api

Over the past few days I've been having issues updating my anime status on my website. Now outages and flakey performance of the Anilist API isn't something new but I logged into to Anilist today to find an announcement from nazo, one of the owners of Anilist.

Over the last 2.5 months, traffic to our public API (i.e., traffic from people using scripts or software not using our website directly) has almost doubled. For example, on Tuesday last week we served ~36 million API requests on top of normal site traffic.

That's a big jump, they seem to be doing what they can to absorb this new level of API traffic. It's sad to see this level of potential abuse towards a free and open API. It's another reason why they're getting rarer to find over the years.

Dave Rupert shares a similar frustration to mine, a lack of accessible public APIs, in much the same context - building personal apps or side projects. Recently, I had the idea of graphing the crowdiness levels across Barcelona's metro network at different times but there doesn't seem to be any API or dataset to help provide the much needed data. As an aside, the mobility-barcelona repository by GitHub user maariionaa-code has some good links. Back on topic, Dave provides some of his own examples along with commentary on the fragility of relying on external APIs to begin with - looking at you Twitter and Reddit.

Coincidentally, Terence Eden recently followed up on his post from two years ago on APIs that didn't require authentication. It doesn't look good today, but there's still some useful ones out there.