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 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/linkedin/shared/authentication/authorization-code-flow?tabs=HTTPS), then you can use the Connections API with Field Request to return the connection names and unique IDs/urns (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/linkedin/shared/integrations/people/connections-api) 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: https://github.com/sbutler-gh/earthkind ^ 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!

FYI: Linkedin is famously aggressively against such things https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/56347/prohibition-of-scraping-software?lang=en

Yeah, even in less restrictive platforms, I feel like this would need a lot of adoption to really get interesting, but would immediately get banned if it did get much traction

I remember reading some ruling within the US about scraping. You’re more / less allowed to do it but ofc LinkedIn has the right to make that painful 🙂

not only painful, but may ban you forever. They can see what auth creds were used to do the scraping. (https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/comments/lrzh8i/can_you_get_banned_for_scraping_job_data_on/)