Okay, all you techie people of Mastodon whose posts I rarely understand, help an English major out:
I know that I can download all my #Facebook data.
But is there any way to set up an imitation of "Memories" privately with all that data, so that I can see what I've posted on a given day over the past [redacted] years?
If anyone wants to make a Fedithing that will do this, I'd happily subscribe. #Meta
@Julie I haven't looked into the data format of the Facebook dump, but in principle it should absolutely be doable. Depending on the size of the archive it might even be possible to implement on your phone and give you a selection of 'memory' posts to send to your fediverse service of choice..
I don't think there's a ready-made Thing (or combination of Things) that can do it, though, and for phone apps, it'd likely need active maintenance.
ETA: Facebook might offer enough export options already!
old:
Does anyone have a Facebook export/dump that they're willing to publish?
If there isn't yet a program that makes Facebook dumps republishable, maybe there isn't a dump people can use to reverse-engineer, test, etc. So! Does anyone have a Facebook dump that they're willing to publish? I don't think I put in anything embarassing, for instance, but I'm not willing to expose that part of my social graph.
I doubt I can get the process the whole way, but I'll help as far as I can. Lots of people need something like this, or want to help the people who need it -- maybe it can be stone-soup.
Also, just letting the question sit for 24h might find an existing answer, it takes a while for things to hop-propagate through federated sites and a third of the world is always asleep...
@clew
Good thinking! I'm in no super hurry other than that I wanted to close my account for a long time. Also not happy about AI bots stealing my photography and my art. Just give me a s/o if you need an archive to try and build such a tool. I think it would be important to many. (Also seeing the same need for specifically Instagram.)
Supposedly you wouldn't need to publish my library by rather use it to try to build such a tool, no?
@pettter @Julie
while doing the kind of exploratory amateur farting around that I can offer it would be Way Too Easy to accidentally publish whatever. Plus also, the programmer probably sees everything. It's just polite/safe/sensible to have public-safe data to start with.
@AasaMariaHedberg
Did the first step of being helpful and went looking for Other People's Answers -- and found something that might be the easiest way:
Facebook *at least for a while* would let you export by *transferring data to other services*. Set up a Blogger site and transfer there, or keep your data in a spreadsheet.
Check your Facebook options. "Static site" or "HTML" would be the most re-usable option.
Following up because this seems valuable and also full of stumbling blocks — if anyone wants a modestly techy person to kibitz-along, for whatever stage just isn’t clicking, I’m happy to and in winter I have time.
@Julie I don't have a facebook account so if you share how it looks with me (just replace your personal info with dummy text and skip over repeating parts with a placeholder or something) and I'm happy to write something that you can use on your computer against your data
@Julie maybe I'm remembering wrong but I recall Facebook dumps coming with an .html file that would turn all the raw files into something viewable, it was pretty simple but not the most customizable
@joel That’s what I’m wondering—how to make that easy and enjoyable to access and use.
@Julie I'm a sucker for adding new projects to my todo list, and I might just have to poke around with this idea too!
I've just requested my data to see what exactly is in there. At the end of the wizard, it asks you to select a format and defaults to HTML. Set this to JSON and it'll produce files any developer can work from. Also make sure the date range is set to all time.
I'll be digging through whatever it generates for me in the coming weeks. If I dev something, it'll be FOSS.
@dev_ric Sounds good!
@Julie also: if you have a copy exported as HTML, see if one of the file formats offered to open it is... a web browser. You can have a website on your own personal computer and just browse about it privately.
@Julie it’s been years since Ive left fb and seen my data file but I feel it has html inside it that would display the images if you opened the files in a browser.