Dear Lazyweb, is there a reverse-engineered Instagram API that doesn't suck?Instagram's official API has no mechanism for uploading photos, because YOU HAD ONE JOB. So if you want to automate anything, you head into the salt mines. Which of course I did: instagram-api.
But I am sick to death of playing whack-a-mole with their API changes. I do not enjoy this work. It brings me no joy. Current pain in the ass: I'm getting tripped up by their "unusual login" checks. This game of whack-a-mole is harder than, say, Youtube's, because some time in the last year mitmproxy stopped working against either iOS Instagram, or against Android Instagram running in an emulator, because why I don't know why.
So there's this other API, and it has two things to recommend it:
- It seems to mostly work, and
- I am not the maintainer.
However:
- It's written in PHP, which makes me just kind of assume that it's also a rootkit;
- It has a list of dependencies as long as your arm (it's over 101,000 lines of code! Mine is like 2,500, WTF. That thing has like a hundred different "exception" classes alone.)
- Installing it requires this thing called "composer", which is apparently Yet Another Package Manager for PHP libraries, and it is, as far as I can tell, a literal rootkit. Here's how you can tell: it's installation instructions are to pipe a PHP URL into a root shell. So uh, no thanks.
I mean, I guess I could run it inside a virtualized host running on my colo machine or some shit, but that sounds hard and slow and I don't want to figure that crap out.
Are there any other options?
And if there aren't, are any of you using my script, and if so, can you just fucking fix it for me? Because aaauuugggghhhh I have better things to do than working around yet another stupid fucking lock-in-based business model.
Or, you know, other options include:
- Hire another full-time employee to manually do all the crap that I've already automated;
- Decide that it's cool for my business to have no social media presence.
In short, fuck you, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. A pox on all your houses.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
