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Ask HN: Tool for self-hosting your own Facebook profile after downloading it?

113 points by camillomiller ↗ HN
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?

45 comments

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happppy
I 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
One-off passwords?
anyzen
Or invitation links (with auth tokens).
happppy
A secret is only a secret when only one person knows.
jstanley
Make them authenticate with their Facebook account.
badsavage
Thanks for this idea! Will implement it next year into my website generator
amelius
Wouldn'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.

[dead] yotapan
What 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
@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
Mastodon 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
My company is working on something to power that and more, for everyone as open source

https://qbix.com

If you wind up trying it, please provide some feedback.

cddotdotslash
Honest feedback: get rid of the spinning globe GIF, it reminds me of Geocities in the 90s.
mxuribe
Yeah, at first i also thought the spinning globe icon was somewhat cheesy too...but now that you mentioned geocities, i really got a warm, fuzzy feeling; nostalgic for the fun days of yore. If that was the sentiment behind the globe, now i vote to keep it as-is.
SmellyGeekBoy
If by "get rid of the spinning globe GIF" you actually mean "add a flaming skull and crossbones GIF" I'm 100% on board with this suggestion.
EGreg
Have you tried clicking on this GIF?
anotheryou
the full-size globe itself looks cool indeed, it doesn't necessarily help the gif feel of the small one though :)
kristianc
It has something very 1995 e-learning walled garden about it. You could maybe use help from a designer and a marketer.

If your target is small businesses and third sector orgs, look at how the likes of NationBuilder do it.

Notice how they don’t talk about blockchain or decentralization or anything like that - people in that sector are non techie and their first priority is that it works.

anotheryou
When 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.

mxuribe
I think this would be great! If - as EGreg stated - qbix is really working on this, i applaud the effort! While it is NOT expected that ALL current twitter, facebook, etc, users will migrate towards the fediverse (and away from the silos), tools like what is noted here would surely help non-techie users. For anyone who helps non-techies (and techies alike) towards open platforms, i tip my hat in respect.
Jaruzel
The 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
When 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
You also need to remove the Facebook tracking pixels they have embedded in it.
_underflow_
For a moment I was briefly surprised, but then I remembered the company in question. No way that was accidental.
yqh
I've checked my own archive and they haven't embedded any tracking pixels. Don't spread nonsense.
[dead] gaius
Well 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
Have 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]
(comment deleted)
nindalf
> for some reason

Do share what exactly it was before accusing people of covering it up.

SmellyGeekBoy
Disregarding the strange rant for a moment, is it purely for tracking purposes or does it just use their CDN for CSS, images etc?

(Wouldn't be surprised at all if it was tracking, this is Facebook after all, but there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to use a a CDN)

Jaruzel
There's a bunch of absolute paths in the generated HTML that link to inline icons and other chaff. As I'm never actually logged into FB, they show up as broken images when you view your offline archive.
polskibus
That must be just a tiny bit of the entire data set they have about you. Tracking from all pages containing like button, all characters entered into chat, including those typed but deleted or not sent otherwise. I wonder how does it match against GDPR request.
unicornporn
Quite a bit. You'd have to do a subject access request to get closer to the truth.
anyzen
No, but I am curious too - that would be a nice idea to kick-start a distributed social network imho.
pbhjpbhj
Opera 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
Try mastodon, I think it has a fb import tool
camillomiller
I’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
rabidrat
Is there any way to get a list of my direct friends with all their contact information (email, phone, etc)?
robbyoconnor
This is a horrible idea
rabidrat
Why? 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
The 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
I 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.