rss-bridge: Problems with Facebook on public RSS-Bridge instances

The issue is not with the cookies per se but with FB blocking crawling. I just ran a local instance on my machine - I was able to open the /posts endpoint in any browser, then launched RRS-Bridge, put it to crawl the page every couple of seconds and to no surprise, i got the error after a couple of minutes and then I was blocking me constantly and nagging to log-in.

Logging-in (and using session cookie) won’t work in the long term because because FB will just block your account like it did in @em92 case.

The only possibility I see is try to extract posts from main page (i.e. https://www.facebook.com/XXXXXXXXXXXXX/?_fb_noscript=1 instead of https://www.facebook.com/XXXXXXXXXXXXX/posts?_fb_noscript=1) but that has the following issues:

• main page is a mess of everything and only display 2 posts on initial load
• you have to scroll down to load regular posts feed, but I’m not sure how to handle that here.

I’d say that the situation is quite dire. For me, I just looked for the interesting pages on different sites (twitter usually, as quite often they use same tool to push to various “social media”) and if some weren’t present elsewhere I nagged the admins to be present.

I keep my fingers crossed that maybe the EU will somehow force those platforms via legislation to be interoperable instead of darn walled-gardens 😐

Facebook is one of the hardest to maintain and it also has a few key limiters, even if it’s maintained. Public instances almost always run into some form of facebook detection, so it’s barely possible to keep it working for the people who run it at home.

Also, because facebook is constantly evolving and doing rolling releases, one feed might work while the other is broken, because fb changed the site underneath.

I’ve minimised the second URL to just three parameters, and it still loads the payload:

https://www.facebook.com/platform/plugin/tab/renderer/?key=timeline&config_json={"app_id"%3A"776730922422337"%2C"href"%3A"https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fbbcnews%2F"%2C"width"%3A340%2C"height"%3A500%2C"has_cta"%3Atrue%2C"has_small_header"%3Afalse%2C"has_adapt_container_width"%3Atrue%2C"has_cover"%3Atrue%2C"has_posts"%3Afalse%2C"tabs"%3A"timeline"%2C"can_personalize"%3Afalse%2C"is_xfbml"%3Afalse%2C"referer_uri"%3A""}&__a=1

Simply changing the “bbcnews” in that URL will fetch any page, we just need to parse the data. I think we are back in business!

Here is final of my story, where I tried to make FacebookBridge work in my public instance (https://feed.eugenemolotov.ru) using my account with real phone number and patch from https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/issues/2047#issuecomment-817099508.

I didn’t read their paper with title “Community standards”, but it looks like it sharing posts via RSS does not follow it.

@tstanbur

hopefully @em92 can (I think he’s the author?)

I am not author of this bridge. I maintain RSS-Bridge in general (reviewing pull requests, pinging bridge maintainers in issues) and bridges for Pikabu and Vk.

Usually maintainer of the bridge does fix bugs, but we don’t have maintainer for Facebook bridge. I have little time to fix bugs in bridges, that I don’t maintain.

Here just one more ‘‘me too’’. I specifically signed up here on Github to ask a few things about the Facebook bridge. Until last week, I had been using a public host from Eugene Molotov to my full satisfaction for about a year (thanks a lot). I don’t have any technical background, so it is sometimes difficult for me to be able to keep up with all the terms that come up with this topic here.

I wonder if the above and below option mentioned by em92 still works and how I could get it running on my own PC:

Deploy RSS-Bridge on your personal PC or laptop and use FacebookBridge from there.

I would be very happy if I could still use the Facebook Bridge in this way, but I am not sure if this still works and how to install it on my own PC. I have looked through github quite a bit, but unfortunately I can’t figure it out myself, which is why I decided to sign up.

If users could confirm or deny that this feature still works, I would be happy with that. Then my next question would be how I can best put the bridge on my own PC or who I can ask for help or get information how to do so. I also think it would be a very good idea to start a donation fund to get a developer to maintain the facebook bridge and make also the instagram bridge work again. That way, we can all contribute to get our beloved feeds going again. Greetings from the Netherlands and thanks for your great work over the years!

Same here. Since April I got different errors in the same Feeds, like:

“Facebook Bridge | Main Site was unable to receive or process the remote website’s content! Error message: `You must be logged in to view this page. This is not supported by RSS-Bridge.”

“Facebook Bridge | Main Site was unable to receive or process the remote website’s content! Error message: `The requested resource cannot be found!”

“Facebook Bridge | Main Site was unable to receive or process the remote website’s content! Error message: Call to a member function children() on null Query string: action=display&bridge=Facebook&u=hyperlitemountaingear&media_type=all&limit=1000&format=Atom Version: dev.2020-11-10” Latest version of RSS-Bridge…

I’m running my single-user RSS Bridge instance on Digital Ocean, and feeds which were giving me error 500 since April 1st just started working again. Let’s see for how long…

Edit: stopped working two hours later.

Data is fetched via a POST request to https://www.facebook.com/api/graphql/

Finding the correct request payload could be a challenge.

Feedbro is a RSS chrome extension that can scrape FB “even personal profiles” but not generate RSS feeds so it’s a matter of checking manually. It’s the best there is that I have found…

It’s pretty useful but it’s not really portable. I prefer to have a centralised solution where I can rely on from my laptop or android.

Feedbro is a RSS chrome extension that can scrape FB “even personal profiles” but not generate RSS feeds so it’s a matter of checking manually. It’s the best there is that I have found…

As suggested, I’ve increased the default cache timeout on PR #2149 which has helped on my instance

I don’t think the Api would help. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/features-reference/page-public-content-access

“This permission or feature is only available with business verification. You may also need to sign additional contracts before your app can access data. Learn More.”

So every Bridge has to get verification, as i don’t think that you can deploy the tokens of your account 😉