Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

thenextweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 243 posts

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

#131

Post by hombre_fatal »

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?

Well, you can log into any website by just guessing an unguessable token and setting a cookie. That's not what people refer to as obscurity, else all cryptography is just security through obscurity which makes it a useless distinction.

You can make off with millions of dollars in bitcoin by guessing numbers correctly. It's public and yours for the taking.

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

#132

Post by mikestew »

I don’t use Instagram. I’m sure I’ve seen Instagram pages, but I’ve never had a reason to create an account. But if they let me see pages, maybe someday I’ll see the need for myself.

A hair stylist I went to recently has an Instagram page. She did a great job, I’ll go bookmark her page in case I forget who she is. And that’s when I am met with a login page. Well, guess who now stands no chance of ever having an Instagram account? They might wear me down if enough friends send links that I click. “Hey, ya know, this looks kinda handy.” Now it’s all over a wall I don’t feel like climbing. Which is fine. I’m not mad, or much of anything, frankly. It’s another “service” I don’t have to waste time on.

But, boy, it strikes me as a strange way to pursue growth.

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

#133

Post by newscracker »

sschueller wrote: post #62

Support the federated alternative that is being built based on the same technology (ActivityPub) as Mastodon and Peertube. [1] https://pixelfed.org/ [2] https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed

How mature and functional is it now? I recall looking at it in the past and seeing that it wasn’t ready (I’m perhaps not recalling things right). In the list of instances, the one with the highest number of users, pixelfed.social, seems to have less than 10 posts per user (in total), on average. Sounds like adoption is not even as good as Mastodon yet.

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

#135

Post by ClearAndPresent »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #127
ClearAndPresent wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yes. You're right, certainly would be stopped by Twitter even if technically possible.

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

#136

Post by lifestyleguru »

cs702 wrote: post #129

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.

Exactly, these profiles are not public anymore (in the common sense meaning of "public profile"). BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it?

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

#137

Post by mikestew »

moccachino wrote: post #43
nolok wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinterest manages to do something horribly stupid and kind of abusive that I usually associates with adult sites ads: show you a preview of something that gets your interest, if you click to get access to it put you through a maze of forms and links all promising the result you asked for at the end, and then when you get to it they don't deliver and instead show other stuff you might like but really you don't because…

They have actually had one positive influence on my life. After having dealt with exactly what you described a few times, I learned that I don't need anything that's on Pinterest. If a search results returns a pinterest link, I ignore it. If I can't find it anywhere except that link, it's as good as a dead link so I move on. This can be extended to much of the internet. So much peace now.

It is one of my main uses of Pi-Hole: “never, ever let anything from that domain into my network ever again.” If I accidentally click a link, it doesn’t go anywhere. I use it for quite a few domains that show up in a lot of places, but have proven to be an annoyance. I’m believe Pinterest was one of the first to be added for that reason.

The ad blocking Pi-Hole provides is a nice bonus, too.

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

#138

Post by [deleted] »

filleokus wrote: post #121
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 compar…

[deleted]

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

#139

Post by yourduskquibble »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #136
cs702 wrote: post #129

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.

Exactly, these profiles are not public anymore (in the common sense meaning of "public profile"). BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it?

> BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it?

Stop using their user-hostile service? They need my eyeballs in order to sell me to advertisers. If they are creating features that turn users away, their bottom line may be impacted enough that they reevaluate their user-hostile business practices.

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

#140

Post by ClearAndPresent »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #124
ClearAndPresent wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Apologies. I didn't mean to sound condescending. It just seemed like a desire to do something so entirely at odds with the two approaches to online interaction (open, user controlled, non-hierarchical vs closed, corporate controlled and top down implementations) that it confused me.
Post reply on HN