Posts and comments

A post is where Facebook gets deep: text and media, a comment thread with nested replies, and a reaction breakdown. fb pulls each on demand so you only fetch what you ask for.

One post

Pass any post URL or id. fb classifies it first, whether it is a pfbid permalink, a story_fbid, or a numeric id:

fb post "https://www.facebook.com/nasa/posts/pfbid0xyz" -o json

The record carries the author, text, timestamp, media URLs, external links, and the reaction, comment, and share counts. Several posts at once, or from stdin:

fb post <url1> <url2> -o jsonl
fb seed page nasa --limit 20 | fb post - -o jsonl

Use --no-detail when you only want the counters and want it fast; it skips the extra detail fetch.

The comment thread

Add --comments to stream the thread after the post, or use the dedicated comments command:

fb post <url> --comments -o jsonl
fb comments <url> --limit 200 -o jsonl

Nested replies are not expanded by default, since that is an extra fetch per comment. Add --replies to pull them. Each reply carries a parent_id pointing at the comment it answers, so you can rebuild the tree downstream:

fb comments <url> --replies --limit 500 -o jsonl

--order chrono|ranked picks Facebook's chronological or ranked ordering.

Downloading everything

Both the comment walk and the reply walk follow Facebook's pagination to the end on their own; the only bound is --limit. Pass --limit 0 (or -n 0) to take the whole thread, replies and all:

fb comments <url> --replies -n 0 -o jsonl > thread.jsonl

The same holds for feeds: fb page <slug> --posts -n 0 walks the timeline until the next-page cursor runs out, so you capture every post the surface exposes, not a fixed first page. Pair it with --since YYYY-MM-DD to stop at a date instead of the very end.

Reactions

--reactions on post emits the breakdown (how many of each type), and the reactions command does the same on its own:

fb reactions <url> -o json

{"total":1240,"like":900,"love":210,"haha":40,"wow":60,"sad":20,"angry":10}

To list every reactor and how they reacted, add --list, and narrow to one type with --type:

fb reactions <url> --list -o jsonl
fb reactions <url> --list --type love -o jsonl

Composing

Because every command streams JSON Lines, you can chain them. Pull a feed, keep the high-engagement posts, and fetch their threads:

fb page nasa --posts --limit 100 -o jsonl \
  | jq -r 'select(.comments_count > 100) | .permalink' \
  | fb post - --comments -o jsonl