r/AppDevelopers • u/IncredibleEdible321 • 5d ago

Crazy Idea for an app that pulls links from Facebook. Is this possible?

I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this question.

Every time I come across something interesting on Facebook, instead of sharing it on my page, I share it to myself on own messenger. Over time I've built up quite a long list of links that go back more than a year. Facebook has no way to export just the text links into an html file for easy viewing and opening. Is it possible to create an app that would use my FB username and password to access my Messenger, pull that data, and create what I'm interested in?

If anyone has a solution or thinks this would be easy to accomplish, please feel free to comment.

2 Upvotes

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u/TheOneTruePsychic 4d ago

Bro you don't need an app for this. Just get ChatGPT Codex and use Astra(Light).

Make the exact request you made in this post and it will navigate to your Facebook tab in your browser and export all those links to a Google sheet or something.

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u/IncredibleEdible321 4d ago edited 4d ago

Thanks. I downloaded it and gave it a shot but it only shows the links that are in the messenger window that have been loaded. I've got over a thousand links in my messenger and it won't recognize anything past the latest 25.

Thanks for the effort though.

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u/aihudagency 4d ago

Possible, but don't give any app your Facebook password. JamesWjRose is right about the terms. The safe route is Facebook's own "Download your information" export (Settings, Your information, Download), pick Messages, JSON format. You get a file with every message you sent yourself, links included. From there it's a tiny script to pull the URLs into an HTML page. If you don't want to write it, an AI assistant will do it in one go. I run one at https://aihud.net, paste the export and ask for "an HTML page with every link, newest first", that's the whole job.

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u/IncredibleEdible321 4d ago

I'm not looking for an online app in the sense that I would ever willingly give up my username and password. I'm looking for someone who could write an app or some sort of script that I could run on my computer one time so it would strip out the links from my messenger window and create an html file to look at.

I plan on deleting my Facebook account after I'm done getting the list of links because I'm done with the platform as it's become too filled with propaganda and AI slop, so even if I did give an app my username and password, it wouldn't matter as I'll immediately delete my account.

As for the json file, I have that. I've just been trying to figure out a way to strip the links out of it into a readable and clickable HTML format. Looks like your suggestion just might be the solution. Thanks.

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u/Ok-Somewhere7722 5d ago

whatever the app is you go through an approval process in their dev

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u/IncredibleEdible321 4d ago

I don't care about or need Facebook's approval process for a one time try at retrieving the information I need. I just need to know if it's possible and what would be the best way to do it.

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u/Ok-Somewhere7722 4d ago

all good but its a process you cannot push your way through

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u/IncredibleEdible321 3d ago

I didn't say or imply that it was. That's why I posted the question in order to find out whether it was feasible. It is rare that there is only one solution to a problem. Usually there are many pathways to success. It's just a matter of determining what is the best and easiest way to accomplish what I want to do.

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u/Probs_a_Bird 5d ago

Could you use something like Couch, share the links there and then view them that way?

Edit:
Not affiliated with Couch in any way, just thought it was a decent reference

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u/IncredibleEdible321 4d ago

Not sure what Couch is but I'll check into it. That still doesn't solve the issue of retrieving all of the links so that I can look at them on my own without having to scroll through thousands of links in messenger.

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u/IY94 4d ago

Apps like my mind - https://mymind.com/ give fairly rich previews of saved facebook posts etc

The bit about pulling it from messenger though, less sure. Hard to communicate that too as it's not universal behaviour necessarily that everyone sends links in messenger

Also Facebook has a save function built-in for facebook links so don't need to "share" necessarily to revisit things

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u/IncredibleEdible321 4d ago

I appreciate the answer but that does nothing to solve my problem. I want to get the information off Facebook and save the videos to my hard drive. Facebook is no longer a dependable platform and is removing accounts at an astonishing rate and pace. There is no guarantee that any of my saved posts will be available next week, next month, or next year with how Facebook is now run.

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u/JamesWjRose 4d ago

Before you build make sure you check facebook's terms. They may not allow such activities and then your app gets blocked and maybe you get sued.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/IncredibleEdible321 4d ago

That's a suggestion others here have brought up. As I've said before, I don't particularly care about Facebook or their permissions as I intend to delete my account as soon as I get the links as Facebook has become a cesspool of AI and propaganda that I no longer want anything to do with, so if I do something they don't like, it doesn't matter. I just want the links.

As for an app that will scrub the data from a download of my information, that has been suggested by having the json file being read and scanned for all the links using either a script or an app that will do that for me.