Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

[andrewducker]

I discovered, about an hour ago, that all of my posts on Facebook which were links to Dreamwidth had vanished. Suddenly gone as if they'd never existed.

I checked with Denise (one of the owners of Dreamwidth) to find out if she knew about it, and discovered that Facebook have stuck Dreamwidth on a block list.

With no explanation as to why, no way to contact them, and no appeal.

This is unbelievably frustrating. And the kind of centralised, autocratic, opaque decision making which I loathe. Tens of thousands of active users, unable to share blog posts with Facebook (which, let's face it, is where most of my friends go for their socialising).

If anyone knows anyone who works at Facebook, do see if you can prod them into getting an explanation...

Edit: All working fine now.

Comments

Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[doug]

I noped out of Facebook early in the pandemic - it kept showing me frustratingly wrong takes on the virus from people I sort-of knew, and I was spending more and more time carefully explaining things with reliable sources. I'm pretty sure Fb started to clock that this sort of post reliably got more engagement from me. It was getting me more and more wound up, and over and over I would be missing out on the sort of significant news from friends that is why I still stayed on the site. I am really, really pleased to have broken my habit and am not going back.

Re: Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'd much rather that people were over here than over there. Sadly...

Re: Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[calimac]

This demonstrates one reason why I want nothing, whatever, to do with FB. On DW and LJ, your display is of all posts by people you've marked to read, that those people allow you to read, in reverse chronological order. FB doesn't allow that. Instead, they have some weird algorithm deciding what you get to see. F that. I want to follow my friends and the people I enjoy reading. Period.

Re: Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[conuly]

It should be possible to view in chronological order, though anecdotally many people report that FB and Twitter keep reversing that decision and you have to reset it manually:

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/view-facebook-twitter-chronological-order/

Re: Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[calimac]

This is interesting. Not only do they report that FB keeps reversing your choice, but they also say that even when it's on it doesn't work: things still keep coming in way out of order under algorithm control.

Further, even the guy who shows you how to do this doesn't recommend it, because there's too much material on FB to follow. Which brings up another problem that occurred to me the first time I saw an FB feed: it's too full of trivia. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is. LJ and DW tend towards fewer and more substantive posts, which are what I want to read.

Re: Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[skington]

Facebook's "most recent posts first" is an absolute lie. You can refresh the page and it'll show you different things.

Re: Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[ex_inklessej388]

And to add insult to injury many of those trivial posts are designed to collect and collate the personal information of you and your friends. It would be one thing if the pointless crap on Facebook was harmless, but it most certainly is not.

Re: Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[calimac]

Huh? I'm talking about trivial posts posted by the user. B. unfollowed one friend of ours for his irksome habit of posting photos of every meal he eats. For some reason FB encourages people to post that kind of blither. Are you talking about some kind of post generated automatically by FB from user data? That would be very disturbing, but I know nothing about anything like that.

Re: Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure

[ex_inklessej388]

It's coming out more and more now but a lot of those personality quizzes and "What Game of Thrones character are you" and "What Colour is Your Mood Today" type posts that can tossed around by friends and family are used to collect personal information on you and your friends. It was used by Cambridge Analytica during the last US election and it is coming out more and more how these quizzes are used by phishers to gather personal information on a person over time.