Pages and profiles

fb page and fb profile are the same command under two names. Facebook stopped drawing a hard line between a Page and a person's profile years ago, and so does fb: both come back as a Profile record with a kind field saying which it is.

The record

fb page nasa
fb profile zuck
fb page 100044561550831        # a numeric id works too

╭─────────────────┬────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────┬────────────┬─────────────────────────╮
│ ID              │ HANDLE │ NAME                                                 │ LIKES      │ FOLLOWERS  │ CATEGORY                │
├─────────────────┼────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│ 100044561550831 │ NASA   │ NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration │ 28,660,579 │ 28,000,000 │ Government organisation │
╰─────────────────┴────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴────────────┴────────────┴─────────────────────────╯

The table is a summary. -o json is the record, and for NASA it holds:

tier, surfaces, sources, via, fetched_at   the envelope
id, handle, name, url, kind                who it is
delegate_page_id                           the old-style page id behind a new-style profile
verified                                   the blue tick
bio                                        the short text under the name
category, category_raw                     "Government organisation", and the raw "Page · Government organisation"
likes, talking_about, followers            the three counts
websites, email, contact_other             the contact block
avatar, cover                              with dimensions and the focus point
tabs                                       the tabs this profile has, with their URLs
posts, posts_cursor, posts_truncated       the newest post, and whether there is more

fb fields profile will print the whole list with how often each one was filled across the captured pages.

The handle is not the identity

A handle is an alias. It names a profile until whoever owns it changes it, and then it names something else or nothing.

fb id nasa

{"input":"nasa","kind":"handle","handle":"nasa","url":"https://www.facebook.com/nasa","command":"page",
 "note":"a handle is an alias and not an identity: it names a profile until the profile changes it"}

The numeric id is the identity. Anything you are keeping, key on that. fb id nasa --resolve spends one request to turn the handle into the id.

There is a second id worth knowing about. A modern profile often carries a delegate_page_id, which is the old-style Page id for the same thing, and Facebook uses both in different places. fb records both rather than picking one, because a claim made about 54971236771 and a claim made about 100044561550831 are claims about the same organisation.

Two counts that are not the same count

likes and followers are different numbers and they come from different surfaces. The via field says which:

"via": {"followers": "s1", "likes": "s3", "talking_about": "s3"}

Followers came from the Relay store, likes and the talking-about number came from the OpenGraph meta head. When the two disagree, they disagree because Facebook rounds them differently in the two places, not because fb got one wrong.

The About tab

fb page nasa --about

That fetches a second page, which is where the long-form profile lives: the full category list, the address, the phone number, the email, every website, the founded date, and the free-text sections.

fb page nasa --about --no-posts

--no-posts skips the timeline parse when you only want the profile, which is one less thing to go wrong and slightly faster.

--tab <name> reads one named tab from the tabs list instead of the main page.

The timeline

fb feed nasa
fb feed nasa -n 50

Signed out, this is what happens:

note: Tier 0 serves one post per profile; the timeline query is refused signed out.
      Run fb auth import to read further, or use fb group feed which is not walled.

One post, a note on stderr saying why, and exit 0. One post is a real answer, not an error, and the record's missed field carries the same sentence so a program reading the JSON sees it too.

With a session imported, fb feed pages properly and -n means what it says. See sessions and tiers.

The newest post also comes back attached to fb page, so if one post is all you need there is no reason to run fb feed at all.

Reading several

Every read command takes one reference, and the shell is the loop:

for h in nasa spacex esa; do fb page "$h" -o jsonl; done > pages.jsonl

-o jsonl is one record per line, which is the format to reach for when you are appending.