Expose a straightforward API for deeper Integrations

[eternal-flame-AD]

Currently Altbot only shows up as a commenter which might not be very helpful for reasons, some of them you noted as well:

(1) It is less obvious and harder to navigate for those in need.
(2) Not all Fedi instances are very keyboard-navigable and/or hide remote content by default, so even finding the comment section and Altbot's text might be difficult.

Have you considered just exposing an API where the holder of the actor keys who signed up can just ask for the captions for an image using an API? This way their instance or their own client can embed it in the post by displaying it inline with the image element? It might even be able to be de-facto standardized in the future for consensual third-party posting middlewares.

Implementation Considerations

If you are not familiar with Fediverse authentication, this section should be all you need for this feature.

Thanks to some "anti-scraping" measures some instances now require you to have a domain/instance you control to sign the request to access the actor keys, this is likely not an insurmountable task because:

(1) If they like to draw a line on what is an "instance" to fetch your public information they likely are not interested in deep integrations anyways.
(2) Even if we don't use our own keys initially, many instances (Misskey for starters) do not require this anyways, so we can do this incrementally.
(3) I am not familiar with fuzzies.wtf instance owner, they might be interested in sharing the public keys and/or an Verification-as-a-Service API for Altbot's followers as well (at least I would if an ethical bot is ran on my instance). They are not private or copyrighted information to begin with, just caught up in the "anti-scraping" war.

[Sam4000der2]

You could offer a small tool, for example in Python. The tool could check at adjustable intervals whether the account has posted new posts without alt text and, if so, generate alt text for the images using your API and automatically add it to the posts or, alternatively, delete the original posts and recreate them with alt text (you can choose which option you want).

The user would have to give the tool their private API key, and you could easily run it yourself, as it's not as demanding as an LLM.

[eternal-flame-AD]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion but I would still prefer an "official" solution to this problem.

The primary concern is this is not that ergonomic, and most instances have limits on how much text I can put in the alt text box so I prefer to integrate it directly in the instance code under a well defined API contract.

[micr0-dev]

Good idea but ive been very freaking busy recently, hopefully will get around to this eventually, sorry for the wait, if anyone wants to give it a shot themselves feel free :)