Meta sucks

In this post, I will share my experience with developing tools for Messenger as an external developer. Mostly I will trash talk Facebook.

For 2 months I have been developing a Firefox extension for transcribing voice messages (STT). In the very beginning, I thought the worst part will be a properly working machine learning model for the Polish language. I’m from Poland, so transcription was really important for me. After some research, I found German, English, Spanish, French, Italian and Polish models. They were not working great, but quite nice for the start.

The second part was to create the extension. That was the most frustrating programming experience in my life. Messenger just hates external developers. At first, there isn’t any official API for receiving and sending messages. Everything I do must be done via modifying DOM elements. Facebook is built with React, so working on class names to operate on divs won’t work. That’s okay, you have querySelector, so that wasn’t such a big problem. Working and changing DOM elements is a pain in the butt. There is some strange clunky effect. After some struggle, I was able to extract an audio link to my extension, do some magic on it and return the transcription. Now I have to create an artificial message. The first idea was just to copy the nearest text message and use it as a template. But what if there isn’t any? I know it’s rare, but I wanna point out that you can’t do it. Without a mock text message, you aren’t able to create a new one. I solved it in this way: if there is a mock text message use it, otherwise create a raw one (colors, border and some other visual stuff won’t be implemented). This raw message doesn’t suit the chat theme, but works.

I have left developing this extension for 5 months. After that time I returned because new models for transcription showed up. The old ones were temporary. I couldn’t train models on my own, because it’s impossible to do it on a personal computer. I don’t want to leave my only PC for like 6 months straight all day long. Great! Now I can use new models and release extensions, right? No. Facebook deleted the <audio> tag from voice messages. Recordings are now hidden from the developer. I’m sure there is a way to get audio from the message, but Facebook doesn’t want me to do it. They permanently make my life harder. I won’t be fighting again. I quit developing this addon.

Why they can’t make working on DOM easier or leave it as it is? Why do they remove API for receiving and sending messages? It’s probably because of bots. Okay, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. I was able to create a bot for sending messages on Messenger within 1 day. It’s still possible, but just a bit harder. You can’t simply edit <div> for a new message, but there are other ways. I don’t want to write it here.

To sum up, they block all things. Working on messages is much harder because they fight with bots and simultaneously making a bot that spams to everyone takes 1 day. Really? I can’t create an addon, which can help blind people with using Messenger because it could be potentially dangerous. At the same time creating something nasty takes just a few hours more.