Human Web CollectiveIs it OK to write code that does new things on the Fediverse?
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Evan Prodromou 🇨🇦🇺🇸🇬🇷🇵🇸Is it OK to write code that does new things on the Fediverse?
Is it OK to write code that does new things on the Fediverse?
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.
Many of the replies mentioned "scrapers" as a category of software that's not acceptable. I think this is misguided.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ActivityPub is made for a lot of different use cases. I really like when people explore use cases we haven't tried yet.
@evan@cosocial.ca
yes, 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
@evan@cosocial.ca
In 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"