freamon

Exactly that, yeah. Thank you for the link.

It's straight-forward enough to do in back-end code, to just reject a query if parameters are missing, but I don't think there's a way to define a schema that then gets used to auto-generate the documentation and validate the requests. If the request isn't validated, then the back-end never sees it.

For something like https://freamon.github.io/piefed-api/#/Misc/get_api_alpha_search, the docs show that 'q' and 'type_' are required, and everything else is optional. The schema definition looks like:

/api/alpha/search:
    get:
      parameters:
        - in: query
          name: q
          schema:
            type: string
          required: true
        - in: query
          name: type_
          schema:
            type: string
            enum:
              - Communities
              - Posts
              - Users
              - Url
          required: true
        - in: query
          name: limit
          schema:
            type: integer
          required: false

required is a simple boolean for each individual field - you can say every field is required, or no fields are required, but I haven't come across a way to say that at least one field is required.

PieFed has a similar API endpoint. It used to be scoped, but was changed at the request of app developers. It's how people browse sites by 'New Comments', and - for a GET request - it's not really possible to document and validate that an endpoint needs to have at least one of something (i.e. that none of 'post_id' or 'user_id' or 'community_id' or 'user_id' are individually required, but there needs to be one of them).

It's unlikely that these crawlers will discover PieFed's API, but I guess it's no surprise that they've moved on from basic HTML crawling to probing APIs. In the meantime, I've added some basic protection to the back-end for anonymous, unscoped requests to PieFed's endpoint.

There are some api rate limits (look for RateLimitExceeded in routes), but the settings are generous enough that a normal user (and not a bot) isn't going to get caught by them.

For this particular case, it's more an instance of the software not interacting (in the sense of not changing things they don't understand).

If Lemmy doesn't implement flairs, then community updates from them won't over-write flairs set on PieFed's copy of those comms. Also, when a PieFed user sends a comment to a Lemmy community, it will just attach an 'Announce' header to it and send it out to all followers. It would be against their own spec to change the content of anything they're Announcing, so followers who receive the comment and happen to be on PieFed instances will interpret it fully, whereas Lemmy will just ignore any fields in the JSON that it doesn't have a use for.

Maybe it was from a Mastodon server that requires 'authorized fetch' or whatever they call it? Last time I was tinkering with something related, Lemmy wasn't doing the required signed GET request for the user, so couldn't show the post.

seems like they appear okay otherwise

There's some other papers that are trying to paint this trial as some kind of "PC gone mad" thing, and even they have clearly struggled to find a photo of Lineham where he doesn't look at least a bit unhinged. I'm not trying to make this about his appearance, I just mean that there's some clear manifestations of poor mental health apparent, and he should probably try to direct his energies towards them a bit more instead.

Is there a use-case for pinging yourself?

If not, it seems better to be able to say "message me at @freamon@preferred.social" without actually generating a notification.

Ah, thanks. I've edited my comment to correct it.

It's indeed just the Mastodon-style Mentions that MBIN uses that cause a slight problem for PieFed. Nothing is being regex'd, so it's just the specific use of the Mention type in the tag[] field which it's picking up, which - as you say - wasn't included in your comment.

I've no doubt that Lemmy's particular auto-completion feature is very useful, but I still don't think it's what OP was referring to. The top-right frame says "I can find the exact unfederated remote comm" ... the key word being 'unfederated'.

On a lemmy instance that's already connected with something like 'yepowertrippinbastards', starting to type it in a comment will indeed fill out the rest. Image from lemmy.world:

But if a lemmy instance hasn't already connected with the community, it doesn't have the info to autocomplete anything. Image from a dev Lemmy instance:

This is in contrast to PieFed, which for one particular screen, can autocomplete community names based on info from lemmyverse rather than its own database, so it doesn't need to have federated with anything yet.

There's pros and cons for each approach obvs, and I'm not super-invested in Lemmy vs. PieFed discussions right now, but I felt a strange urge to try to explain some week-old meme (and dick about with some new screen recording software). If you're right and I'm wrong, then that's okay too.

OP is referring to a feature of PieFed, which will autocomplete a community's name if you go to 'Add Remote Community'. It uses data from lemmyverse.net in the background, so the instance you're searching on doesn't have to actually know about the community beforehand.

Video demo: