Is it OK to write code that does new things on the Fediverse? #EvanPoll #poll #ActivityPub #Fediverse

71% Yes
27% Yes, but...
0% No, but...
1% No
230 votes - ended 2 months ago

all 10 comments

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[–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

@evan@cosocial.cayes, but you will recive death threats! #some-people-got-very-annoyed-at-invisible-mentions-in-wafrn #and-there-is-a-reason-they-are-now-the-first-line-on-this-reply #butt-you-should-check-this-post-in-original-instance

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    @evan@cosocial.caIn another note: "yes but", the code shall not violate the spirit of the social contract of fedi. example: just a scraper: GTFO vs: "yeah I made this fedi software with a bunch of users and has this cool feature to backfill an user's profile's public posts as long as they dont block us"

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (7 children)

    Thanks all. I see a lot of developers getting brigaded for launching new tools on the Fediverse. At best, they're insulted and their motives are questioned. At worst, they're brigaded on GitHub, the Fediverse, or in real life.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (6 children)

    Many of the replies mentioned "scrapers" as a category of software that's not acceptable. I think this is misguided.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (5 children)

    First, ActivityPub has a Web API that is used by federated servers to find out about people, the content they make, and what they've done. That's built in. It's on purpose. You have a lot of control of what is shared in this API. If you are concerned about what you share, you should check your software's privacy settings. There are a lot of knobs and levers.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

    I don't even think "scraper" is a reasonable name for this kind of software. We usually use that for screen-scraping software, which takes HTML output and grabs the structured data out of it.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

    Second, a lot of the things we use on the Fediverse depend on reading that API data. Like user search, content search, hashtag feeds, relays, backfilling conversations, and aggregate data.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    Anyway, even for software that doesn't crawl the API, I think we need to give people the benefit of the doubt. People spend a lot of time and effort making that software -- usually open source, usually for free.

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