I have a legacy WP blog that I wanted to migrate to some static architecture for ages but IMHO users should be able to comment and maybe even post a pingback. I know, old MT days. But social media is always about getting (positive) comments and feedback, not just dropping statements and knowledge.
I also don't want to tie my site to disqus or other 3rd party cloud services and their implication on GDPR.
A buddy found Cusdis - a self-hostable Disqus alternative: https://cusdis.com . But this only does comments, no pingbacks - and via a separate product that you need to integrate using JavaScript.
And running this opens you up to security issues you were trying to avoid by going the SSG route. In a way you could just keep WP, then.
(Also, WP has this beautiful ActivityPub plugin that makes your blog a fediverse account that people can subscribe to and even comment on your posts from Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
The presentation looks like marketing overkill, their solution looks pretty simple. It‘s just two trills „Trillerwerk“ bells combined. It was the standard in Germany until the late 1990s https://youtu.be/-mW7dWHDivo
While this will probably happen over time, free* offerings are an anomaly you can‘t build a business on. But even 1€/months minimum is probably too low to cover costs.
Surprised how little the B2C and even B2B e-commerce segment is providing API access for automation and agentic coding. One could easily set up rate limits, fraud detection and KYC checks upfront initial access.
Normal customers are not paying for APIs, so there is little value in offering them for free, especially when it can be harmful. B2B sometimes does pay for them, but not always is it obvious from the outside that they even exist. Much commerce is also on tight numbers and thus kinda secretive about their stuff.
Think it's context dependent whether it's a good or bad thing.
The owners of German supermarket and car companies are really the richest of the rich in Germany (okay and maybe the SAP guy on top). It would definitely be a net positive if someone manages to scrape and compare their prices.
In the restaurant market it's one player abusing many small players.
And honestly, I think the reason everyone cries when "Amazon launches an API" is because Amazon would not dare to piss off the German supermarket oligopoly.
Can you share them? I recently looked for such projects and didn't really find anything that works well.
The issue is that each market sets their own prices and I believe REWE is the only large one where you can fairly easily scrape the product catalogue. I thought about it in a shopping list context, so you'd need to make it location dependent to be useful. But you could do a lot of cool things with it. Like choose a basket of goods and it creates a route for you: "Go to supermarket A and buy goods XYZ, then to supermarket B and buy ABC"
There's this one which got some publicity, doesn't seem to be updated any more but it worked for all these retailers listed and is open source: https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise
> B2C: Is it really surprising that a busines has no interest in providing more price transparency to their customers?
Might I suggest you remove your tin-foil hat and consider that:
- 99% of REWE customers almost certainly have no clue what an API is
- 99% of the remaining 1% know what an API is, but their day-job involves messing with APIs, so they don't want to spend their weekend-time messing with the REWE API, they just want to do their shopping at REWE.
- The final 0.1% are those who come on HN and pretend its all some sort of big conspiracy to minimise transparency by $evil_corp. :)
If you think about it, imagine if REWE officially exposed an API B2C. This would mean they are obligated to provide support.
Do you really want the price of your shopping to increase because REWE now needs to find money to pay for a helpdesk for the millions of B2C API users ?
Businesses and services differentiating between B2C and B2B is nothing new, that is why the two different terminologies exist !
What next, you don't want to fill up your car at the petrol station (B2C) but you want to be permitted to buy a barrel crude oil direct from the drill and refine it yourself (B2B) ?
> Might I suggest you remove your tin-foil hat and consider that:
First up: Read and follow the rules. No need to insult me. Especially considering what you said shows that you both misunderstood AND misrepresented what I've said.
And frankly, my reasoning was simply saying "Company won't publicize internal info if they don't get an advantage from doing so". It's literally the same reason Google doesn't publish all of their source code. I'm struggling to see what part you are misunderstanding but it has to be something extremely basic to conclude I'm a conspiracy nut for basically stating "Company acts in their interest".
Opening an API to the public allows third parties to develop apps that can then be consumed by end-consumers. Not trying to be offensive here, but do you know what an API is? To conclude I meant every single end-consumers building their own app is at best disingenuously twisting my words.
Opening the API would allow new players like you and me to enter the market and take a piece of the pie. Why would a market, dominated and controlled by a few big players, opt for that? You don't even need to know that the German grocery market is incredibly price competitive, to understand that.
> If you think about it, imagine if REWE officially exposed an API B2C. This would mean they are obligated to provide support.
Can you provide a source for that requirement? I'm pretty sure you just made that up.
> Businesses and services differentiating between B2C and B2B is nothing new, that is why the two different terminologies exist !
At this point I'm entirely lost what you read in my comment. Yes I know. I specifically made that distinction.
> What next, you don't want to fill up your car at the petrol station (B2C) but you want to be permitted to buy a barrel crude oil direct from the drill and refine it yourself (B2B) ?
Yeah you definitely misunderstood something... What I said/meant:
The question: Why isn't the API open?
My answer:
For B2B I gave an example where the API is used by another German firm, providing an example that the API is indeed consumed B2B.
For B2C: They have no reason to do so. They have a well functioning app where you can order stuff. They have one of the bigger recipe pages (at least it does very well SEO-wise) in Germany where you can immediately order ingredients from a recipe. The biggest recipe page in Germany (chefkoch) offers a direct link from recipes to their order page. Maybe you're missing this info? Thinking it's an internal API to data that isn't exposed anywhere at all would somehow explain whatever you tried to say here. But again, if you're that uninformed, don't insult people.
> Opening an API to the public allows third parties to develop apps that can then be consumed by end-consumers. Not trying to be offensive here, but do you know what an API is? To conclude I meant every single end-consumers building their own app is at best disingenuously twisting my words.
Here you are wrong too.
If you want to develop an app via an API that is only offered B2B, what do you do ?
Yes, that's right ...
You phone up REWE and negotiate a license to access to the B2B API to develop your application. B2B2C if you want to put it in simpler terms.
My original point stands. REWE clearly do not want to officially expose the API B2C, almost certainly for the exact reasons I already spelled out in my original post.
But no, its easier for you just to spread FUD, claiming "busines has no interest in providing more price transparency to their customers" just because they will not let you have access to the API as direct B2C.
Haha man, I think this is a cool project, the REWE API is cool, the REWE delivery App and Website are cool. Certainly not spreading fear, uncertainty or doubt.
What you describe as B2B2C is exactly what chefkoch does. And it's exactly what I initially said, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But anyway. Doesn't feel like we're getting anywhere. Have a great day ;)
They will lose. The only areas Germany can compete, are that with broad APIs. Take HBCI/FinTS for banking. Go API or go out of business. I‘m pretty sure Piknik and Flaschenpost will offer agentic agent compatible APIs at some point.
Every server admin can ban your account. You can’t move a banned account. You lose everything. I was banned from mastodon.social because I dare to criticize the socialist regime
of the former GDR on Germany‘s Independence Day.
Well, some of the non-centralized social media is quite left-wing. If someone favours the SED or other parts of the ex-GDR regime (like FDGB etc) then it's IMHO already bordering on left extremisms. After all these guys enslaved a hughe population to make people do their biddings. If that is not extreme, I can't say.
That said, if you insisted that some "Germany's Independence Day" existed, then it's perhaps that what got you banned. Germany was never really a colony. Not of UK, not of Spain or Portugal, or not in newer times of Russia. Many countries that were a colony of them, or just annexxed, have an independence day. Germany doesn't --- the last time it was partially colonized, in roman times, there was no Germany.
This lead to even more strict echo chambers because they effectively kill different opinions. The bubble will become even more strict and radical to people that are not living the cult.
True, but in cultural matters I wish we had more ivory towers and (yikes!) elitist closed communities than watered down open spaces that average out to mediocrity. See niche subreddits when they go popular and devolve into dumb memes and a neverending stream of the same beginner questions.
All the public internet has brought is homogeneization rather than specialization.
while true i think it's inevitable. bots are most of the internet, limiting communities to known good actors is becoming incredibly important and the side effect of removing unknown good actors is difficult to get around
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon
I second this. Even moderation of mastodon.social and related OSS projects is toxic. It was the biggest disappointment of the last couple of years to me, even worse than Twitter ever had been.
the widow-maker list increases.
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