I announced recently that Bridgy Publish for Facebook would shut down soon. Facebook’s moves to restrict its API to improve privacy and security are laudable, and arguably the right idea, but also mean that users can no longer use third party apps like Bridgy to create posts.
I didn’t realize it at first, but similar API restrictions hit the backfeed (aka listen) feature, which sends comments and likes back to your web site. Bridgy can still see comments and likes by Bridgy users, but that’s a tiny fraction of the Facebook comments and likes that it used to see.
I spent a while looking for a workaround, and even looked into scraping HTML, but you have to be logged into Facebook to see even public posts, on both www and m, so no luck there. [Insert silo snark here.]
So with a heavy heart, I’m shutting down Facebook on Bridgy entirely. Publish will still work until August 1, but listen largely stopped working on May 24, so I turned it off altogether and disabled new user signup a few days ago.
Thanks for all your work on Bridgy for publish, backfeed, and a myriad other great and troublesome features for hoisting content out of the Facebook silo and into our personal sites.
update on other failed attempts, from the Bridgy docs: