I have a family member who runs a non-profit organization. They had contracted a social media agency, and one of the things that agency did was make a Facebook page for them.
After the page had gotten some traction, and the contract with the agency was ending, their employee removed himself as an admin on the page in order to “hand over the keys.”
Except he hadn’t made anyone else an admin yet. So the page had no administrator, and because it had strict settings, it meant that literally no one could get into the account.
This page was not big, but it was not small; we’re talking ~50,000 impressions/post.
Over four months, my family member couldn’t get access back to this account. She sent in her ID, some tax documents, a picture of the literal business registration with her name on it (that shared the name of the page). The old administrator confirmed, to Facebook over email, that she was intended to be the new administrator.
Nothing. Facebook left her hanging.
I reached out to a friend of mine who was a dev at Facebook.
But doesn't the network effect (e.g. the fact that 95% of the people out there won't have heard of said platform and won't have much interest in using it due to their friends not being there) kind of ruin the efficacy of doing that?
I kind of see that now with Signal/Telegram, most of my friends are still on WhatsApp, so using either of those as an alternative to it isn't a viable choice, since i'd have very few people to chat with. In contrast, WhatsApp is an already established solution, so i wouldn't have to ask them to install a new app either (which i tried, about 10% even cared about Meta owning it).
In regards to having any sort of a social media account for a company, that would be a non-starter in most cases - since you'd limit your outreach possibilities severely by using niche networks. That said, it can work for other sorts of software, like file sharing software (Nextcloud over Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever), and federated networks could be worthy of further consideration as well.
I think you're missing something: nearly 100% of people who are online are already on the platform called the Web.
The Web allows you to operate a community service which is compatible with nearly 25 years worth of devices and browsers without being required to use anyone else's platform.
No, i don't think i am. When i talked about "platforms", i wasn't talking about the types of devices, but rather the types of social networks (or, say, marketplaces, professional networks etc.). Allow me to clarify, because the term "platform" is indeed ambiguous!
That means that Facebook has 659 times more users than Mastodon. So, assuming that you want to target an audience that's a general representation of society, not just technology geeks and privacy enthusiasts (who'd make up a larger part of Mastodon, presumably), for every 1'000'000 impressions on Facebook, you would get ~1'500 on Mastodon.
With a conversion rate of 1%, Facebook would earn you about 10'000 sales, whereas Mastodon would earn you 15. Let's suppose that whatever you're selling costs 25$. Facebook gets you 250'000$, whereas Mastodon gets you 375$, just because you chose a different platform.
The former doesn't respect your privacy, whereas the latter does. But that doesn't matter in a meaningful way for a business, if your goal is to reach more people to engage with to advertise or even just represent your product.
In a non-commercial sense, consider being able to chat with only one out of every 659 of your friends. In other words, it's unlikely that any of your friends (unless it's a niche group of people with shared interests) or family use Mastodon, whereas many of them most certainly use Facebook. Which of those is better for keeping in touch, then?
This is the network effect, something that every new platform out there has to deal with.
On the other hand, I started my own blog and Facebook-like forum for less than $10/month, and all my friends are able to access it and connect with me from any of their multitude of devices.
And included in the same fee is the ability to spin up more sites for each friend who wants one too.
And they can all inter-operate and copy posts between each other.
Mastodon is pretty much just another Facebook, split into pieces.
> The Web is a real, viable, free platform, today.
As long as you have friends who are willing/happy to use these alternate platforms? Sure!
I'm not saying that platforms like Mastodon shouldn't exist, them being there in the first place is promising and a good thing. If they work for you, keep using them!
However, we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that they're a viable alternative for certain use cases, such as maximizing your outreach.
Agreed. And also insist that they are required to label responses from ‘AI’ systems as such.
I’ve had many experiences talking to Google support (for ads where we are paying them thousands of dollars) where the responses which are allegedly from humans really seem like a conversation with an algorithm.
They have also introduced fake empathy messages now which come across as patronising and insulting. For example I was trying to upgrade my YouTube premium account and 3 different support reps all said a variation of “I have a YouTube Premium Family account and when I can’t get access to it I feel concerned, so I know what you’re feeling.”
Short of legislation, they really don't care if even 5% leave the platform - Facebook showed this when they still recorded double-digit profit growth despite losing a huge amount of usage in the younger generation (but that was eventually offset by purchasing Instagram). They can tune the Ad levers anytime to extract money from the rest of the remaining population to make up for what was lost, so until there's some mass exodus or cataclysmic change in U.S. acceptance of social media, they won't see any real consequences for spitting on a trivial portion of their users.
I suspect that their current business model ("free service, but we sell your eyeballs") would stop being profitable if they added enough customer support into the mix.
Facebook has how many? 2 billion users? More than even the largest nation on Earth. Even if there was just one customer support worker for 1000 of them, that would mean 2 million employees.
They would have to start charging for access. Not that I dislike that; it would make things a little more balanced, with users becoming customers.
I'm not saying they need tons and tons and tons of people.
> And Account Safety/Support/Security/Compliance Customer Service is (almost everywhere) very much a bureaucracy.
Fine. At least in that world you can talk to someone. Bureaucrats, I can work with.
But tech just doesn't give a shit. We have this wreckless-to-ignorant willfull blindness to the flaws of what we build and having to exercise one's connections is the exact opposite of the so-called 'democratization' that everyone talks about. Our world practically vomits liberal values of equality and egalitarianism and yet we willfully submit our lives to machines that can shut us out for completely automated and imperfect reasons, with no real recourse save for the savvy and connected.
Like people need to be burning at the stake over this stuff. Enough is enough.
Getting past the absolute useless Facebook Concierge Support is impossible. And they cannot help with anything that's not a copy-paste from the faq. It's infuriating. A client's domain had gotten a restriction so they could not run ads with a link to their site (which they had been doing for years), but on inspection from the FB team, and the escalated team, it wasn't restricted at all, but nothing they could do/wanted to fix.
All these automated systems coupled with a total unwillingness to help, it just sucks. Google is even worse, as you often can't even send a mail somewhere.
I'm part of "this crowd." My Instagram was disabled without warning. Instagram barely actions their appeals process and I don't know anybody that works at Facebook. Neither do any of my friends. I'm also SOL.
Yeah, nice try. My wife decided that she didn't want to share her age. Not being computer literate, she changed her age to zero. Yes, dumb move. She's never been able to get back on again.
Frankly, she did herself a favor. Facebook is toxic.
Do your own networking / ask your own social network. Find an employee and then send an email. Find a discord server where one is and DM them. It's not impossible to talk to an a facebook employee as a random person. In the age of the internet we are all deeply connected.
The thing that's great about this model of support is it's auditability. When the normal channels don't work, and you just sorta know a guy get problems fixed gives me a lot of comfort.
The main thing is, there's no way for someone to social engineer the standard system. And there's really no way an employee could be bribed, because they wouldn't be friends with the kinds of people who offer bribes.
Security through an anonymous web of trust. Good stuff!
I'm in this boat with Instagram. My account is permanently banned, and I didn't do anything.
And I mean that literally. I have never done anything with the account. I created it years ago, but I never got around to posting a photo or anything. It's just an account with no activity.
When I try to login, I see this:
> Your account has been permanently disabled because it didn't follow our Community Guidelines. This decision can't be reversed either because we've already reviewed it, or because 30 days have passed since your account was disabled. Learn more about why we disable accounts in our Community Guidelines.
Those guidelines are all about content, and of course I didn't post any.
My next thought is maybe someone (like a spammer) took over my account and posted something bad. But I have a strong, machine-generated random password, so that seems unlikely.
So I tried contacting support through the mobile app (since I can't through the web site), and a bot sent me a 5-digit number and asked me to reply with a photo of myself holding a piece of paper with that number. I did that and got no response. (But maybe because the ban is permanent I wasn't supposed to be able to contact support.)
It's probably because you had no activity. Someone may have run out of ideas for deleting bot accounts and wrote a query that caught idle accounts with no posts.
The exact same thing happened to me recently, and yet I had some activity, though not much. And there was absolutely no content in my account that could be construed as violating any terms of use. I posted pictures like once or twice a year.
Suddenly my account was disabled, with instructions to send an image of myself holding up some code; but nothing has happened since I sent it.
I've had the exact same thing happen to me twice on IG. Same as you: no activity other than a filled out profile, both times banned for not following "Community Guidelines." An extremely frustrating experience when all I wanted to do was look at my friends' photos.
I had a similar thing. I wanted to get invoices and billing stuff from FB for the company I work at. Created a FB account specifically for the purpose, as I don't have a personal account. Then got hit with the banhammer.
I got banned from IG before I could even log in the first time. I signed up with an email address since I don't have a FB account, and on my first login attempt it said my account was banned. I figure it's the same dark pattern that twitter does where they give you the "option" to not give them your phone number, but they'll auto-ban you and say they need a phone number to verify you're human.
This one sucks (for twitter at least) because I don't give out my number because I'm deaf. Seriously, I won't even give the hospital my number, just my email.
Why? Because every appointment they'd ring me, even though if they pull up my details it said "Do not ring, deaf, please text or email" - eventually I just changed my number. So much "private calls" I was just not going to pick up (even if I can hear, I feel it's better to completely understand what the other person is saying.)
On Twitter tho, when you make different handles for say businesses or what have you, you run into the same issue. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I thought it seemed pretty weird that _every_ account needed a unique phone number attached. The non-profits I'd help out with on social media don't have a contact phone number...
Seems like a great way of making people just give up rather than bothering to jump through hoops.
> And I mean that literally. I have never done anything with the account. I created it years ago, but I never got around to posting a photo or anything. It's just an account with no activity.
Maybe you got caught up in a sweep for "coordinated inauthentic activity." IIRC, the groups that do that sometimes stockpile inactive accounts for amplifying things in the future. e.g.
> On Twitter, Mr. Gal-Or’s video was shared by many accounts with suspiciously bare digital personas, according to Darren Linvill, who studies social media disinformation at Clemson University. This, he said, is a characteristic sign of a coordinated operation.
> Of the 534 accounts that tweeted the video from April through the end of June, two-fifths had 10 or fewer followers, Professor Linvill found. One in nine had zero followers. For nine accounts, Mr. Gal-Or’s video was their first tweet.
Yep. A lot of the spam algorithms penalize new accounts, so spammers started making them months or years in advance to sit idle. Now that’s a spam flag.
The amount of spam created by computers can always outweigh the effort required to clean it up by humans. Hence enlisting computers to fight the spam before it gets posted.
This sort of thing should be more of a motivation to move away from platforms like facebook than the privacy issues. Imagine giving a company the ability to cut you off from your friends, delete entire records of conversations that you had with them, your photos and memories, random connections made which could have influenced your life in the future etc. All on a whim or the result of a glitch or mistake, but providing no means of recourse.
It needs to be much easier for people to store and publish their own pictures, contact lists, dates, connections, life events etc so that it can't all just be taken away at a moment's notice.
My Facebook account has disappeared without a trace, after having been disabled and publicly reinstated by Facebook months before [1]. I don't understand how is this level of incompetence tolerated at a company that wants to mediate social connections and own the metaverse.
Will I be forever banished from a part of society because your primitive algorithms are allowed to make incontestable decisions without true oversight?
As Facebook's services are increasingly the only way to interact with modern society, permanently locking out people can alter lives. We deserve due process.
>As Facebook's services are increasingly the only way to interact with modern society,
Seriously? I use Facebook now and then but "only way to interact with modern society"? I don't know a single service I need that requires Facebook. One can think Facebook has too much power without making it out to be this all powerful overlord. I'd probably tend to lose contact with a few folks if I dropped Facebook but it's hardly essential.
Facebook isn't just about old high school friends, to some it can mean finding a free stroller and clothes for their baby, finding a buyer for their produce, or getting support in times of need.
> As Facebook's services are increasingly the only way to interact with modern society
Wait what? I haven't used my Facebook account in years, what am I missing?
But I just had a thought : If Facebook is really that essential for interacting with society as you claim, shouldn't it be regulated as a public utility?
Services such as Facebook Groups, Facebook Marketplace and WhatsApp have become essential in some places.
Employers can use WhatsApp groups to coordinate with employees, this is widespread even among government agencies. Facebook Marketplace has succesfully supplanted classifieds in many places. Being locked out means you have less access to goods and services, from used furniture to babysitters, caretakers, food and apartments for rent. You can also lose the main audience of your products and services, which can be catastrophic for members of an impoverished population. Facebook Groups can be the only way to connect with certain support groups or have access to services, especially in communities with limited public services provided by the government.
Once we step out of the affluent bubble, it becomes evident that a deleted Facebook account can ruin lives. I agree that these companies should be regulated to some degree, to ensure that all people have access to de facto essential services.
He already gave some examples but to expand a little bit I was moving from a place to another 1km way (at most 10 minutes driving accounting traffic) and needed to hire someone with a small truck, I was able to find bigger companies on google but needed nothing of what they were offering even a small pickup truck would suffice my needs and the only place I got what I wanted was on Facebook (marketplace).
Connections are pretty flaky, unfortunately. Every couple years Facebook bans my spouse's account for, I can only guess, having the last name spelled more phonetically as "Bot" instead of transliterated as "Bhat". (It helps Americans get a little closer to correct pronunciation). A friend who's worked there about ten years puts in a good word and it's unbanned. Unfortunately not this time, it's been two months now.
They're also fairly regularly delete Native American accounts with English translations (which is there legal name) of Native names. These translations predate the internet.
My Facebook account was shut down without explanation in 2019. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response.
If a Facebook employee is reading this ... I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account (which would be against the TOS, anyway). My account is so old that it was created back when only those associated with certain universities could get one. I want that one back.
I've owed Facebook $150 USD from an ad campaign I ran for a non-profit group for years now. Maybe 6? They still haven't banned me. They'll occasionally ask (as a small alert you can cancel out of) for it. I was hoping they'd ban me so I wouldn't have to go through the hoops to delete the account. No such luck, haha.
I rarely visit though, I'll use `messenger.com` for close friends/family, that's about it. I just learned to minimise my usage on `facebook.com` and it's been fine. I do understand others have a lot of difficulty doing this and deleting their account seems to be easiest for them. (but it's never really deleted tho is it?)
The same thing happened to me in 2019. I fought hard for a while and then gave up. I thought maybe I could drum up some public support (and work my way to a facebook connection who could restore it) by blogging about it and posting here...but nobody cared.
Yup, mine got deleted a couple of weeks before my 42nd birthday, as they had determined I was under 13. I'd only been on it a year. The form for uploading my ID didn't work, just said "Sorry, please try again later" until the deadline for appeals had passed. Tried all kinds of file formats. Absolutely no idea what triggered it, or what I could have done differently.
Facebook is a once-a-week dumpster dive of community / friend news that I always follow up in other ways, so I'm investing even less in it this time round!
In September, IG deleted my account. No email, no warning. I lost an unbelievable amount of memories.
To open a support ticket about it, I had to send in a photo of me holding up a sign with a captcha on it. Despite following up on the ticket 8 times, I still haven't even gotten a response back. Just miserable.
Finally made a new account in October. That new account has been "temporarily blocked" 5 times so far. I've had to provide my phone number, a 360º video of my face, and more. I really don't know why Meta hates me.
Of course I don't know your motivation, but your description sounds like some variant of the Stockholm Syndrome – an extreme form of domestication, an unwholesome dependency. Are these social sites that much a part of your identity?
I find it strange when people downplay network effects of facebook/instagram. It’s not as simple as switching to another brand of toothpaste. These platforms have huge network effect, so good luck trying to connect with your friends over another channel (which no one uses). Life will just go on without you.
Social networks should be heavily regulated or forcefully decentralized. It’s not about the product anymore, it’s about society.
I assure you life goes one whether you are on instagram or not.
In fact, many report the quality of their life improved upon leaving (even in this very HN thread).
Regarding top-down regulation: not nearly as effective as aligning incentives bottom-up. People waking up and taking care of themselves, both physically and mentally. Which is the part I found so fascinating in lelandfe's ordeal – I'd have flipped out after the first instance of such abuse. Never mind coming back for more, 8+5 times. The individual self seems dissolved, domesticated. "Why does the shepherd hate me?"
I mean, yeah, for some people Facebook is addicting, drives them to depression and compulsive scrolling, etc etc. These people quit facebook and go around telling everyone how much better their life is now
but for a lot of people facebook is just a part of the computer where your friends are and it's where they talk and it sucks to not be able to use it
But how I use Facebook doesn't change my fascination with how others handle (what I'd consider) outright abuse by Instagram. Your implied "sucks to not be able to use it" must be strong indeed for them – way past anything I'd describe as nonchalantly as you did.
I think at least two things are wrong with this kind of logic:
1. It’s never as simple as “if this then that”. Yes, there are studies that show short-term mood improvements in people upon leaving social networks. There are also studies on long-term health effects of reduced social connections which leads to depression and heap of other psychological problems. Guess how one connects with other people today? Through the social networks. Life may go on without online presence, but it’s a very different life from the one we were living 20 years ago, where only your weird cousin was frequenting MySpace and everyone else preferred to socialize in person.
2. These platforms consciously exploit biases and addictions in order to thrive. You may not see why people want to live through such ‘minor’ abuse as getting deleted from instagram, but it’s usually traumas that drive people to all kinds of abusive situations and self-medication, social networks being just a cherry on a cake. You cannot wake out of trauma, same way as you cannot simply walk away from smoking or alcohol abuse, and ignoring this seems very dangerous when our whole online presence becomes a “substance” for some people. Stopping abuse and healing in that case would also mean disconnecting from huge parts of social life and losing access to community.
Social networks take existing complex unsolved problems in our society, and dial them up to 11, with zero intention to design around the problem or take responsibility. Aligning incentives bottom up just does not work for these kinds of situations.
Seriously, it reads like someone begging to go back with an abuser. If a company treated me like this, why would I ever want to do business with them again? You see this kind of reasoning with other, non-addictive services too.
Alice: [COMPANY X] ripped me off, took my money and won't refund me!
Bob: Just issue a credit chargeback for fraud.
Alice: But, then [COMPANY X] will ban me!
Bob: Why do you want to continue a relationship with a company that abused you?
There is no way on earth I'd scan a copy of my driver license to send to someone like Facebook, or take a "360 degree video of my face" just to supplicate myself to them in the vain hope they might allow me to become part of their revenue stream. This is totally bonkers.
Bob: Why do you want to continue a relationship with a company that abused you?
Alice: Because there are no other companies to use.
In abusive relationships there are greener pastures in the millions of other possible partners. For me, Instagram is the only option: my friend group does not use other social media. And keeping up with my friends and social calendar is important to me. If everyone was on, I don't know – Mastodon, I would switch in a heartbeat.
I didn't use social media from 2020 to mid-2021. So, no, not part of my identity.
Decided staying abreast of friends' updates, sharing my own, and being aware of current humor were important for me. I've definitely been happier since using it again (terribleness of Meta support notwithstanding)
i had twitter ask me for my drivers license abkjt an hour after making thr account and i just decided i preferred not sharing it with twitter and never worried about it again.
bullet dodged and thx corpo for helping me make the right choice.
nice, I'm guessing the ad data brokers detected your child and Facebook used that as a trigger lol.
inspired by the people that make random crap on youtube for children and were confused about their target demographic being 38 year old women in the analytics, further realized to be just the logged in account for a parent using their ipad as a babysitter
I'm starting to wonder if these ban appeals shouldn't simply be handled by small claims courts.
Basically, the company has to have a human justify why it banned a fellow human. No response or no account reinstatement simply makes the company in contempt of court. If the company has a legitimate reason to ban it should be pretty easy to argue (this user posted this graphic content in exhibit A.)
I'm no fan of Facebook, but I think this is pretty extreme. Other than laws barring discrimination against protected classes, nobody has a right to demand that any company provide them services.
> Other than laws barring discrimination against protected classes
You have a point here.
I'm running with the assumtion that most of the ban appeals that are going to end up in small claims court are from legitimate users stuck with an automated false positive. Pretty sure if a human spent 30 seconds looking at the ban, they would overrule it. The issue is getting a human to actually look at it. I doubt users brazenly breaking rules would go through the process of going to small claims court.
Looking at the thread, I see a lot of people with unusual names (for instance asians and native americans) getting banned. I wonder if this couldn't be interpreted as discriminating these people. Of course, we can only assume FB's good faith here, hence why it would not be a problem for them to produce evidence of bad behavior from the people they banned.
There is an argument to be made that if the company has more than a % of marketshare in a given market or feature and intentionally prevents interoperability then it indeed owes services to everyone.
In this case, Facebook is the new website/storefront/phone number for a lot of small businesses as well as the default communications medium for a large chunk of the population and makes it impossible to interact with these without having an account (unlike let's say a telco or email provider which will happily receive contacts from other providers).
Yes they do have that right, if the company has no substitute, and if doing without it is a substantial impact on life.
For example, the power company. The telephone company. A sole ISP with no local alternatives. A company that owns an important toll road near your house. Monopolistic social media companies. Etc.
They don't have that right now. There is no legal framework yet for demanding a social media company provide you an account. Many of us would like to see that changed.
If you own a Quest VR headset and have purchased games, a ban means you cannot play or download them. I would hope that would be reasonable grounds for a suit in small claims court. If they make membership in the social network a requirement of using a product you purchased, that comes with responsibilities on their end too.
Who did you reach out to get it unbanned? Do FB employees have some official channel for reinstating their own accounts or accounts of friends and family?
(Also, please don't work for Facebook. You have talents that can be applied at a more ethical company.)
This is a bit mean. You do not know the circumstances of OP. Do you know them personally to be able to say this? Is this so-called more ethical company going to pay them the same or give them the same sort of pay and benefits? What if this person has a spouse, or children that need specialised care that costs a lot? What if they also have a mortgage and provide for their parents as well as their family?
Just saying "Please don't work for Facebook" is just so tone-deaf. Maybe YOU can work for a more ethical company, doesn't mean OP can.
It is not mean to tell people don't work for Facebook or nestle which makes money through Shenanigans. Politicians don't do anything against Facebook as they have lot of wealth to lobby politicians. As long as intelligent people are going to support mammoth corporation like Facebook what can we normal people say?
I don't know if it applies for majority of people but in my social circle we treat palantir with stigma and actively tell people not to work for them. So, is it really mean to tell that? What can normal people do ? Telling people not work will help society in long run and also signals advertisers, consumers not to use their product:) It is similar to why USA has banned companies to not use any kind of cotton produced from xiangxinag although they might not personally know if that company is in mortgage and can afford to survive if they don't use cotton from china?
My comment was polite, but your response is very aggressive.
If you work for Facebook then you have in-demand skills that will command a high salary elsewhere. Facebook is a highly unethical company and people should avoid working for them, your imaginative story notwithstanding.
I made a facebook account for advertising a few years back... (facebook requires linking advertising/business accounts with your personal account, and I didn't have a personal one). I was 90% through creating my second ad, when the UI glitched out and went into some sort of infinite loop. Seconds later, I was locked out of all my accounts, and to this day I can't access it.
Funny story, deleted my FB acct several years ago, then a couple months ago I found a group for my school and tried to reactivate my account but now it says I was banned. Silver lining is I won't be in FB again.
My wife just got threatened by FB to have her account banned (For saying that she’d have punched a sexual harasser in the nose.)
Anyway, I’m excited. Her life is about to improve dramatically.
Question for folks in the know: what’s the best way to download all photos from your Instagram and Facebook accounts? I’ve got some drives I’m going to back her stuff up to, and I figure this is a good group to ask.
The problem we have here is that the big social media companies want to become the commons of the web, but they don't want to take on the responsibility this entails.
They want to be the storage source for all of your emails, photographs, and videos; and would even love to host things like your medical records; but if you are holding a person's entire life then that should entail a higher level of responsibility.
To be honest, I don't think it's wise to entrust everything to a company that is supplying its services for free. If you are paying a company then you have a contract and the company is bound by legal responsibilities that can be enforced by the law. If you are not paying for a service then they have no responsibilities apart from those they hold themselves to, and you have no legal recourse if they suddenly deny you access to the services they are providing.
Wow, I just checked and I was deleted as well sometime in the last six months or so after a decade or so of existence. I'd deleted my old posts and left only one post that said "I don't post on Facebook, please check me out on Twitter."
Now it doesn't even say I'm suspended; it just says that no account can be found with my password, even though it prompted me (after entering username and password) to find out if a totally different account, but with a similar name, was mine.
This is actually quite funny. I'd struggled with the decision of whether to delete my account entirely, but I doubted whether it would actually be deleted or not. I bet this is a more thorough method of deletion than if I'd gone through the multi-week deactivate-wait-delete process!
I got banned by Pinterest by mistake. I found a site which just said to pester the shit out of them for months and eventually they would capitulate. This technique worked. Took about 2 weeks of constantly filing appeals at least once a day. Eventually some support drone re-enabled me.
The problem with that is that social networks have network effects. If you don't use them, you miss out in ways that using other ones instead doesn't make up for.
To be fair, if you work in marketing, you (or your work) more or less enables all of this garbage in the first place by funding it so I'd argue it's deserved.
Some time ago I read the tip that if you send them a data protection request to either completely delete everything on you or unban you, they'll unban you, because option 1 is too hard for them...
Looks like big tech emplyees have become the new aristocracy. They are the only ones that can change the situation and also the ones who benefit from it, be it in the form of social status or, as the article mentions, as Grey market sellers of unlocks and reinstatement.
They simply should do paid-by-minute support and make it a profit center. Stop pretending that their service isn’t about making money from users or that they want to do free tech support. Everyone knows how big web companies make money by now, no need to keep up appearances.
My Facebook account that I effectively just abandoned one day in 2014. One day last year someone tried to access it and Facebook sent me a security alert. Now I can't log in to it unless I send them a photocopy of my ID.
For those who don’t know, ActivityPub enables all of these (Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, Friendica, Misskey, etc) to work transparently between implementations and servers.
And a bit of a pain to separate and isolate yourself across it. I no longer have the inclination to blast myself everywhere on the intertubes. That era of "signing up for everything" is over.
Deleted my FB account last year but rarely used it to begin with. Never linked my IG account with FB either but am waiting for a reasonable excuse to delete it as well.
If you want more fine-grained control over federation than Mastodon (which already has the basic knobs), Pleroma is more flexible in that regard.
It’s trivial to set up in a way that your content never leaves your server if you want, blanket or per-post.
Note I’m saying that content flows across servers and implementation, not that all of these share federated auth. You can not “sign in” on any other server than the one you registered with.
Some people have multiple accounts on multiple servers, some stick to one. fosstodon.org is a great one for floss and Linux talk if you don’t want to run your own.
BTW, check my HN profile if anyone wants to be friends :)
> ..not that all of these share federated auth. You can not “sign in” on any other server than the one you registered with.
Oh definitely, I haven't conflated the two. The issue (at least for me) is I haven't found a way to limit mass propagation of content. Things I post in one federated instance may not jibe for others when it is a two-way street. Vice versa, maybe I don't want the exposure from more radical persuasions and/or content. Trying to reconcile the tradeoffs is also an issue in of itself as well.
If you're willing to run your own instance, Pleroma is the way to go. Maybe Misskey, haven't tried yet. You can specify arbitrary (including one-way) federation and content propagation policies.
I'm also assuming that the support in server software for non-moderator users to have better control (assuming trust in the operator of course) will continue to improve over time.
A tech echo chamber is the last thing people want. The beauty of Facebook and other proprietary social media, for all their flaws, is that they gained acceptance among non-tech people because they focus on actual functionality & user experience as opposed to technicalities that only nerds care about.
Mastodon and similar projects are and have always been dead when it comes to mainstream acceptance; I could spend 20 minutes writing a lengthy post but here's a good start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579504
Unfortunately a lot of open source cares more about ideological wars (such as about systemd, or Debian not including proprietary network card firmware by default) than actually solving a real problem.
buddypress is open source and free - not sure what it would take to make it 'federated' - I have not used the export data option in wordpress to know what may or may not include with buddypress - but there may already be ways to export from BP and to pull rss feeds from the various sections.
Being automatically deleted from Facebook would be a dream come true, if it were really all deleted. Normally it is practically impossible to get that.
From my experience they don't care. Pretty sure they know their system is flawed and instead of investing in support staff they let you create new accounts. There's maybe an exception if you spam a lot.
Facebook/Meta itself seems to disagree with you - the very article we're discussing says the accounts were reinstated after inquiries from the author of the article, and a Meta company spokesperson said the accounts were "incorrectly removed".
Many uses of Hitler on Facebook would violate their rules against hate speech, so I'm not surprised they have automation looking for that name. But even Facebook now agrees that a play about a real person who was forced to taste Hitler's food before he ate it is not such a violation.
I have a family member who runs a non-profit organization. They had contracted a social media agency, and one of the things that agency did was make a Facebook page for them.
After the page had gotten some traction, and the contract with the agency was ending, their employee removed himself as an admin on the page in order to “hand over the keys.”
Except he hadn’t made anyone else an admin yet. So the page had no administrator, and because it had strict settings, it meant that literally no one could get into the account.
This page was not big, but it was not small; we’re talking ~50,000 impressions/post.
Over four months, my family member couldn’t get access back to this account. She sent in her ID, some tax documents, a picture of the literal business registration with her name on it (that shared the name of the page). The old administrator confirmed, to Facebook over email, that she was intended to be the new administrator.
Nothing. Facebook left her hanging.
I reached out to a friend of mine who was a dev at Facebook.
Issue resolved in 48 hours. Over a weekend.