I have met many people who told me that they no longer use their Facebook but they miss some of the Pages that they used to follow (news, memes…). You probably found yourself in the same situation. In this post I will discuss about a specific problem that can be applied to a general case.
So I follow some meme Pages and Groups on Facebook (even if most of them recycled from Reddit). In stead of opening Facebook and being distracted with unnecessary posts and ads, one evening I decided to create a small Android app that aggregates the memes from the Pages and Groups and shows me as a feed.
Posts are not always memes (images). It could also be a text, a video or a link. I keep images and discard the rest. In a nutshell, the process looks like this: fetch a Page’s (or a Group’s) X number of posts, filter images only and display in a simple card. A card contains an ImageView and a couple of buttons as shown below (more about the buttons later). Below is an example. We have radio buttons to choose to fetch from a predefined Page or Group and the number of posts defaulting at 150 (some pages have a lot of text, link or video posts and we might be required to fetch 100+ posts to get images).
If you have a Page/Group (or even your own profile), you can then post these pictures directly to your community by clicking the different buttons. POST NOW just posts the image with the smiley as a message, POST W/O posts the image without any message and POST WITH posts the message that I manually type.
It’s been a couple months I have been using this and I found it very handy. Though I am using it for memes/images, it can easily be extended to, for example, fetch news content from different news Pages/Groups, videos from your favorite creators without watching ads and many more. Though I will not disclose how I am fetching the contents from Facebook, in general, it can be be achieved by scraped or using Graph API. Below is a demo video (the example Page is 9Gag).
