Does kbin allow 3rd party apps / development? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by daddy@kbin.social to c/kbin@kbin.social

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I found the API documentation but it seems to be lacking. If someone wanted to create a bot to moderate their magazine, how do they authorize the bot? For example, Reddit had Oauth documentation.

I am completely new to this fediverse stuff so excuse my lack of knowledge if I'm missing something.

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[-] Kichae@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Kbin is very young, so the documentation is lacking basically everywhere. The developer, ernest, was scrambling this weekend to get some of the docs around setting up a server in shape for tomorrow, and desperately trying to keep k-soc's hamster alive as the instance went from a few dozen to several thousand active users.

Ultimately, despite its level of polish, it's not production level software, and we're all just making due.

The project is open source, though, and there's nothing stopping anyone from making mobile apps are alternative web front-ends. By the end of this week, there will likely be dozens of servers running kbin, if not hundreds, and whether they want to allow external actors to use the API will be up to each server's administrator.

But anyone thinking about it should be aware that ernest was contemplating making the kbin API Lemmy-like, as Lemmy has a significant head start on number of sites running it, and until very recently number of active users. But given the explosion in attention kbin has gotten, and the explosion in population on k-soc, that might not be a priority any longer.

[-] Kabaka@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

there's nothing stopping anyone from making mobile apps are alternative web front-ends

The biggest thing stopping people is the fact that the API does not actually work. As far as I can tell, every API endpoint (slowly) returns:

{
    "@context": "/api/contexts/Error",
    "@type": "hydra:Error",
    "hydra:title": "An error occurred",
    "hydra:description": "Internal Server Error"
}

In order for anyone to build new clients, the API first needs to be finished. Unfortunately, the choice of using PHP/Symfony is going to hinder that due to its incredibly low popularity. I got my start in software engineering by professionally writing PHP, but I haven't touched it in at least 15 years.

I'm currently trying to find my way around kbin-core, and it is a mess. There are almost no comments (and some commented-out code with no explanation), huge amounts of what I assume are stubs, and the commit log is a nightmare (commit descriptions are meaningless and repeated, like four commits in a row with only "Post expand fix" as a description).

This needs a lot of work before anyone should start trying to build API integrations.

this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023

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