It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
There was a thread on reddit from an escort who was on a podcast talking about how she was banned from instagram and facebook (for promoting her escorting!) and the only way she was able to get her account back was to seduce some high-level meta employees via linkedin, date them and then convince them to reinstate her accounts.
edit- not sure if this is the same girl but here is a similar article about this scenario: https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...
Along the same lines, I think organizations shouldn't be allowed to send out email but not receive email at the same address, e.g. noreply@. That's just hostile in general.
Hell yeah. Don't threaten me with a good time.
If your service is free than I don't think anyone is entitled to customer support, since there aren't really customers in the first place
It could even be quite high, like $100 million or $1 billion in annual revenue.
(I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack, so I just have a custom domain set up with fastmail and point the MX to them. Their UI is great and a breath of fresh air compared to gmail. I guess they could in theory decide to lock me out randomly too, though I trust them to have actual customer support and can just point the MX somewhere else in the worst case)
Google: anonymous inscrutable guillotine
Fastmail: payments fail and I do not notice for too long
It's certainly my biggest worry about using them.
Edit: NVM. I see Fastmail when I reread the comment.
Is there a way to only host the receive portion?
I'm happy to pay someone to handle all the idiocy around sending email and getting it through Google and Microsoft, but I'd really like to hold my emails myself.
Sure. Set up your email server and have DNS of your domain point the MX record at it so you receive all email directly without any third party involvement. Then, set up outgoing email to forward to some third party which handles delivery for you. IIRC there are some free options even, if your outgoing volume is low.
That said, my email server handles incoming and outgoing email for a handful of domains for self and family, no problem.
Sure. Set your MX to your own SMTP server but pay a mail delivery service to send your emails & use their SMTP servers as your outgoing server. You'll have to setup SPF & DKIM appropriately of course.
It's not trivial to do this, but it should be possible.
Is there a paid mail delivery service that doesn't get marked as spam instantaneously?
Or is there a way to do this through something like Fastmail?
All of that seems easier than setting up a server to keep your e-mails.
*This entire post is fabricated satire. Though, I would not be shocked if it were true.
For security reasons, corporations don't want staff talking directly with customers. So the corporation is a blackbox with very limited communication abilities; both internal and external. It does a lot of things which affect a lot of people but if you fall through some crack, there's nothing anyone can do about it.
As I recall that was even true of the free dialup ISPs (NetZero, Juno, etc.) back in the ‘90s.
“ The response was: The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. For more information, go to https://support.google(.)com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser”
Then it has a phishing email copied below trying to look legitimate.
Can I create a filter to block this spam for good? It’s been happening for over a year now and makes me think one of my emails failed to send so I jump to open it ugh.
Used to work in marketing-adjacent teams and know this too well.
If your goal is tech support, at least if you just light the money on fire you'll get warm.
I don't remember how much it was, not much. I subscribed to the support for one month, then canceled. I've paid them hundreds a month for years, so it feels kind of cheap of them, but I did manage to get the help I needed.
If they can't figure out the problem from there with you description then they are just incompetent and you shouldn't be doing business with incompetent companies no matter how large or popular they are.
You should bring everything you rely on in house as much as possible if not possible then on business that has an incentive to work with you. If you can't afford to then question if your product is really providing value. Why anybody with greater memory than a goldfish would build on top of a google service is beyond me (probably just people falling for ads or propaganda) it's no different then building on known vulnerable software.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 297 times (+ all the soft killed services without adequate support) , shame on me!
At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.
I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.
I wonder what would have to happen for people to become more digitally sovereign, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If anything, we're going in the other direction.
Or perhaps in the quaint fishing town of Dildo, Newfoundland.
shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
You won't find the reach, but you'll find a little community of other artists that can be a lot more personal & fulfilling than you would find on mainstream social media.
Everybody knows his history. Yes you can, "steal an idea". He does it to everyone. He did it to Snapchat. It shouldn't be a surprise the things he owns are substandard garbage
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
Remotely trying to correlate or compare them defies any reasonable semblance of comparability.
You can mail your own server to a co-location service if you want to host the metal yourself.
If you need to go a step further and not rely on one host, it's inexpensive enough to get multiple hosts.
I wonder how that bridge at least awareness wise can be improved.
Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.
This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.
* yes, I know...
Social media is a web app and mobile app.
A website is just a website. Somehow being shut out of your own hosting is something else entirely.
Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.
Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.
We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]
But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.
Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...
Sadly I can't find anyone to pay off at Google yet to fix my gmail (I have the username, password, and everything is forwarded to the recovery email I own, I just lost access to the phone number and they enabled 2FA without asking).
Reddit also, I can't find anyone there to unban my friend's account that got locked (due to a server outage), even after speaking directly to spez about it.
One tip: if your IG/FB account get suspended, then it's way cheaper to get it unbanned via black hat routes than if you roll the dice and try to appeal it. Appeals often end in perma-bans that are much harder for Meta employees to undo.
If pogue972 on Instagram suddenly got a reset email or something, I definitely wouldn't ask any questions.
Tbh, I'd be curious if it's even recoverable and what triggered the ban. I just got an email out of the blue asking me to fill out a captcha, reply to an SMS and send a selfie. I did all that and just got a reply I had violated "community guidelines" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Since it was a private account I never posted anything on, I was racking my brain what could have possibly got me flagged. All I did was reply to pics of ppl's pets (and sometimes cute girlies). Definitely nothing abusive.
From what I've read, the SMS was used just to automatically block any new account you make.
https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...
> "So, I stalked them on Instagram through my backup but still slutty account," she said. "I managed to find a couple (employees), not from that department but still people that worked at Instagram in LA."
> She said she allegedly met up "with a couple" employees in the L>os Angeles area, adding that they know about her podcast.
> "We met up and I f*ked a couple of them and I was able to get my account back two-three times," Kitty Lixo said, recommending others with locked accounts to continue reaching out to the platform for eventual ban reversal.
To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with.
It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal.
In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...
It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.
Don't worry this requirement was removed. Now you just need a Meta account which is totally different!
There was no bait and switch because there was no consumer product.
There’s a lot to dislike about Meta, but this complaint doesn’t make sense. If anything, Meta has put millions more of VR devices into consumers’ hands by selling the Quest at a loss. Nobody has to buy it.
You can get locked out of the IRS, Social Security, etc. in the same way.
We are citizens of private corporations that are social networks.
There are not many laws there for recourse or communication.
I'm seeing more and more sites pushing for signing with facebook/apple/google accounts and I'm afraid how the Internet may look like in a few years. It seems we're on path on total sanitization of online services, sites and content to the point where everything will be "safe", verified and authorized and so will be users.
I believe it's still possible to run independent identity services and route it through one of the cloud providers in some cases.
Creating your own email address on your own domain and then enrolling your own domain in identity accounts seems to be one practice I saw being mentioned the last time I was brushing up on SSO.
A real hard wake-up call on the importance of owning your own online identity and content.
99% of the time you can still log into a banned Reddit account and visit the internal appeals page. You are usually just "shadowbanned".
1. One morning my account was shadowbanned. Literally everything from any time in any subreddit, including truncating threads and taking other people's replies with it.
2. I logged in and used the appeals page... and it was eventually "granted" with an apologetic message!
3. But nothing changed, except that appeals page stopped working, as it claims the account is normal.
4. Mods can briefly approve what I post, but it doesn't stick. After a few minutes it becomes blocked again, with no audit-trail.
5. So... I dug up an old resume-feedback throwaway account from ~5 years ago to go asking for help...
6. Within a day, it got shadowbanned the same way.
7. For a few months, I did a monthly attempt to make a ticket via support.reddithelp.com, but never got any kind of response.
8. I guess I gave up trying to fight the faceless Kafkaesque system and slid into mild depression, as Reddit had been my primary social conduit after the pandemic.
Even if I go back and try to build up a presence again, without answers I'll be plagued by anxiety waiting for some mysterious stupid algorithm to stab me in the back and destroy everything again.
Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.
Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.
I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.
——
This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.
If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?
At scale, the value of individual users approaches zero.
And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.
One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.
If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.
This "exploit" has been there for years.
I only ever used throwaway accounts on Facebook, just to access some services that were only accessible via FB. At some point FB banned my account. I created a new one on the browser. Worked fine. When I signed into that account on my iPhone: instant ban. Delete FB app on iPhone, reinstall FB, try new account, same thing. Try a new iPhone, same iCloud account, new FB account: instant ban again.
They can not only track you across app reinstalls, device resets, but also across multiple devices. And Apple facilitates it.
They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.
Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
[1] https://7amleh.org/post/erased-and-suppressed-palestinian-te... [2] https://meta.7amleh.org/ [3] https://7amleh.org/post/hashtag-palestine-2024-en [4] https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
Wondering where the EFF was for that issue?
Every other day a story comes out about a centralized platform either:
1) Extorting for money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887
2) Canceling accounts: https://www.eff.org/pages/when-knowing-someone-meta-only-way...
3) Has their algorithms choose what you see and hear: https://x.com/i/grok/share/NwPcWVxZiHQytvGs8MONRdpCi
4) Deplatforms you anytime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming
5) Demonetizes you, after taking over half to begin with: https://podcastle.ai/blog/how-much-money-do-youtubers-make-p...
6) Allows governments easy surveillance and even hacking your account: https://natlawreview.com/article/even-hacking-field-governme...
7) Sends your information to advertisers, etc. etc.
8) Makes everyone increasingly depressed, angry and distrustful of others https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
Now I ask you, why do people put up with this, especially content creators with large audiences?
Because they have no viable open alternative that they can host easily themselves.
And why is that? Here is what it would look like if they did: https://qbix.com/community.pdf
I think it's because just like in Web3, the incentives of Web2 are to make a lot of money for your early stage investors, the VCs, and very few choose not to sell out after they hit the critical mass and get massive centralized power and network effects. I've seen "indieweb" come and go, "decentralizedweb.net" is down but they used to have TimBL speaking at it. I've seen Diaspora come out 13 years ago and sadly one of the founders killed himself. I've seen Mastodon, which Trump's team forked to make Truth Social (one of the few deplatformed guys who actually got his own platform, had to spend millions on it).
Why do you think there is no good alternative to Big Tech, the way that, say, at least the Incredible Burger is an alternative for people who want to opt of meat?
For now it’s already extremely full-featured, but still only web developers will be able to use it: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
If you do give it a try, come back here and write about your experience.