String IDs — API Breaking Change

App development
#1

Hey all, just a heads up that we’re merging a breaking API change soon.

Going forward all IDs are going to be JSON strings instead of JSON numbers. This is because we’re paving the way for non-sequential snowflake ids, and Javascript (or any library deserializing JSON numbers as 64-bit floating points) can’t handle numbers larger then 53-bit. These changes required very little code on the mastodon front-end to change, and we don’t expect them to be a big issue conceptually, but you’ll probably want to make sure you’ve got your types in a row before trying to connect to a master instance!

As far as I know there aren’t any plans to make a release with these changes, so you’ll probably have a while to upgrade. I want to make sure everyone is on board before this code makes it into a tagged version.

Thanks! Feel free to chime in here or on the Github thread if you have any questions.

#2

Is the api url version changing with this? for breaking api changes it would make sense to make use of that /vX/ in the api path

#3

I don’t think that really makes sense given that there would be a fundamental correctness issue with trying to use the v1 APIs, also the change is really minor and in non-typed languages would be completely identical.