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.

I’d be wary of getting a conversation node from anybody other than the original author (as described in the second approach).

There’s a reason why, if you want to resolve a missing post in Lemmy, etc, you have to use the fedi-link to retrieve it from its source, not just from any other instance that has a copy (because, like the “context owner”, they could be lying).

For Group-based apps, conversation backfill is mostly an issue for new instances, who might have a community’s posts (from its outbox), but will be missing old comments. Comments can be automatically and recursively retrieved when they are replied to or upvoted by a remote actor, but fetching from the source (as you arguably should do) is complicated by instances closing (there’s still loads of comments from feddit.de and kbin.social out there - it will be much worse when lemm.ee disappears). So perhaps Lemmy could also benefit from post authors being considered the trusted owner of any comments they receive.