Last November, I made a brief post to Facebook about Mastodon. Mastodon is an open-source and open social network, which is decentralized and all about user control instead of corporate control. I’ve blogged about Mastodon and the dangers of Facebook before, but rarely mentioned Mastodon on Facebook itself.
Today, I received this notice that Facebook had censored my post about Mastodon
Facebook is only censoring posts about Mastodon cuz they know they don’t stand a chance in direct competition
How so ? I’m genuinely curious. AFAIK mastodon targets a different niche than FB. Namely it aims to offer a better alternative to twitter.
Facebook: 2.8 billion users. Mastodon: 2.2 million users.
Yeah, Facebook is quaking in their boots at the upstart that’s three orders of magnitude smaller.
(I say this, incidentally, as someone who’s deleted his Facebook account and uses Mastodon…)
Mb it because FB cannot dig any data from in mastodon instances.
Yes. Those 2.2 million people out of 4.2 billion they’re not currently engaging with must be really eating at them! They’re probably tossing and turning at night that literally 1/2000th or so of their as yet unsubscribed populace can’t be dug out yet.
🙄
The fediverse needs to get over itself. It is not a major player yet. It isn’t even a minor player yet. It barely qualifies as the fringe of a fringe player.
And, note, I say this as a user of four fediverse services (and not a user of Facebook nor Twitter)!
Mastodon is not a threat to Facebook or Twitter. Yet. Pixelfed is not a threat to Instagram. Yet. Lemmy is not a threat to Reddit. Yet.
Could they become? Possibly. (I personally don’t think so, but freely admit that I could be wrong about this.) But they are not even on the radar of the big guys yet.
It doesn’t matter what the niche is. What matters is where you spend your time. If you are posting regularly on Mastodon, you aren’t on Facebook. That means they can’t show you ads and they can’t charge premium rates for advertising. They would logically deem any social media site as competition, even Twitter.
Indeed, I posted a link to my personal blog yesterday and Facebook appears to have shadow banned it (it did not get any likes or other interaction); another link to my personal web site (which has a COVID tracker) was reported and removed.
Facebook’s main value is that it allows me to stay in touch with a lot of old friends I have no other contact info for; in terms of a social network, I’m moving towards the open source stuff (Lemmy/Mastodon/Diaspora/Discourse and the old school PHP-based message boards).
They have been shadowbanning links to other social media sites for a long time. (No one sees your post in their feed)
Wow. I was not aware of this. I thought they always inform when they take blocking action.
Side point but @ericbuijs@lemmy.ml would you like to have this community? The current owner is long gone.
Sure, I would like to do that.
K done.
I mean, that is not surprising at all. I am kinda a little amused by (but mainly sad about) how bewildered the article author seems to be by Facebook actions against their post about a “Facebook alternative” social network.
I fully agree. I respect the author as a Free Software advocate and a developer for GNU/Linux Debian but he should have known better. Being at the whims of FB anything can be expected. I do hope he’ll delete his account now.
If they censor enough people, those users will stop using their account. It takes a certain critical mass of users to perpetuate interaction. If they run off enough active users, the site will start to implode like Myspace did.
Most people on Facebook aren’t being censored and a lot of the people (not all, obviously) being censored are not exactly the kind who are going to be missed.
You know, the kind that go to Gab or Parler instead.
I would say that’s a misconception.
I was locked out of Facebook after posting cover images of comic books in a group dedicated to comic books. It was relevant content that people in the group wanted to see. There was nothing political in my posts. I’m sure I was targeted because I didn’t follow people or encourage followers. I was blocking certain annoying elements of the site with security plugins. Facebook deemed me to be a bot and made me answer about 6 Captchas in a row to prove I’m not. After successful completion, they locked me out of the site.
Facebook is about collecting info on it’s users and manipulating them based up upon the info collected. Since they had no personal info on me (not even my real name), they fabricated false info about me. After being locked out of my account, I downloaded the info they did have on me. It was all fictitious data so they could sell info to advertisers. They are frauds. Scum of the Earth. They are pathological stalkers online and I feel their activities should be deemed criminal.
Facebook censors by withholding content so you see can’t see it and blocking your posts so that others don’t see them. They profile users psychologically and they know whether their users are more likely to click an ad with a red background or a blue background.
Twitter is no better. Twitter accused me of being a bot after I went into the settings and unchecked all the topics they had me flagged as being interested in. The only difference is that I sent an message to Twitter cussing them out. They apologized and restored access to my account.
those people didnt goto gab or parler because they got banned off facebook only because they either got banned of twitter or because trump got banned from there
