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The Internet World

  • UUID: 33f7f425-cd8f-4458-a330-88f73b1f784d
  • Timestamps
    • 20231120, started this article because of the issue with Postman update
    • 20231206, thinking about changing the title to "The Digital World"

This is a sad article that I hesitated to write since a long time.

It seems like a general trend or cycle of trends. Best things go worse and worst things go better. Cycling.

Internet at the beginning was open. Internet today is about money. Money has disrespected everything good. No way when money has been established as the ruling power.

The trigger of this article is my upgrade of my Postman app lost me my collections. It is just so unreasonable.

It symbolizes a trend of going worse. It indicates a broken hope once Postman had. I hate Postman did this. But I think they also have made their hard decision here. The root is deeper, I think.

Postman logically should work as an offline client app. Logically, it should not need an account to work properly. An optional account should be helpful if synchronization among Postman apps on different platforms is needed, but never should it be mandatory if no synchronization is needed. However, after the upgrade I have done today, Postman made an account mandatory. When I chose not to have an account, the client app also intentionally made my collections disappeared. Why a dirty way to force me to have an account by using the fact that I value my colleactions. How could they do so? Hide my data to make me do something they want!

As a software developer, to be honest, I think I can try to understand this as the following. Software applications are not made without costs. The Postman development team needs to spend time, energy and money to make the software. At the beginning, they made the application freemium+ as their business model with the wish that baisc users help them to become popular and pro users pay them for more advanced functionalities to make a sustainable business. However, the reality is that not enough users have used accounts which allows the Postman team to leverage for revenue. So they "need" to make the dirty move to force users to make accounts which allows the Postman to abuse more or to force users to abandon, such as I will do.

More control to abuse. It is not just the Postman team. Think about the changes happened around twitter.com recently. That control freak knows that controlling is the best way of getting profits for himself from others by ignoring the responsibility to help to build or maintain a libre society or democracy. It is sad. But the thing is not really about requiring an account. It is about the change. The broken promise. The broken trust. It is more about cheating.

Users made the choice to use certain applications based on the assumption that the future will not be worse as technology improves with time. As I chose to use Postman on base that I can continue using it without losing my data on a version update. (If it is not very annoying pop up widget to ask me to upgrade, I would prefer to keep using the version I have.) But the Postman team intentionaly made my life worse by hiding my collections after the upgrade. It is that they started by giving impression that the app can be used with collections without an account, but now they have hooked users in and then are forcing users to make accounts to allow them to collect user data on their servers. It is cheating. It is dirty strategy.

NOTE: This article is started because of the Postman issue I encountered today and supposed to be updated in the future. So for the moment, it could result in a feeling of titled with a big concept but really too narrow talked about Postman. But in my opinion, the action of Postman team represents more.

Topic: Postman

Way out of Postman

Now my feeling of Postman is "dirty-dirty".

I have search on the Internet for restoring my collection data without registering an account which wounld result in my data goes to the "Cloud" (Someone's server). There are some finding I have found.

  • My environment is macOS 14.1.1 and earlier this morning updated my existed Postman version to the lastest version 10.20.0 by clicking the button with the app
    • So there resulted a clue that my MacBook has once updated to the latest version
  • I downloaded an old version from a Google Drive because all the official download sources have been removed by Postman
    • as a matter to prevent users to use old versions by the Postman team
    • which also endangers users because downloading from a Google Drive provided by another user has the potential to download virus-ware
  • I installed the old version downloaded from Google Drive (because the user who shared the software feels nice, the downloaded software looks good on my inspection and I do not have many more choices)
  • Luckily, the old Postman can start and also import the "10.20.0.Backup_postman_dump.json" I exported from version 10.20.0
    • Luckily because Postman has not yet blocked this import or they have not yet made the exported file another format with is not compatible to older versions
  • I installed alternative apps including Restfox
  • I tried to import the exported "10.20.0.Backup_postman_dump.json" and failed
  • I realized that export from newest Postman may have intentionally changed the format to make alternative apps unable to digest
  • I exported another "10.1.1.Backup_postman_dump.json" from the older version Postman I downloaded from Google Drive and closed the app
  • I tried to import the exported "10.1.1.Backup_postman_dump.json" and succeeded
    • which proved that Postman is trying to make it hard to migrate away from it
  • I reopened the old Postman I downloaded from Google Drive (to check some variable values) and found that the app updated itself to the newest version which hides my collection I imported from "10.20.0.Backup_postman_dump.json"
    • What a dirty-dirty action! Only because I have once clicked the button to update in my existed other old version?

Postman team is trying hard to make users of Postman hard!

Alternatives to Postman

Lists

  • https://alternativeto.net/software/postman/
  • https://apidog.com/articles/best-postman-alternatives-for-api-testing/
  • https://firecamp.io/blog/5-opensource-insomnia-alternatives
    • Published on October 20, 2023
    • Top 5 OpenSource Insomnia alternatives that you must try in 2024
    • https://github.com/firecamp-dev/firecamp
    • https://github.com/EsperoTech/yaade
    • https://github.com/ArchGPT/insomnium
    • https://github.com/RecipeUI/RecipeUI
    • https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox
      • 🎯 Offline-first web HTTP client
      • Made by an Indian from Mangalore
  • https://testfully.io/blog/top-5-postman-alternatives/
    • Matt | 14 Jun, 2021
    • 13 Postman alternatives you should know about
    • HTTPie
      • Web, Desktop, CLI
    • API Tester
      • iOS, Android, Mac OS

HTTPie

  • https://httpie.io/
  • https://httpie.io/desktop
  • https://github.com/httpie/desktop
    • ~My Remarks
      • This is not the source code repositry but just some docs and as release download hosting
    • 🚀 HTTPie Desktop — cross-platform API testing client for humans. Painlessly test REST, GraphQL, and HTTP APIs.
    • HTTPie for Web & Desktop
    • In this repository, we publish releases of HTTPie for Desktop for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
      • The app continuously auto-updates after the initial installation.
  • https://github.com/httpie/cli
    • 🥧 HTTPie CLI — modern, user-friendly command-line HTTP client for the API era. JSON support, colors, sessions, downloads, plugins & more.

Restfox

  • A very promising alternative to Postman

Insomnium

  • A truly open alternative to Insomnia
  • Issues
    • https://github.com/ArchGPT/insomnium/issues/93
      • Error importing Postman data: No importers found for file #93

Insomnia

  • Welcome to the Scratch Pad where you can work locally with up to 1 collection.
    • To create more and see your projects login or create an account

Quotes about Postman on 20231120

https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/12415

  • johnnyjob commented last month
    • Why the hell you put absolutely artificial limitations to your users? Create an account to do what? Organize my requests which are stored on my hard drive? What The Fuck guys, really? Good luck suckers.
  • imne commented last month
    • I've got no idea why there was a need to cause so much inconvenience to so many people, extremely frustrating, my company is even look as alternatives for postman already cause who knows what the next update will break
  • Aculeo commented last month
    • I don't like ranting, but I'm so done with this product. I used to like Podman for getting some simple API testing done, but the recent changes have made that it abundandly clear that you do not care about that use-case in the slightest. In a corporate environment I can't just synchronize API metadata to the cloud with getting a ton of approvals. And it's not worth the trouble for me.
    • And to add to all of this, you're actively working against users to downgrade to older releases. So I will also suggest moving to a different product now.
  • rdfedor commented 3 weeks ago
    • Downgrade your postman to continue using it offline, #12369
      • https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/12369

https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/12369

  • rdfedor commented on Oct 2
    • Seems as though the Postman team decided to screw everyone over and removed the downloads for downgrading so the above links are dead.
  • Anutrix commented 3 weeks ago
    • Lost days of work due to the Postman interruption. Uninstalled postman and switched to Imsomnia. It doesn't require login or forced sync.
  • argenstijn commented 3 weeks ago
    • @Anutrix Check out https://github.com/ArchGPT/insomnium. Better than Imsomnia :) more info on the link

https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/12114

  • Collections only available for Sign up Users #12114
  • r0b2g1t commented on Jul 4
    • We wouldn't want to sign up by security and data privacy reason. And store my Collections locally and offline. The new force sign up approach has made it easier for us to use other tools (like Hoppscotch self-hosted) and move away from Postman. To full fill our requirements which I can definitely recommend to anyone.
  • jnagle-nf commented on Jul 7
    • This is an unacceptable compromise because, as stated in Postman's documentation for the Lightweight API Client, this does not offer compatibility for Collections or Variables.
    • Restrictions like that mean I cannot export Collections from my legacy Scratchpad to use in the Lightweight API Client. It also means I cannot store and reuse Variables across requests.

* cached version, generated at 2024-01-09 03:24:26 UTC.

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