used an OSS frontend before. Any other open source frontends worth trying?
- hadrien01 4y agoNitter is a frontend for Twitter. It's so much faster, and doesn't block you if you don't have a Twitter account. I don't use an alternative Web frontend for YouTube, but on Android I use NewPipe.
- black_puppydog 4y agoLibreddit! 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.
- qjx 4y agoteddit.net is a good reddit frontend
- black_puppydog 4y agoyeah if you want to actually interact. but 99% of the time I just want to read, and libreddit is perfect for that
- grey_earthling 4y agohttps://farside.link/ https://farside.link/ is a decent overview of the genre.
- gamjQZnHT53AMa 4y agoThere's a great Firefox extension called LibRedirect[0] which can automatically redirect you to alternative frontends for many services. [0] https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect
- agluszak 4y agoI'm glad that Bibliogram exists, but it really shouldn't have to exist. Instagram/Meta should be legally required to provide an open API.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago> Instagram/Meta should be legally required to provide an open API. Why?
- atoav 4y agoOne argument would be: Because beyond a certain size your service becomes a public platfrom and you are no longer competing with other platforms through your features, but through the fact that you have an existing userbase. So there is A) public interest in accessing, archiving, displaying, etc. the things users do on your platform and B) forcing your service to become more open the bigger it becomes keeps the competition of services going. Edit: also see the relevant discourse in this other thread (especially that comment here): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32686866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32686866
- noitpmeder 4y agoSo have other services, i.e. PornHub and the like, crossed your threshold of public service? 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.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago> This essentially mandates that all very successful online enterprises become government arms. 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.
- Henrywright23 4y ago
- groffee 4y agoAnd in completely unrelated news on the front page 'why Instagram is dying' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32685663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32685663
- CyborgCabbage 4y agoWe still have teddit.net and nitter.net
- NoboruWataya 4y agoI self-hosted this for a while but found that I got blocked/severely limited as soon as I tried to do basically anything. I'm sure there were things I could have done to get around the limitations that very quickly got imposed, but it wasn't worth it to me. If you don't like Instagram's UI/tracking/privacy policy/closedness then really the only sustainable solution is to stop using it, in any guise. 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.