I was using it’s APIs. But new restrictions have effectively been put in place that prevent me from using them for what I need. Similar API calls were being made that were causing DDOS attacks on lemmy.world.
As for running a lemmy instance itself. That’s a thought but I need the data in a different format to do efficient searches. It’s a tricky problem.
Yep that’s the new idea. The sad part is that with this method there’s no way to get historical data. Only new posts. So if a server goes down, gets DDOSd etc… I’ll lose posts forever.
Also building an ActivityPub implementation from scratch isn’t trivial either. So that’ll take some time.
I’ve got a few other ideas I’m playing with as well. Like just assuming that internal post IDs are all sequential and literally fetching them one by one. Or maybe some combination of both?
Thanks for the shout-out.
But FYI I’ve run into some bugs that’s preventing new content from being indexed. So you won’t see anything new (from about a week ago) until I can find a new method to fetch new posts.
By default there’s no way to hotlink, if you will, to a post on any platform. Now some apps might be doing something special to get around this, but out of the box this isn’t supported at the moment.
Now there is an issue on lemmy itself which I’m exploring that should “fix” this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987
But I’m not sure how that might translate in a mobile app.
Missing features are fine. Even then, and maybe it’s just me, but Push Notifications + User Highlight/Tagging doesn’t seem like $2 worth of value to me. Just trying to call out that the current value-to-cost ratio seems off. And sure there are other features and maybe other users will get $2 worth of value out of those, but in my opinion that’s why I won’t be buying a subscription, even if I want to support the developer.
Originally it just looked like a collapsable title. (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/android-collapsingtoolbarlayout-example). Then I just happened to tap it trying to find out how to change my default sorting. Although I’m not sure why Sync doesn’t just use the default from my profile?
Thanks! I think I found the bug and I’ll see what I can do to get that fixed here soon. But to keep this comment thread on-topic message me personally if you have any other issues.
Totally understand that. And personally, $20 to remove ads forever, seems reasonable. But the other features under Ultra currently don’t add up to the price tag for those features at the moment.
None of the current Ultra features really stand out to me except tagging/highlighting users. Push Notifications will be a game changer but they aren’t in the app yet.
I also tried building a pet feeder during the pandemic because the one I was using, the company decided to go belly-up. Never got a fully working though.
(At least that’s what I’ve done open-source wise). I do Android development for my day job.
First I want to preface that I actually never used Sync for Reddit, I always used RIF but I wanted to give Sync for Lemmy a shot and see what it was all about.
A few things from my perspective:
Keep in mind I don’t have a frame of reference for what the prices were in Sync for Reddit, but cut the prices to about a 1/3rd or 1/4th of what they are now and they seem to be more inline with the value that the app provides over the other apps.
I don’t mean to sounds critical in all of this. The app is probably one of the smoothest and best looking out there so far, but the value to money ratio just isn’t there.
Tap the everything label at the top
Playing devil’s advocate for a bit… So these are just cross-posts. Which existed even on Reddit. …I assume they weren’t handled in any way in Sync or Reddit?
But let’s say this is fixed… What to do about the multiple comments threads? How would you reconcile them with each other? Especially since the user can choose different ways to sort the comments as well. Would all of this logic normally handled by the Lemmy back-end now need to run on your phone? Also how do you choose which post / instance to actually display and which ones to hide?
Btw, I’m not trying to dismiss the idea. Just want to call out some of the technical problems that might come up trying to implement such a feature. As well as ask questions to try and determine exactly how such a feature is expected to work.
If the honeypot is set the request is simply discarded.
FYI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing)
But there should also be a separate endpoint to get an auth token. (I don’t remember it off the top of my head). Then your bot should store that somewhere and send it as the auth parameter in every request.
Ya if it’s not federated already, I’m thinking the link will just remain as-is? Then comes the question of what happens after federation is complete? Ideally I’m thinking to do these rewrites as the comment containing the link gets federated so it only happens once, but that prevents updates… If I do it during someone looking at the post, then that becomes a lot of network traffic…
Still a lot to plan out initially and then propose to the devs for feedback… So it’ll be awhile still.
I just got a PR merged today that might help with this. I’ll start experimenting with it more over the next week or so.
Basic theory is that I can detect at least lemmy posts in the comment bodies and then rewrite those to your local instance. Primarily question is going to be performance, as remote network calls will be necessary.
Fair enough. Sometimes you can’t help but go down these rabbit holes though.
How do you account for the duplicate Riker in TNG? Who’s the real one and where did the extra matter come from then to assemble William vs Tom?
(It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that episode so I don’t remember if they covered that but on-screen)
A similar question could be raised for the Rascals episode…
Think of Lemmy as email. Each post or comment is just an email sent to a distribution group (a community). If your email server goes down, all of those users and distribution groups are gone. Now I’ll still have the emails I sent to you in my email box but you won’t be able to see them as your email server is offline. Sure you could create a new account on a new server but you’d have to tell everyone about your new address (federate) but there’s nothing to associate your old user with your new one and there’s no way to backfill data. I could reply-all or forward (comment) on to your new address but there’s still no way to associate those old posts with your new account.
Correct. As I can only provide links to posts that are on your selected home instance. Eventually I’ll change this but you’ll get a 404 page for links that aren’t on your home instance, but see my P.S. below.
P.s. there have been changes to the Lemmy API that have prevented me from getting updates for about a month now. So most of the results you’re seeing are from old posts only. Until I can rebuild the crawler or find a new API there won’t be any new content.