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Comment by pierrec | Hacker News Reader

I recently tried to use this kind of system to pipe news from facebook pages into an RSS feed. Impossible. Facebook hand-picks which developers get API access, and only allows ultra-restricted usage, so for example there's no way they would allow API access for a generic Beehive user, even just for reading public posts.

Want to scrape data from the HTML? They aggressively detect anything that may or may not be automated, and give you a CAPTCHA.

I see it as yet another abuse of their monopoly position. So many artists post public updates exclusively to this platform, and this is exploited to make sure everyone stays locked in and is forced to use facebook directly, ads included. Even the slightest competition would make it obvious how ridiculous this is, but the current monopoly is self-perpetuating.

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Since you would self-host your own Beehive instance, there's luckily a way around that: create your own Facebook app for development (you will never publish it) and use its tokens to connect your Beehive with it.

That being said, there's no Facebook Hive yet (any takers?), but that's exactly how it works with the Twitter Hive.

Facebook doesnt hand pick anyone to its api.

just create a facebook app (no approval needed), have users sign in to that app to get their access token. then use the api posts endpoint to get all posts from any page. its that simple

OK, facebook hand-picks the authorization for an app (and its associated API access) to become public. They also hand-pick private access to more advanced API features. It's still essentially impossible to create an easy-to use program that reads public facebook posts, since each individual user has to create a developer account. I guess my first post was poorly phrased, but the main point remains that their policy forces the general public to use their front-end, and none other, to view any posts on public pages.

1. your users do not need to have a developer account. they just sign in via your app and you get their access token as long as they are a fb user.

2. i have over 10 fb apps and fb did not have to authorize any of them to be made public so i am not sure how you got that info. you just click a button to make the app public. can you clarify?

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/review/w... lists only "public_profile, user_friends and email" as scopes available without a review, accessing posts seems to require a different one.

do you want users to pipe news from public fb pages like cnn and nytimes? or feeds from private individuals/friends?

that permission only applies to the latter.

This is mostly wrong.

It's true they probably won't allow a generic Beehive user. But they will allow individual users to setup their own app accounts which will get access to public posts.

This seems to meet the above usecase exactly.

could you maybe run an android fb app in a vm then sniff the traffic?

Give our service at https://feedity.com a try for Facebook pages (or any other public webpage) into feeds. It's stable and scalable.

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