I want comments on my social media crossposts to show up on my blog as
a comment section, and mostly this works well: modern systems (Mastodon,
Bluesky,
LessWrong,
etc) provide APIs where you can load the replies associated with a
post. On the other hand, older systems like Facebook are more locked
down: they want to keep your content inside the platform as part of
their
economic
moat.
Still, Facebook will show all the comments on a post to anyone who
visits it, even if logged out. You have to dismiss a popup and click
“show more” and “see replies” a few times, but it’s all public. At
times I’ve writtenscripts to
export the comments, but they’re quite brittle: Facebook doesn’t
design their pages to be easy to scrape, and so my code has relied on
incidental things that only happen to work.
Even though this is not a permanent solution, I’ve had another go at
writing a comment exporter (code).
It’s not as thorough as past times: I couldn’t figure out easy was to
get the timestamp or links to the comment on Facebook, and I’ve left
both out. I also had to switch my opt-out from working on user id to
user name, which is less robust. But it works! I’ve gone back
through June 2019, fetching comments for any posts where I was missing
them.
Exporting Facebook Comments, Again
Link post
I want comments on my social media crossposts to show up on my blog as a comment section, and mostly this works well: modern systems ( Mastodon, Bluesky, LessWrong, etc) provide APIs where you can load the replies associated with a post. On the other hand, older systems like Facebook are more locked down: they want to keep your content inside the platform as part of their economic moat.
Still, Facebook will show all the comments on a post to anyone who visits it, even if logged out. You have to dismiss a popup and click “show more” and “see replies” a few times, but it’s all public. At times I’ve written scripts to export the comments, but they’re quite brittle: Facebook doesn’t design their pages to be easy to scrape, and so my code has relied on incidental things that only happen to work.
Even though this is not a permanent solution, I’ve had another go at writing a comment exporter (code). It’s not as thorough as past times: I couldn’t figure out easy was to get the timestamp or links to the comment on Facebook, and I’ve left both out. I also had to switch my opt-out from working on user id to user name, which is less robust. But it works! I’ve gone back through June 2019, fetching comments for any posts where I was missing them.