My last post to Facebook was almost a year ago on July 31, 2018, a day before Facebook turned off their API and prevented my website from interacting with their service. Other moral and ethical concerns with Facebook aside, I’ve got what I hope to be a useful method for people’s interactions with my Facebook account to come back to my site. This will let me better own and control my data while still interacting with people “stuck” on this problematic service.

This return post will serve as a test to see if I might return to and occasionally post there again.

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

16 thoughts on “”

  1. Chris’ reference to a means of linking his site to Facebook touches on something I thinking about this morning.

    Even though you can export your Facebook data into what seems like a nicely presented, local site of sorts, I’d like to be able to basically parse my Facebook timeline, and somehow migrate it to a WordPress blog.

    This may be possible using an extension of the Keyring plugin for WordPress. I’d like to test this out, even though I’ve never really been able to get the Keyring plugin to work on my site.

    I’d need to first configure a private WordPress site first though in case it works, and the site populates with private updates.

    1. Paul, I think Jonathan LaCour documented some of how he exported his Facebook and Instagram data and imported it to his own website. While he is using Known (also a PHP based CMS), a lot of the code and method could probably be reused for WordPress.

      I haven’t been watching Keyring for a while, but keep in mind that Facebook has apparently dramatically increased the amount of data they allow for export post-GDPR in the last year. You might also appreciate the Data Transfer Project which has been doing some interesting work since last July.

      1. Thank you for the suggestions. I’ll look into these options too. For now, I’ve started manually posting Facebook updates to our private family blog. It’s not really a sustainable approach given how much I’ve probably shared on Facebook, but being deliberate about it is probably a good way to focus on quality.

    1. @timnolte I’m presently crossposting manually from my website to my Facebook presence. The portion I’m working at automating is based on @snarfed@mastodon.technology ‘s work mentioned here: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy/issues/854

      Apologies for the late reply as I’ve been working on federating my WordPress site with Mastodon. Your reply came back to my site, but was marked as spam for some reason. Hopefully soon I’ll have two way threaded conversations under wraps too!

      Syndicated copies:

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