[amelius]

Someone should write and maintain a library that can scrape Facebook accounts. This library could be used by software that can help people stay away from FB without the downside of missing out on things like events or groups.

[vermilingua]

This would be impossible to maintain. Facebook regularly changes the layout of pages, and mangles the DOM to defeat adblocking, and also likely take anti scraping measures.

[amelius]

Yes, but are you familiar with the tool Youtube-DL, which is open-source, runs on Linux, and allows users to download content from youtube? This tool is very useful, and is constantly being updated after changes on YouTube that break the tool. If the tool doesn't work, you simply invoke it with the "-U" flag and it updates itself. So far, this tool has not failed me.

I think a similar approach could be taken by this scraping library, though I admit it would be a lot of work to maintain it.

[kodablah]

There are other approaches like accessibility APIs and text selection based on positioning and visibility.