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Ask HN: Tool for self-hosting your own Facebook profile after downloading it?
I was playing with the idea of a Facebook profile cemetery. It would be a tool to structure your profile data after you download it from Facebook, in order to self-host it on a space you own. The idea would be to keep alive your profile history, but on your own website, for friends and family to still browse it, or just as a way to claim and still show data that's fundamentally yours to show around.
Before I try to figure out a way to do that and start building something, do you know any tool useful for this purpose?
- happppy 8y agoI think it would become public and anyone would be able to see who you are, what you do. How are you gonna check if someone visiting is your family member?
- BerislavLopac 8y agoOne-off passwords?
- jstanley 8y agoMake them authenticate with their Facebook account.
- badsavage 8y agoThanks for this idea! Will implement it next year into my website generator
- camillomiller 8y agoGlad you liked it. Keep me posted.
- amelius 8y agoWouldn't it be better to import the data into an open social network like Mastodon? What would be great is a tool that continuously does this (i.e. a one-way sync). This could help people convert away from FB.
- yotapan 8y agoWhat I find confusing about Mastodon is that there seem to be so many mastodons, is there a main mastodon that links to the others?
- anotheryou 8y ago@yotapan they all sync, so it doesn't matter which one you are on (if I'm not mistaken that's the beauty of it)
- digitalzombie 8y agoMastodon is just twitter. I'm on it... unless I'm missing something. It doesn't completely replace it at all and missing a lot of functionalities that FB have. The ones being, chat room, event invitation/planing, birthday reminder, photo albums, group, etc...
- EGreg 8y agoMy company is working on something to power that and more, for everyone as open source https://qbix.com https://qbix.com If you wind up trying it, please provide some feedback.
- anotheryou 8y agoWhen you say "company" is it a start-up thing or a side project or how is it making money? If there is any money, hire an uxler or a designer or use an ok looking theme to build upon. I'm sorry to chime in with the other critiques here and on something so superficial, but I think making it to some baseline would greatly improve how the project is seen. Can you also give an elevator pitch? People can't be bothered with watching a long video I fear. What I quickly grasp from your website: 1 to 3 devs, technical non-pragmatic solution, something like facebook maybe, but decentralized. How is it better than diaspora, mastadon, facebook etc.? I wrote a concept for a twitter-like link aggregator with ratings, without democracy or machine learning and would actually be happy to chat about whether it might fit qbix.
- Jaruzel 8y agoThe zipfile you download from Facebook is already in the correct format. All you need to do it spin up a web server (apache nginx etc.) and unzip the files into the webroot. For security, just add the usual webserver/*nix security. EDIT: Just unzipped an old download from my (pre-purged) profile into an empty web folder, and it all works, mostly. FB specific icons are missing, and your private messages are all in a subfolder called 'messages' which has no security, and all the threads are folded into a long chronological list. So I guess the format would need tweaking a bit.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoWhen you ask Facebook for your archive it's already pure HTML. All you need to do is to censor it somewhat (if appropriate, e.g. remove private messages) and host it somewhere with access control.
- gaius 8y agoYou also need to remove the Facebook tracking pixels they have embedded in it.
- _underflow_ 8y agoFor a moment I was briefly surprised, but then I remembered the company in question. No way that was accidental.
- yqh 8y agoI've checked my own archive and they haven't embedded any tracking pixels. Don't spread nonsense.
- gaius 8y agoWell I checked mine and it hits fbcdn.net so I guess it’s you trying to cover it up for some reason. Brand new account too, not suspicious at all.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoHave you not heard of AB testing? It's certainly possible that one of the biggest arms of surveillance culture can AB test people on what they do with their exported FB profile.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nindalf 8y ago> for some reason Do share what exactly it was before accusing people of covering it up.
- anyzen 8y agoNo, but I am curious too - that would be a nice idea to kick-start a distributed social network imho.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoOpera had something called Unite just before it went under; it was a web-server that ran on the browser and allowed you to connect to friends p2p for sharing, etc., it wasn't quite there but it had the concept of the 'net as _the_ social network without intermediates. I was really excited by the concept and thought we were on track to have "the next Facebook". Primarily it needed caching to handle self-hosted content not being always on. Still hopeful we can move on that direction so we can self-host and publish to different platforms, etc..
- mariapilar444 8y agoTry mastodon, I think it has a fb import tool
- camillomiller 8y agoI’m not looking to create something to update in the future, more like a public repository of my own content under my own direct control
- FabianBeiner 8y agoI once created https://github.com/FabianBeiner/Bela-Facebook-Archive-Theme https://github.com/FabianBeiner/Bela-Facebook-Archive-Theme, but I don't know if this one still works with the current version of the exports. But basically, you can just beautify the pretty decent export of Facebook with some CSS and remove the parts you don't want.
- verdverm 8y agoDoes Mastodon use ActivityPub?
- neckardt 8y agoYes. First line in the README on Github: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
- rabidrat 8y agoIs there any way to get a list of my direct friends with all their contact information (email, phone, etc)?
- robbyoconnor 8y agoThis is a horrible idea
- rabidrat 8y agoWhy? I have access to it anyway by clicking on their name and can cut-and-paste by hand. And they are people who have agreed to share this kind of information with me specifically.
- walterbell 8y agoThe http://indieweb.org http://indieweb.org community has prior work in this area. > Your content is yours: When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control
- ibash 8y agoI deleted my Facebook. Two things I would’ve liked: - a tool to add exif location data back to my images. In the export the image metadata (like location) is in a separate file. I ended up writing a quick script to do this. - a tool to message people in messenger my phone number and email. I ended up doing this manually, but it’d be nice to have an automated solution.