How are private front-ends built without APIs? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 5 months ago by governorkeagan to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I'm referring to projects like redlib or invidious.

I was thinking about doing something similar for a local second-hand marketplace and got curious. Redlib seems to use token spoofing to get past rate limits and Invidious doesn't even use the official YouTube API.

The only way I thought of, which would be slow, is to scrape the site (like you would with Beautiful Soup).

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[-] kitnaht@lemmy.world 47 points 5 months ago

Also the legal benefit of scraping the site without the YouTube API is that you haven't had to accept their terms of service.

There's an Android app called GrayJay that got a C&D from Google, and they told Google to kindly fuck off, because they hadn't used any of Google's APIs. Google had no leg to stand on.

[-] governorkeagan 4 points 5 months ago

Interesting, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info!

this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024

41 points (100.0% liked)

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