I used to get value out of some private groups, support groups - but those have slowly become infested by bots/trolls in a weird way that I can't really prove but the experience for me at least has been increasingly poor over the last few years.
All this is to say it does not surprise me that facebook aggressively protects its moat - someone over there realizes the power of habit/compulsion, it's clearly baked into their app and UI and everything about that ecosystem. Long gone are the before-times where app growth was focused on making a compelling user experience, we're in pure extraction mode now that pretty much anyone that will ever make a facebook account already has made one.
Meta admits it deleted links to decentralized Instagram competitor Pixelfed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42694547 - Jan 2025 (3 comments)
(apparently they've fixed it now)
Considered by who? Setting aside the 2021-2024 Lina Khan anomaly, the US Federal government has not enforced anti-trust law for decades, and the States do not have enough power to create their own anti-trust laws. We also just elected an extremely big-tech-friendly government, so that won't be changing for the foreseeable future.
He’s cultivated an aura of vindictiveness. I’m not recalling any great examples of him being unpragmatically vindictive.
This isn’t vindictive, though. In some cases it was straight-up competition.
> If Zuck insufficiently bends the knee, that's what's going to happen
This is transactional, possibly corruptly so. But it’s not really revenge as much as exerting control. If there were nothing Zuckerberg could reasonably do to avoid Trump’s wrath on account of what Zuck did in 2020, that would be vindictiveness.
and if graham is pissed all he has to do is wait for 2028 :)
on July 9, 2020, was taken back into federal custody after refusing to agree to conditions of home confinement that included a prohibition on communicating with the media. Cohen filed suit complaining that his re-arrest was an attempt to prevent him from releasing a tell-all book about Trump titled Disloyal: A Memoir. On July 23, a judge found in his favor and ordered that he be returned to home confinement.
And yeah, it's definitely a bad thing for the internet. Honestly, I wonder if someone could argue it's an anti-competitive behaviour that should be banned?
More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelfed
But link your (forced) Oculus account to Facebook? That's a ban (yeah, automatically flagged, but still)
Or any number of unspecified community guidelines violations
Or accounts getting hacked constantly
As an aside, Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments criticizing Apple for not innovating and trying to lock users in is laughable in the face of Meta’s complete lack of innovation and user hostile practices.
If I am not supposed to know, why even try.
Tech is hard, it's difficult for us to understand how hard.
I don't think it's a 1% problem. At least not here in Europe.
I just checked, by official numbers 60% of Switzerland uses Facebook regularly. Obviously not accounted for multi accounts and bots, ... Who in their right mindset would target only 60% of people for a proper business? Mainly woman, mainly 50+. Which bank invests in a business plan like this?
The only Meta app I use on a regular basis is Whatsapp.
But that doesn't negate the fact that maintaining a Facebook page is something a non tech person can do for free on their own reasonably well.
1) It's "surprising" because this is super vindictive unless they're doing it for very good, specific reasons (otherwise it's just competition killing)
2) "Reserved the right" doesn't mean a given thing isn't censorship, especially not at the scale Facebook operates at
"It's time to get back to our roots around free expression."
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/its-time-to-get-back-to...
Just like "state's rights", "free speech" has always been a lie told by those who want only THEIR speech to be free, which is why you can say the N word on twitter and not get banned or blocked, but if you say "cracker" you may be downranked
“It's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram”.
Add it to the already impossibly long list of people shouting about “free speech” when they absolutely, positively do not give a single shit about that topic outside of the context of how they can use it against others.
I’m not a FB defender by any means. Just being realistic. Twitter has broken new ground in just banning competitor links from their platform (substack) but FB doesn’t do that.
Facebook did come out and say it was a mistake a few hours later. I’m sure the haters will say this is just their cover story. But why would they do it if they’d fold under such a tiny amount of pressure? Seems likely to just be an error after all.
We're trying for a high information/indignation ratio and comments like this are the other way around.
Even within a type, there's plenty of design-space to do something different. Even Threads does a lot different from Twitter.
I'ved hated Zuck even before he became a Nazi-acquiescer, but the design/layout of Pixelfed which is almost identical to Instagram give Zuck's army a plausible reason to ban them...