this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Enshitification hits Postman. POSTMAN! (community.postman.com)
submitted 9 months ago by HowManyNimons to c/tech
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I'm a bit late to the party here because I haven't needed Postman for a while, but how is it okay that now we have to LOG IN TO POSTMAN and send our API requests to them for them to store on their own cloud?

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[–] CodexArcanum 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I've been out of web dev a couple of years myself and was confused that HTTPie (my favorite curl alternative for terminal testing) now had a very Postman-like GUI interface. Apparently, the need to continually update everything means that old good apps like Postman get enshittified and old simple tools like httpie get turned into bloated apps.

Seems like Microsoft got really interested in postman in 2022, that's probably when the issues really started. MS wants everything you do to be in the cloud.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I'm so sick of it: Apparently a software is considered "dead" if it doesn't get weekly updates. This is unsustainable. IMO there's usually a point when a software is actually complete until some lib breaks or so. Especially with the UNIX mantra that every program should just have one purpose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I had the same thing when I was getting back into webdev. A httpie UI what?

Thankfully the cli tool seems unchanged so far.

[–] stjobe 9 points 9 months ago

I haven't done web API work for a while now, but postman had gone to shit even back then, to the point that I actively looked for alternatives. Ended up using an extension for VS Code called Thunder Client if I recall correctly. It was a bit rough around the edges but it got the job done without me having to log in anywhere or upload my requests anywhere.

[–] NoLifeGaming 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Any good alternatives?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Insomnia. You don't have to use an account. It's slightly annoying but the application works well.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Insomnia suffers from the same issue, use the fork https://github.com/ArchGPT/insomnium

[–] kvadd 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I really like Bruno

Edit: https://www.usebruno.com/

[–] HowManyNimons 2 points 9 months ago

The reason I hadn't used Postman in a while was because I had put Swagger on all my APIs. If that's an option for you, I recommend it.

For an alternative, I reckon you can't go past cUrl. Get a request working, then parametrise it with whatever scripting/programming language you like best, copy paste edit rinse repeat, and you've got yourself a makeshift Postman.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Postman is also crazy expensive when paying for a team account. Like, there’s no way you represent that much value to the product. We just moved to cURL and have a git project where we store common requests to share.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

You may already know this, but jq makes working with JSON at the CLI more productive.

[–] HowManyNimons 1 points 9 months ago

This is it. The point of the enshitification is to stop people from sharing a Postman collection file for free on Git, and make them pay a subscription to access their team's requests online.

Bloody no. No good steward of their boss's money would sign up for that.