Marc Manley

Delegating the Feed, Part 1: The Paperwork Before the Post

Delegating the Feed, Part 1: The Paperwork Before the Post

Working title — swap freely. Other candidates: “Teaching Hermes to Post,” “Beyond the Newsletter,” “Automating Middle Ground’s Voice.”

A few weeks after getting Hermes to draft Middle Ground’s newsletter unattended — scrape the site, pull the extras, build the Mailchimp draft, ping me on Telegram for a final human look before anything goes out — the obvious next question showed up: could the same pattern work for social media? X, Instagram, Facebook, Substack — could Hermes draft those the way it now drafts the newsletter?

The honest answer, once I actually sat down to look at it, was: maybe, but not the same way, and not all at once.

Four Platforms, Four Different Problems

Mailchimp was forgiving. One clean API, no adversarial posture toward automation, nothing standing between “I want to post” and “here’s a token.” Social platforms aren’t like that. X’s API is paywalled now. Substack doesn’t have a real posting API at all. Instagram and Facebook route everything through Meta’s Graph API, which means Business accounts, linked Pages, developer apps, and — critically — App Review, Meta’s gate for any app that wants to actually publish content on someone’s behalf.

So instead of building four integrations, I picked one to prove out first: Instagram, since Middle Ground’s account (mgmccali) seemed like the most likely candidate to already be close to ready.

Confirming the Plumbing Actually Existed

Before touching a developer console, I wanted to know whether the prerequisites were even in place. Turned out to be a genuinely useful exercise in verifying assumptions rather than trusting that “it’s probably linked”:

  • mgmccali is a confirmed Business-type Instagram account
  • It’s connected to an active Facebook Page — Middle Ground Muslim Center — which is itself set to Business type
  • I’m the admin on that Page through my personal Facebook login

Every one of those had to be checked screen by screen, because “linked” in one Meta menu doesn’t automatically mean “linked” in the one that actually matters for the API. Worth doing before writing a line of code — if any of those had been missing, the entire plan would’ve stalled somewhere much more expensive to discover later.

A Dead App and a Wrong Turn

There was already a Meta developer app sitting in my account — something called “MMDC,” presumably from an old experiment. It looked promising for about thirty seconds, until it turned out to be deactivated (90 days without an API call will do that to you) and, more fundamentally, the wrong type — Consumer, not Business. Not worth resurrecting. Better to start clean.

So: new app, MG Social Media Poster, built through Meta’s newer use-case-driven creation flow. Picked “Manage messaging & content on Instagram” as the use case — the one explicitly built for publishing posts via the Instagram API — and left the ads/messaging/Threads options alone. Fewer requested permissions now means a simpler App Review later.

The Part Nobody Warns You About: Business Verification

This is where the session took its real turn. Getting real publishing permissions through App Review requires Business Verification — Meta confirming, with actual documents, that the organization behind the app legally exists and matches the name you’ve entered.

That sent me digging through Middle Ground’s paperwork looking for something that would clear the bar. A W-2 seemed like a reasonable candidate at first — it’s got the EIN on it, after all — but it turns out Meta’s document checklist is narrower than that: Articles of Incorporation, a business license, a government tax document, a bank statement, or a utility bill. A W-2 documents my wages, not the organization’s legal existence, so it’s a weak submission at best.

What surfaced instead, somewhat unglamorously, were two collections notices — one from the IRS, one from California’s Franchise Tax Board — which confirmed the legal name, EIN, and a California entity number, but are balance-due notices, not registration documents. Useful as reference data. Not useful as proof.

The actual fix is straightforward, just not something I can do solo: ask Omar (who handles Middle Ground’s filings) or the CPA for the original EIN confirmation letter, or pull the entity’s registration directly from the California Secretary of State using the entity number now in hand.

Where Step 1 Ends

By the close of this session:

  • The Meta app exists and is correctly scoped to the Instagram use case
  • The account/Page linkage is fully confirmed
  • The one real blocker — Business Verification — is identified, understood, and has a clear next action sitting with someone else (Omar / the CPA)
  • The next actionable step on my end doesn’t require the documents at all: connecting mgmccali inside the app’s use-case configuration screen, which can happen in parallel while the paperwork search continues

Nothing here posted a single pixel to Instagram. But that’s sort of the point of Part 1 — the unglamorous, unavoidable work of proving the foundation is real before building anything on top of it. Hermes learned to draft a newsletter by having its container, its venv, and its credentials sorted out first. Teaching it to touch Instagram is turning out to start the same way: not with code, but with an EIN letter somebody has to go find.

Part 2: connecting the account, requesting the permission, and — assuming the paperwork comes through — actually submitting for App Review.