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I can tell you that this article was written by someone who has never attempted to use Facebook’s developer tooling. Their dev portal is constantly broken in d

I can tell you that this article was written by someone who has never attempted to use Facebook’s developer tooling. Their dev portal is constantly broken in different ways, it blocks you from making changes at random because it needs to run some kind of heuristics to see if you’re doing something malicious (even with webauthn 2fa). We recently tried to get a Facebook app approved to use the pages_messaging permission. You need to have test users to pass verification. Unfortunately, you can no longer create test users on their platform since October of this year. If you try to use a real dummy user, it will get banned immediately when the application testers log in from another country. Aside from that, you end up with corporate assets being owned by people’s personal Facebook accounts, because there’s no reasonable way to use SSO or similar. It’s just downright terrible. I’ve used the offerings from all of the big tech companies, and Facebook/Metas is far and away the most hostile. You get what you pay for. I will eat my hat if Meta successfully builds a cloud services platform for other tech companies given the state of their developer tooling in all their other business lines.

deleted 3y ago
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ceejayoz 3y ago
All this matches my experience. I’ll add that they recently closed down their bug reporting tool for most APIs; instead they point you to their empty, dead StackOverflow clone. The bugs we do file sit in “assigned” for months, and the resolved in 30 days stat that used to be 95% is now down to the 50s. For several years posts to Facebook Groups via API would fail if they had a dollar sign in them. Something to do with their spam and Marketplace handling black boxes.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  That is a hilarious failure mode. I can imagine how it first happened, but to ignore it forever is bonkers. Yet another data point for me that these huge companies just make too much money. Too insulated from the impact of bad decisions/priorities.
anonymoushn 3y ago
Trying to pay them to display ads is a similar experience
altairprime 3y ago
Why would it be necessary to use Facebook dev tools for end users to interop with, and as described by the article, eventually migrate their personal Mastodon user endpoint to threads.net via ActivityPub and the data portability stuff? I assume that most Mastodon instances are run by someone who wouldn’t count as a simple end user — but for the article’s purposes, the server operators are statistically irrelevant, compared to the majority of merely-users.

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ceejayoz 3y ago

All this matches my experience. I’ll add that they recently closed down their bug reporting tool for most APIs; instead they point you to their empty, dead StackOverflow clone. The bugs we do file sit in “assigned” for months, and the resolved in 30 days stat that used to be 95% is now down to the 50s. For several years posts to Facebook Groups via API would fail if they had a dollar sign in them. Something to do with their spam and Marketplace handling black boxes.

fbdab103 3y ago
That is a hilarious failure mode. I can imagine how it first happened, but to ignore it forever is bonkers. Yet another data point for me that these huge companies just make too much money. Too insulated from the impact of bad decisions/priorities.

anonymoushn 3y ago

Trying to pay them to display ads is a similar experience

altairprime 3y ago

Why would it be necessary to use Facebook dev tools for end users to interop with, and as described by the article, eventually migrate their personal Mastodon user endpoint to threads.net via ActivityPub and the data portability stuff? I assume that most Mastodon instances are run by someone who wouldn’t count as a simple end user — but for the article’s purposes, the server operators are statistically irrelevant, compared to the majority of merely-users.