Bibliogram

» see bibliogram.art as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Somebody sends you an Instagram link. You open it, and Instagram shows you one photo and then a wall: make an account, or install the app, or go away. Bibliogram was the small program that sat between those two moments. It asked Instagram for the public profile on your behalf and handed back the photos as an ordinary web page, with no login and nothing to install. The first commit landed on 19 December 2019 and the flagship instance lived at bibliogram.art.

It was never a company and never tried to be. The source was public, anyone could run a copy, and enough people did that Bibliogram existed at dozens of addresses at once, each paid for by whoever happened to be running it. When Hacker News found it in May 2021 the post collected 248 points, which is the kind of attention that brings traffic a hobby server has to absorb. The person behind all of it went by Cadence and worked alone.

The job sounds trivial and it was not. Instagram does not publish a public API for reading profiles, so every front-end like this works by finding some corner of the website that still returns data to a program instead of a browser, and then holding onto that corner while the platform tries to close it. Bibliogram spent its entire life doing that. The surprise is not that it ended. The surprise is that it worked for nearly three years.

~ the record ~

~ how you keep a door open ~

Instagram started tightening in 2020 and never really stopped. Rate limits came first, then limits that varied by what you asked for, then a restructuring of the whole site that changed how profile data was returned. By July 2022 Cadence counted four different methods the platform used to hand over a profile, and several of them were rate limited so hard that a public instance could not stay useful for more than a few visitors at a time. Access over Tor was cut off in the same stretch, which mattered because a shared instance looks to Instagram exactly like one very busy person.

I never ran one of these and I never needed one. What I recognize is the instinct underneath it. It is the same one that makes an engineer keep a local copy of anything important: if the thing you depend on is only somebody else's server, you do not actually have it. The people running Bibliogram mirrors were doing unpaid sysadmin work so that strangers could read a photo without being read back. That culture produced Nitter for Twitter and Invidious for YouTube in the same years, and from Turkey it was invisible, the way it was invisible almost everywhere. A front-end that works does not announce itself.

~ a bill and a wall ~

Teddit, which did the same job for Reddit, was born eleven months after Bibliogram and died eleven months after it. The two deaths look alike and were not. Reddit killed Teddit with a price list, a published number per million API requests that no hobbyist could pay. Instagram never sent anybody a bill. It simply made the data harder to reach every few months until the program on the other end stopped being worth maintaining. That is slower than a bill and it leaves nothing to argue with.

The 1 September 2022 post makes clear that the technical wall was only half of it. Cadence had been fighting a platform in their spare time for three years with no motivation left to keep doing it, and said so plainly. Individual posts still rendered after that. Profiles, the thing people actually came for, did not.

~ what came after ~

Cadence did not stop building. The next project was BreezeWiki, a front-end that strips the advertising and the video players off Fandom wiki pages, which is the same idea pointed at a target that fights back less. The Bibliogram code was left open with an invitation attached: take it and run it, and if you do, rename it and take the original author's name off the documentation.

That last request is the detail I keep coming back to. Somebody wrote a useful program, gave it away, maintained it against a hostile platform for three years, and then asked that any future version not carry their name. The domain answers today with a JavaScript redirect belonging to somebody else entirely.

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