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Comment by Hnrobert42 | Hacker News Reader

I dont know if that’s true. If I could consume Facebook via RSS, I might follow it a bot more. When I wanted to respond or like, I would have to switch to the app.

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You just answer your own question? With RSS you'd only use app when you feel like to involve, but social media platforms generally want you to stay in the app, hence no incentives.

FB couldn't collect data on your usage from an RSS feed, which is what they use to drive their advertising platform, which you are also not participating in. So having you read outside of FBs site or app is not in their best interests.

You would think that small and upcoming social media sites would support RSS, at least to attract users.

Apparently Mastodon generates an Atom RSS feed for every user, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755553

Twitter used to have RSS feeds for every user. I still follow a few accounts using code that converts them to RSS but I probably would not have bothered if I didn't already have a Twitter API key.

Bingo.

> If I could consume Facebook via RSS

You used to be able to do that. The problem (from fb's point of view) as the sibling comment points out is that you'd never visit facebook.com unless you wanted to actually wanted to interact with the content.

you still can follow public FB pages with RSS. It needs some HTML parsing but it's doable. To make it easier i've added the feature to aktu.io and i'm following a few FB pages of websites that don't have RSS...

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