Facebook and RSS

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 13:50:26 +0100

dynamic@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Thought of the morning: When trying to predict the future of #ActivityPub federation by #Facebook / Meta / #ThreadsDotNet, and the effect it will have on the independent Fediverse, what can we learn by looking at the history of RSS functionality on Facebook?

In particular, might this be a better example than focusing on the fact that Facebook killed interoperability XMPP/Jabber interoperability for their chat system?

I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this.

(boosts welcome)

facebook rss social media federation threads.net

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Thu, 19 Dec 2024 13:57:48 +0100

dynamic_hubzilla

dynamic@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

I feel like Facebook may have had better RSS capabilities in the past than it does now, but I don't know specifics. It's not a feature that I ever used.

A quick internet search turns up a number of online services offering to generate RSS feeds from Facebook pages, but this doesn't seem to include user profiles, e.g.:
http://fetchrss.com/source/facebook

"Please note: we can't generate RSS from user profiles. These are Facebook privacy policy limitations, and we respect these restrictions."

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 13:58:56 +0100

dynamic_hubzilla

dynamic@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

There's also at least one RSS export service had their API access revoked in 2019 ( https://www.facebook.com/rss.feed.export/), although I don't know the details behind that.

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 14:11:10 +0100

dynamic_hubzilla

dynamic@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

I have a vague recollection that when Facebook first adopted a privacy policy asserting that they have intellectual ownership of everything posted on their site, that some creators adopted a policy of posting content to their personal blogs first, and then linking to it via Facebook. I don't know whether anyone tried anything similar with RSS feeds, nor if it was technically possible at the time.

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 14:12:08 +0100

dynamic_hubzilla

dynamic@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Sidebar: kind of interesting to look back on how, at the time, a lot of people asked what on earth Facebook thought they were playing at with trying to claim copyright ownership of posts to their site. The answer to that question feels rather less mysterious, now that we live in a world of increasingly ubiquitous LLMs.

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 14:14:47 +0100

dynamic_hubzilla

dynamic@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@dynamic_hubzilla

Anyway, I'd love to hear from people with more knowledge of the ins and outs of the history of how Facebook has supported incoming and outgoing RSS feeds, and also any thoughts on how this translates (or not) to what we can expect for the future of Threads.net's ActivityPub federation.