I back up everything I write/comment/post online, but I haven’t been able to do that for my Lobsters comments/submissions. Would it be possible to add a way to export my own data programmatically?
A JSON endpoint would be simplest (even if it’s authenticated with a long-lived secret). A GDPR-style manual export/download would work too, but would be less convenient for regular backups.
I’ve seen a few GH threads referencing an endpoint like this (lobsters/lobsters#1167 and lobsters/lobsters#935), but it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. I realize there are concerns with this sort of thing, but hopefully we can come to a solution. The content is already there anyway, so this just saves me having to write an HTML parser for my user page.
Thank you!
To those issues: I’ve tried to avoid expanding the API to generally support every use case. It would be a lot of work, mostly to support one-off projects, and it would make the site harder to change if there was a deprecation policy (or no policy and GH filling up with complaints).
But this seems like a reasonable feature, so I’ve added it to the issue tracker.
Totally makes sense, I appreciate it!
https://lobste.rs/~xavdid/stories.json for stories, not sure how useful comments are out of context.
Every comment won’t be a winner, but many act as standalone thoughts / resources for a topic. And each is still something I’ve written, so it’s nice to have that saved somewhere (for instance, to find everything I’ve ever said on any site about Python).