Scraping Facebook group posts: Story nodes, reactions, pagination

A Facebook group feed is not a flat list of posts. It mixes real posts with section headers ("New members", "Suggested for you") and promotions — and a naive collector happily saves the noise as content. Here is what the group posts endpoint actually returns and how to walk it.

The endpoint and its shape

GET /fb/api/v1/group_posts/{group_id}?after=<cursor>

The payload lives at data.group_address.group_feed:

• edges[] — mixed units; filter by node.__typename
• page_info.end_cursor — the cursor (~550 chars, base64)
• page_info.has_next_page — loop condition

__typename values that matter:

Value	Meaning	Action
Story	an actual post	keep
GroupsSectionHeaderUnit	section divider	skip
QuickPromotionNativeTemplateFeedUnit	native promo	skip

Every Story node carries cache_id (dedupe key), the author, message text, attachment, reaction and comment counters, and timestamps.

The walker

from getsocialapi_facebook import Client

fb = Client(api_key="gsa_live_...").facebook

posts, cursor, seen = [], None, set()
while True:
    page = fb.group_posts("800246542990860", after=cursor)
    feed = page["data"]["group_address"]["group_feed"]
    for e in feed["edges"]:
        n = e["node"]
        if n.get("__typename") == "Story" and n.get("cache_id") not in seen:
            seen.add(n.get("cache_id"))
            posts.append(n)
    if not feed["page_info"].get("has_next_page"):
        break
    cursor = feed["page_info"]["end_cursor"]

print(len(posts), "posts collected")

Per-page reality

Facebook serves its native group page in chunks of 2–3 Story posts — that is upstream behavior, not an API limitation. One request = one chunk; a 100-post group costs ~40 requests. Latency per page is ~3 seconds. If that cadence does not fit your use case, the unified feed endpoint stitches chunks server-side up to per_page=20 at the cost of occasional seam duplicates.

Cursor rules

1. Take end_cursor only from page_info — nodes contain internal cursor fields that look identical and produce Invalid Cursor errors.
2. Pass it verbatim as after; never decode or slice it.
3. Cursors are reusable and session-independent — safe to checkpoint long exports.

A broken cursor returns 400 Invalid Cursor (not billed) — restart the walk from page 1.

Enrich with members

Post collection answers "what"; the group members endpoint answers "who". Cross-referencing post authors against the member export catches lurkers (members who never post) and power posters (members dominating the feed) — the two lists every community manager wants.

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