I hate facebook and haven’t used it in years, but I live in a small town where many local events are only discussed on facebook or instagram. I’m wondering if there’s a way to create a niche lemmy community with a bot that regurgitates that content so I’m not out of the loop?
Any repo links or online guides for setting this up? Or maybe Meta’s walled garden is impenetrable to scraping?
imginn and instaloader for instagram is the only option(?)s i’m aware of sadly… facebook/meta’s anti-bot measures are very intense.
Or maybe Meta’s walled garden is impenetrable to scraping?
afaik, that’s the case for Instagram. After scouring the internet for frontends, there are 3 archetypes:
- black boxes like imginn, gets you images and nothing else. no source code to audit, self-host, or build an API
- self-hostable frontends that get rate limited almost instantly, even for a single user
- proper alternative clients that got cease-and-desisted into the ground
They did a great job making a panopticon, closed to the outside, yet devoid of privacy
Same problem as you. From what I found, you need an admin account on the Facebook city account. Then, you can build a bot to cross post to mastodon, RSS, whatever.
But seems like you cannot do it with your own Facebook account.
But seems like you cannot do it with your own Facebook account.
what causes the limitation? the posts are readable to all registered users
I dont know. I also though that, as post are public, it should be easy to scrap them but doesn’t seems so. Probably Meta bloc scrapper so that their precious data won’t be stolen by AI bots…
I’ve found a couple of lib to do Facebook bot, but they all require access to admin account.
The good news is that our new public council would like to get rid of MAGAFA. I’m in contact with them, so I hope I’ll be able to setup an official solution instead of setting unofficial scrapper 😃
Lame