Blog April 28, 2020
MetaMate provides a convenient interface to all kinds of services and uses an abstract data schema, that’s derived from the most common domain specific type representations. For now, MetaMate focuses on reading public data from the social domain, starting with HackerNews. The next data sources that will be available through MetaMate will likely be activitypub, reddit and twitter. We would like your feedback, so please let us know which data sources you would like to see available through MetaMate. All the data-sources can be queried in the same fashion, as they, from an abstract point of view all provide SocialAccounts, PostFeeds and Posts.
MetaMate does not talk to data sources directly, but rather uses a service that’s translating MetaMate’s request to vendor specific requests. A service can be written in any language with the tools of one’s choice and can obtain the data in a variety of ways. The HackerNews services, for example, talks to multiple data sources at once. It’s getting most of the data via HackerNews’s firebase api. But, in order to retrieve one’s favourites, the service simply obtains that data from news.ycombinator.com directly, and uses hn.algolia.com to search posts on HackerNews. If you are interested in how this works in detail please have a look at the Source code.
If you are interested in how to build a service in general please, have a look at How to build a service
If you want to build an application on top of MetaMate you can either use our public instance at metamate.one or spin up your own MetaMate. Please find more information at How to build an application with MetaMate.
HackerNews service reference
Below are a couple of queries which illustrate the data that is returned by the Hacker News service. If you have any questions, please reach out to us.
Get Services
Get PostFeeds from hackernews service
Filter PostFeeds for topstories and get all the Posts that are contained in the PostFeed
Get HackerNewsActivity by id and all the Posts the HackerNewsActivity authors
How to setup a MetaMate?
Please have a look at the installation instructions