It seems weird to me.

When posting an image, you get XML.

actually dunnolol, fuck it i'm tired ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When posting a status, you send JSON.

Maybe I was using the endpoint weird, but the code is tested and I've been using it for a while, so at least it works. But I might still be needlessly complicated about it. Not sure - I reverse engineered it in the web debugger, because I was too lazy to read the manual. lel

Ah, and you mentioned OAuth: I guess you need it for three legged authentication, i.e. web applications authenticating you to the social media service on your behalf, without having to give away your credentials, just the way when you authorize an app to post to Twitter or Facebook.

Not sure if you can do that with HTTP basic auth.

nope

Ah, okay. That's what I thought, but I was not 100% sure. If you don't think so, either, then you probably can't.

as in you could but you'd end up reimplementing oauth flow, so why bother :^)

Right. Whatever token magic you would have to build would have to basically come down to the same steps and mechanisms OAuth uses already.

So, not sure how GNU Social would do "web apps" and that sort of stuff. They probably cannot right now.

But I am reading some OAuth tests in the GNU Social source code. Not sure if that's a planned feature or already in.

https://github.com/foocorp/gnu-social

fucking opensource

That's good, no?

when someone bothers to write the docs :^)

Eh, it's better than not being able to contribute at all.

oh ... wait, now I understand your comment

You meant to hint at how bad or out of sync the docs are for many OSS projects. Agreed.

The best manual is the source code.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But, at least GNU Social doesn't have some weird client agreement like Minds. Minds devs wanted me to sign some weird agreement before contributing.

It was something about intellectual property. I didn't read it all. I just said no. I have no patience dealing with that stuff when I am doing them the favor to give them source code for free. No thanks.

you'd leak their secret crud sauce

no kidding ...

Minds is kind of ... wonky.

if it's not decentralized it's not worth the effort :v

I don't like the source that much, but I like the platform: no char limit and blog posts.

if by some magic happenstance they get popular i expect they turn into yet another facebook

They are already kind of weird. I don't like how Ottman is running a lot of things.

And, I think they have the same aversion against loli as Gab.

Andrew Torba was semi-nice about letting people build wrappers for their API. I had reverse engineered one in Python and had been the maintainer for a Python package on PyPi (pip install gab-api), but Torba asked us to remove those packages, so I was nice and did.

I am still maintainer for a Mind API package for Python.

But I had two of my bots/utility accounts axed by Minds staff now, so I kind of gave up on it. :(

It's pretty stupid, because they are infected with bots, but me writing a useful bot (you could @ it and it could generate memes, etc.) was somehow "abusive".

I can already see them turning into another Facebook when they get popular, but I guess that's the lifecycle of tech on the Internet.

we could have prevented this

BTW, even Twitter lets you build bots and gives you a developer API, so, in a way, they are more draconian than Twitter even.

How could we have prevented it?

use the internet like the founding fathers meant it to be used

Ah ...