I think I’ve found a newer major issue with changes that Facebook has made recently. When using mobile devices and you follow an external link from Facebook, it will open that link in Facebook’s own browser. There is no way to get the authentication cookie set in this browser because it literally lacks an address bar that you can type/paste into.
The FB browser used to have a setting that allowed you to bypass that automatically. That was removed recently. It used to also have an address bar where one could have pasted in the authentication link, but that too has been removed from the browser. The only way to set a Ghost authentication cookie in that browser is to send the link by Facebook Messenger and then click the link from there (which is a messy process and not a solution at scale).
I also tested to see if the FB Browser would intercept links to sites where I have apps registered to those links and FB in fact intercepts that also. A link to Twitter will end up in their browser and not the Twitter app.
100% of my following is on FB and I am trying to convert people over to subscriptions and this is going to wreck my entire operation. It’s primarily a seasonal publication and we’re just now starting to see people complain about this awful behavior for which there seems to be no solution for whatsoever.
People can still open the link in their real browser by using the three dot menu in the FB browser, but that’s an extra step every time. I am thinking about creating a big annoying card that gets inserted into every article telling people to open the links in an external browser and only appears when the FB browser is detected.
Does anyone else have a suggestion that might be better?