Gregory's Server@darius it should really be a part of mainline mastodon. maybe there's already an issue open for it on GitHub?
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9 comments
@darius most social media sites have places on profiles where you can put links that no one else can touch, and that's something that can be scraped. no one else can edit my twitter bio or profile website link on my other socials. if your main internet presence is on instagram and you're joining mastodon, the HTML that displays your public profile data is the most appropriate place to be looking for a link to your mastodon account. you don't need the HTML rel link at that point.  @NervousGamedev right but that would need to be in a machine-readable, consistent format across all of these websites. If Instagram changes where someone's bio is stored (or even just the HTML in which it is structured or the API calls needed to get that info) then everything breaks. @darius i think it'd still be worthwhile to maintain that for each supported social media site as they update. simple enough to detect a breaking change like you describe unless the site is deliberately trying to sabotage it. major social media sites have reliable APIs you can use to directly query the data fields we're talking about so you wouldn't even need to use HTML to verify in the first place. @NervousGamedev we actually do something like this at the place where I work and it is a much bigger nightmare than you might imagine, requiring a lot of labor. And also major social media sites change their APIs all the time -- it's one of the main reasons I got interested in running my own social media, so that I could guarantee consistent APIs for my bots @darius interesting! i know APIs change but usually see them do it in deprecation phases giving developers plenty of notice to update things, and even then offer the previous API for a while. but it's been a while since i was a part of that world. has this changed? @NervousGamedev Facebook is notorious for changing things with deprecation periods that are very hard to work with, or not communicating deprecation well. Twitter in 2018 changed the way their entire streaming API worked, published docs saying "the new API will provide similar functionality", and then there was a ~1 year gap between old and new API. I've heard similar re: other services @darius is this also the case for very fundamental things like querying basic profile info like bio and other such links? @NervousGamedev it can be! any way you slice it this kind of coordination is a big difficult problem all around |
@NervousGamedev the problem is that just providing a link is very hard to verify. For example, if all I needed was a simple linkback I could comment on a NYTimes news article with a URL to my Mastodon profile, and link the NYTimes article and be "verified". There are fixes for that but they are tricky and there are many holes in it. The reason why we check for a "rel=me" HTML attribute is that writing unfiltered HTML is typically not allowed by commenting systems