this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023

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get updates from facebook group without facebook ? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey, I hope this is the right community for this question :))

I volunteer at a local place, but they only communicate through a facebook group that I never check. My question is -

Is there a way to get a notification, whenever there's a new post in the group, hopefully through some FOSS :))

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I have looked several times and not been able to find anything. Facebook knows people want this and they know they don't want you to have this. They dedicate resources, legal and technological, to ensure that the only way to interact with Facebook is through their designated data-mining channels.

My advice would be to let the organization know that you don't have a Facebook account and if they want your help to volunteer that they need to use a platform that doesn't exploit it's users for profit. It's a totally unreasonable expectation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

this is what I feared 😅

thanks for the answer :))

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Make your objections known, offer to help the transition, but it's likely worth it to accept the tradoff and participate via Facebook when they don't make effort to change.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

You’d still need an account, but I think you can plug Zapier into a group to create RSS feed items from posts.

From there you can use your RSS reader of choice, FOSS or not

There’s also the graph API if you want to DIY, also needs a token with group permissions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

that sounds promising :))

I'll check that out :))

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

What type of organization is it? Could they be convinced to provide an alternative in the fediverse?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

maybe - it's my local circus and they're very nice - the thing is, a lot of the other volunteers are not tech savvy, and likely won't change to a new platform unless a lot of energy is put into making the transition easy - but it might be a project for the future :))

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Can you DM a bit more details? Depending on their size and budget, I can help. I can host their own Mastodon/Matrix server for less than $30/month and provide the tech support to the transition.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Maybe try a Matrix bridge?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Tried that for messaging once. It worked for like 2 days until facebook decided someone had "hacked" my account and I needed to reset my password. Didn't help that the matrix bridge was very flaky and nigh impossible to set back up again after it failed, without just deleting the entire matrix database and starting from scratch. Not recommended.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Which bridge did you use, if I may ask?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Mautrix facebook I think

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

what is that ? (:

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Put simply, a bot that interfaces with external services and replicates messages to/from a Matrix chat. The software is at matrix.org

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Not sure how helpful this is but in the past I used a Firefox addon called check 4 change

https://check4change.com/

You can let Firefox monitor a website in the background for change.

A con of this solution is that it only works when Firefox is running.

You could also try to maybe automate it with

https://ifttt.com/facebook

Or something like this https://visualping.io/blog/how-to-be-alerted-when-someone-posts-on-facebook/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I'll check that out :))

thanks for the answer :))