Mastodon's Streaming API is requiring authentication from 4.2.0 onwards

[ThisIsMissEm]

Hey, I just wanted to let you know that Mastodon in v4.2.0 and above will be changing the Streaming API to require authentication to access, and that would consequently break buzzrelay. I'm not sure what the alternative is for now.

[SuperSandro2000]

I'm not sure what the alternative is for now.

If mastodon does not want to offer an API, scraping is always an option. It makes things less efficient and more resource heavy.

Maybe you can also work around it by using client credentials but that seems to be not fully working as indented. see https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/24116

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We know for two weeks that the change is comming from the PR (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/23989#issuecomment-1628961709) that introduced it and so far no one cared enough to give any explanation on it whatsoever.

[CustardFlan]

Hey, I just wanted to let you know that Mastodon in v4.2.0 and above will be changing the Streaming API to require authentication to access, and that would consequently break buzzrelay. I'm not sure what the alternative is for now.

I'been usin this as a workaround:
https://instan.ce/api/v1/streaming/public/local?access_token=lenghtylongtokenfrommastodonapptoken

But it seems that mastodon is under a new API development, at least in the glitch fork, so, the API URL is gonna change anyways in some point in the future

[astro]

Supporting that ?access_token= parameter is what I'm currently working on. Thank you for keeping me posted about new API developments.

[ClearlyClaire]

Have you considered ingesting activities that are sent to you by participants on your inbox, rather than using the streaming API? Of course this would require the servers you want data from to subscribe to your relay, but that is something you could advertise if you had the feature.

[voxpelli]

The ActivityPub specs mention that implementations may choose to deliver activities with the "public" audience/target to all known sharedInbox:

Additionally, if an object is addressed to the Public special collection, a server MAY deliver that object to all known sharedInbox endpoints on the network.

Not sure if Mastodon implements this

[ClearlyClaire]

Not sure if Mastodon implements this

Mastodon does not send public activities to all known sharedInbox endpoints, and I believe this is not advisable. Mastodon does something similar for much rarer events (account deletions), and this is already an issue in some cases at the sending side, and considered spam at the receiving side by several operators. This approach would not scale and would likely bury small servers under a constant influx of unsolicited public posts from everywhere else on the fediverse.

[voxpelli]

@ClearlyClaire I meant in response to your post, if Mastodon supported sending to select sharedInboxes, such as this relay

[ClearlyClaire]

Ah, Mastodon already sends to the inbox of subscribed relays