Any devs interested in tinkering on a tool to export social graph/network data from walled gardens like LinkedIn/Facebook/Discord, and build some lo-fi chat/comms on top?
I’ve been hacking on this starting with LinkedIn. If you enable authentication with LinkedIn’s 3-legged flow (LinkedIn 3-Legged OAuth Flow - LinkedIn | Microsoft Docs), then you can use the Connections API with Field Request to return the connection names and unique IDs/urns (Connections API - LinkedIn | Microsoft Docs) for all of your connections. With that, you have a first-connections social graph. And then, just need a way to send message blobs to those folks!
Here’s a repo where I’ve been working on it:
^ At the moment, it’s stuck because the LinkedIn 3-legged auth isn’t working — not sure exactly what the problem is, whether CORS or with the redirect URIs. I added documentation in the index.svelte file to describe more there.
If it is CORS errors, I’m not sure if that’s bypassable locally, so I also spun up a deployed instance at https://earthkind.pages.dev/. That gives some redirect errors when trying to authenticate which might provide more information.
I’ve been reflecting on this for awhile, think it could be really useful! For example, do you ever have an in-depth DM chat with a friend where you wish other people could check out the discussion/thoughts coming out? By building something that’s described here, we could even give people an option to have chats that are publically indexable and discoverable — the equivalent of chatting in public, so others can overhear and join the conversation. Just one of the possibilities!
I’m looking for devs who have experience working with these kind of APIs/callbacks etc, to hack on this together (open-source ofc). If you’re interested, drop a reply below!