Yep. A reasonable compromise might be to use an API for certain queries, but encourage clients to implement fail-over behavior so that if an API goes down the client will still work. Obviously not all clients are going to do that, but I think I will probably end up doing that with Satellite sooner or later, especially if/when the problem of impersonator profiles becomes more of a thing and tagging suggestions need to be ranked by some kind of trust score (which would be expensive/hard to compute locally)