Unable to Write Apps That Share via Steem, Gab or Facebook - The Amazingly Anti-Social World of Social Networking @ 2019
Recently, I have been upgrading and updating the features at my own social network, Ureka. I thought it would be a relatively simple task to add the ability to cross-post to other networks, I was mistaken!
I just want Ureka's users to be able to opt to post to other networks as they post to Ureka, so that they don't need to write the same post multiple times and also to make using Ureka more attractive, since most people are entrenched in a main network they use and don't want to leave.
I got Ureka connected to Twitter painlessly and it all works as expected. I can post a shout to Ureka and choose to cross-post it to Twitter, no problem. I then tried to do this for Facebook and hit a snag.. They have a manual authorisation process for such things and any app that wants to use Facebook's remote API has to provide a screencast of what they want to do, why - who benefits and a bunch of other information. This is then reviewed and the app is tested. As occurs in literally every example of me interacting with Facebook's support team, their response was not specific or clear enough for me to understand what the issue is and unable to take action to improve anything.
It appears that maybe they haven't authorised Ureka because I wasn't able to demonstrate how 'value' would be added to the user's experience by Ureka using Facebook - however, I cannot do that because Ureka isn't authorised to access Facebook yet! It's katch 22.
I was then pointed to the fact that Twitter can forward posts automatically to Facebook via their own app.. So I figured that might be the best solution. It turns out, though, that despite Twitter's own documentation describing how to do this - the connection app doesn't work and after a few times reloading Twitter's apps page, the option for the app disappeared altogether. I'm not sure if this is a bug or that they cancelled the app and didn't remove it properly. I've seen mixed comments on that online.
Next up, I thought I would use Steem - that should be straightforward - I thought. I started reading about Steemconnect's methods and knowing that many other sites have successfully used it to authorise accounts on the Steem blockchain, I figured it would be fairly painless. In fact, though, I logged in to Steem connect's dashboard and attempted to follow the guidelines, but as with Twitter and Facebook, the guidelines are not clear at all. After accidentally replacing the description and icon for my own user account on Steem, I managed to get an app created for @ureka, but their dashboard hasn't given me any keys for it and appears to be broken. So I can't do any more there for now!
Finally, I thought I'd look at Gab.com. I know they have an API for doing these things, so I started following their guidelines. "Go to the developer apps' page in your settings in gab".. Ok.. Except, there isn't a page with that name and nothing like it! No help is available online and Gab is still under sustained DDOS attack!
So much for 'social' networks! lol
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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not surprised facebook doesn't want to share.
twitter is already onboard with facebook as being of the same corporate type entities.
strange that is so hard to deal with steemit, tried contacting developers that have already done it?
Yes, I have had some feedback and some questions answered - it comes down to code and websites/guides being out of date to some extent. People write code and then move on to more exciting things without thinking in an organised way about what they have already done. I'll have another go at it soon.
seems like if you program something others are using.. it would be top of the list.
good luck with it. curious what is your language of choice?
i like tcl/tk.. partly because it has been around forever, works on every platform... and just works. and is fun to program in.
I had never heard of tcl until I looked it up - interesting!
I currently mostly just use PHP, JS/JQuery, HTML and SQL for web things. Although I trained in software at degree level, I am more excited by other things now, so I limit what I use to these. I don't have time to learn or use other languages really.
ah well, i find it to be the best language for quickly developing little GUIs around linux commands, wonderful for parsing text, and now I don't want to use anything else.
you should see all the major ways TCL has influenced computers science, like with sqlite3 .. it is bizzare to me in a way that python is the accepted standard when tcl, to me, beats it in every way, mainly dealing with errors..
and i hate the way spacing/tabs matters in python.
but i hear python/tcl pretty much do exactly the same things.
Don’t you hate bad guides? One of my pet peeves at work! People write a guide, say ‘just go to this function’ on a page of a hundred functions and sub functions. Fail!
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For startups or small projects with small budgets it is understandable to have such things occurring - but for multi billion dollar companies, it is ridiculous!
Try using OnlyWire. It will automatically post your content to multiple social networks. If you are a developer, contact me please. Don't know programming, but have an app idea that should help users who have the same problem with you.
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My aim here is to connect my own social network to specific other networks, as opposed to just allowing me personally to post to multiple networks. My aim is to allow the users of Ureka to do this using Ureka.
I don't have any spare time to work on other projects at the moment, but there are lots of developers on Steem - you might find some who do if you go to the Steemdevs Discord space: https://discord.gg/DqTewp
There is no need for cross-post if there is interoperability. This is why Aaron Swartz invented RSS.
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absolutely - and my site supports RSS output. however, my attempts to get social nets to use such RSS in the past has been shaky and relied on 3rd party apps.
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