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Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

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Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#121

Post by filleokus »

sschueller wrote: post #65

Offtopic question. All Instagram images and videos appear to be hosted a publicly accessible storage even those of private profiles. You just need to know the URL. Is this security by obscurity really enough?

I would say so, the URLs are pretty darn long:

https://scontent-arn2-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/5932ec6f480e416a...

It's not obvious how likely it is to guess a valid URL, but even if it's just the first path, its still 128 bits (assuming a hexadecimal alphabet). According to [0] there are 50+ billion photos uploaded to Instagram. Even if we assume 10 000 billion posts (200x margin), 10^13 is a very small number in comparison to 2^128≈3.4*10^38,

[0]: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/

(In the the URL above I've changed one character, yielding it invalid, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to figure the missing one out.)

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#123

Post by ClearAndPresent »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #120
JoshTriplett wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time federation comes up, I always ask where the bridges are that allow "following" people on the non-federated sites (e.g. Twitter), and the answer is always vague and non-specific, suggesting that such bridges exist without any information about using them. I'd love to see a switching guide for, say, Twitter, that specifically says "here's how to transparently follow people on Twitter, and here's how to have…

There is no bridge. I highly doubt the Twitter API TOS would even allow it. What you can do is get a client that supports both Mastodon as well as Twitter. I recommend Twidere on Android. https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.mariotaku.twidere/

There sort of is although I don't know why anyone would want it.

https://github.com/renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#124

Post by JoshTriplett »

ClearAndPresent wrote: post #114
JoshTriplett wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time federation comes up, I always ask where the bridges are that allow "following" people on the non-federated sites (e.g. Twitter), and the answer is always vague and non-specific, suggesting that such bridges exist without any information about using them. I'd love to see a switching guide for, say, Twitter, that specifically says "here's how to transparently follow people on Twitter, and here's how to have…

Perhaps you have misunderstood the purpose and implementation of federating sites like these? Your question sounds like someone asking how a user of a newly opened Facebook account can follow people on Twitter. They're entirely different services. The federating, or not, is immaterial. The first part is the alternative service. Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, presented in a Twitter-like format and flow. People…

> Perhaps you have misunderstood the purpose and implementation of federating sites like these?

No, I absolutely understand how federating sites work, and don't need the condescension.

It's common, in many types of federated reimplementations of non-federated sites, to create special-case bridges that allow treating a large non-federated site as if it were following the federation protocol, precisely to help people migrate and to continue interoperating with users who are on the non-federated site.

In the specific case of ActivityPub, there are multiple bridges that allow following Twitter users as if they were part of the fediverse. Multiple Mastodon users I know have mentioned them. People just don't talk about them very clearly, or document them in migration guides. Hence my comment suggesting that.

If specific portions of the fediverse want to avoid ever interacting with Twitter bridges, they can absolutely do that, just as they can avoid interacting with other portions of the fediverse. But it would be helpful if potential new users had some information they could use to migrate more smoothly.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#125

Post by twic »

> “This is to help people see photos on Instagram and then understand how to get the best Instagram experience by being part of the community, connecting and interacting with the people and things they love,” the company told Adweek.

Why would you say something like this? And why, as a journalist, would you report it? It's a transparent lie; nobody is going to be taken in by it. So why bother even saying it?

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#126

Post by AJ007 »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #120
JoshTriplett wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time federation comes up, I always ask where the bridges are that allow "following" people on the non-federated sites (e.g. Twitter), and the answer is always vague and non-specific, suggesting that such bridges exist without any information about using them. I'd love to see a switching guide for, say, Twitter, that specifically says "here's how to transparently follow people on Twitter, and here's how to have…

There is no bridge. I highly doubt the Twitter API TOS would even allow it. What you can do is get a client that supports both Mastodon as well as Twitter. I recommend Twidere on Android. https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.mariotaku.twidere/

After the recent LinkedIn scraping court rulings, it seems Twitter should be legally scrapable. Twitter is largely public content submitted by their users, which Twitter does not own. It’s plausible this is why Instagram removed public access.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#127

Post by cyborgx7 »

ClearAndPresent wrote: post #123
cyborgx7 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no bridge. I highly doubt the Twitter API TOS would even allow it. What you can do is get a client that supports both Mastodon as well as Twitter. I recommend Twidere on Android. https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.mariotaku.twidere/

There sort of is although I don't know why anyone would want it. https://github.com/renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster

I actually have my twitter and mastodon accounts linked with this, but I assume a bridge like the other commenter requested would allow to follow any twitter acount from your Mastodon account.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#128

Post by twic »

xwdv wrote: post #75
near wrote: post #9

They also use meta robots=noimageindex,noarchive on every page without an opt-out which is so incredibly stupid and walled-gardeny for an image sharing site. I wanted to use Flickr instead but nobody else uses Flickr, then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code (that and Google completely ignores…

> then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code This just sounds like an excuse to yourself. It’s not hard to deal with this just strip out the EXIF data and bake the rotation into your images on upload. Problem solved, though I don’t know your experience level.

Or even just detect the rotation tag, leave the image untouched, and rotate it in CSS.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#129

Post by cs702 »

So now those profiles are not really public anymore.

They are available only to members now. Walled-off.

This action works directly against the best interests of Instagram users seeking to maximize their audience and reach.

Let's call this what it is: an anti-feature.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#130

Post by AJ007 »

nolok wrote: post #42
pmlnr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use Flickr. The only place out there which doesn't want to immediately steal photo rights.

I still maintain that if only Yahoo had any intent to do anything rather than sit around back then, Flickr would have won in the field of photo sharing and photo social media, and it would have been a much better end result for the users.

Search engine and instant messenger - Yahoo could have been Google & Facebook if they had been managed competently.
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