lol this same post got flagged and taken down from HN

Yours is a little bit easier to read, but my main problems remain the same. Here’s some initial comments looking at your swagger link from the perspective of a user who is brand new to the lemmy API (and doesn’t use Javascript):

• I can’t tell what the general flow of the API usage in general is. Am I supposed to login/authorize somehow first? Some common examples, especially in at least one programming language (whether that’s curl or python or whatever) I think would go a long way to help people understand what they’re supposed to do.

• How do I know if I need to authorize for a particular endpoint?

• What is the entire URL for any given endpoint? It’s never really explained clearly.

• What is this “servers” dropdown? What’s the difference between those?

• Endpoint descriptions are often unhelpful. /user says “Get the details for a person.” It doesn’t tell me this is actually how I’m supposed to find their comments or posts. Nothing tells us this.

• We have to guess what endpoint we might need for a lot of things. Example: /post/like is also for dislikes, but it doesn’t tell you that. It also never tells you HOW to like or dislike anything, the valid values of score do not appear to be documented. And you’re left to assume that’s the right field to even use for it.

• What is the content type of the request supposed to be? JSON is never mentioned anywhere.

• What are these named “parameters”? Is that a query parameter? Why does it say “object” and “(query)”? Does this parameter go in the request body instead? /user shows a parameter called “GetPersonDetails” except in reality this name is (I guess) supposed to be completely ignored, because no part of the request actually uses the string “GetPersonDetails”.

• Schema is missing for many endpoints, like the request part of /user.

• What are all these fields under “GetPersonDetails”? Are they all required? Only some? It doesn’t say anything about it.

• Many of the possible error codes are undocumented.

There’s probably more but that’s the main stuff I think.

This thread sums everything up nicely I think: https://lemmy.ml/post/98675/95459

And for programming.dev specifically, the API did not work for me when they had CF bot protection turned on (endpoints always returned the “Just a moment…” bot check html), it was only after it was turned off a few days ago that it started working for me, because CF doesn’t like my IP/browser/something and always gives me endless captcha loops. Previously their stance was that bot IPs had to be explicitly whitelisted to be allowed on their server.

This is still written from a javascript perspective and assumes many things that are not true when using other approaches to calling the endpoints.

curl 'https://lemmy.world/api/v3/user?username=egeres&sort=New&page=1&limit=20' | jq .posts

https://join-lemmy.org/api/classes/LemmyHttp.html#getPersonDetails

The documentation is really terrible and the developers try to defend it anyways.

Some instances also employ cloudflare or other anti-ddos techniques that make automated API usage impossible.

I really do not like these docs and find it extremely confusing for anyone not using Javascript. For example that “form” parameter that’s on almost everything, doesn’t even exist and can’t be used when you’re using curl, but it doesn’t tell you that.

keeping a list of changes in the source code

Source?

Doesn’t really matter if you’re not positioned to be able to defend your license in court.

there’s absolutely no reason you can’t use git

A really important thing to remember with all licenses is that they’re only as useful as your ability to enforce them… in court. And there’s a non-zero chance that at least some of these are practically unenforceable anyways.

I only use AGPL+non-commercial+racistword

ask the AI how to make the product better, duh

they’re called crimeflare for a reason. besides being a government goldmine having access to everyone’s encrypted TLS traffic, they selectively enforce censorship in unethical ways.

why block kiwifarms when you still allow hosting monkey torture sites? or sites for sourcing bathtub HRT secretly sent to minors? they shouldn’t be policing the internet in the first place. this is dangerously close to invalidating Section 230 protections as well.

there’s so many more reasons it’s not even funny.

They are the world’s largest MITM as a service.

Wonder why they didn’t just use something like Qt that works pretty seamlessly across all platforms.

It was always doomed from the start for several reasons IMO. The current design also causes it to get slower as the network gets larger…

personally I just can’t get over the syntax to even try rust. to me it just looks terrible. I know not everybody agrees though. that and having even longer compile times and no mature gui framework

https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/

I have no idea how they make money, it never made sense to me. It still blows my mind to think there are that many people that click on ads, I just have a really hard time believing it still.

Do they though? I don’t know a single person that has ever clicked on an ad. I know, sample size of one, but it just seems so basic to know not to click on them. Maybe those people really do exist. Sigh