To hell with Facebook

[Max Rockatansky]

Bluesky sounds like an old school chewing tobacco brand name.

[LilianaUwU]

You're better off on Bluesky than on a platform owned by Elon Musk.

[Rothman]

My impression is that there just isn't a lot going on over on BlueSky

[bugo]

Bluesky is not a replacement for Facebook. They are nothing alike. I didn't get it when some of my friends said they were moving from Facebook to Bluesky, because they aren't the same at all. Bluesky is more like a Twitter that isn't run by a fascist. Nobody has come up with a good Facebook replacement. It would need to mimic Facebook features like groups and pages, but without the AI police force randomly enforcing arbitrary rules that make no sense.

"Facebook jail" is a problem for many reasons. For some users, it is their only mode of communication with the outside world. It's not hard to imagine a person living in poverty who can't afford phone service who steals wifi from the neighbor and does all of their communication on Facebook Messenger. Facebook's bans are random and don't always disable the same features, but sometimes it does block the victim from using Messenger. It they had an emergency, they wouldn't have a way to contact anybody and it could lead to somebody dying or worse. Facebook is irresponsible and should not be allowed to run its own prison system. After all, AT&T doesn't ban me from making phone calls for 3+ days because I yelled at somebody or criticized Zuckerberg's orange, porcine cult leader. They are definitely politically biased, because I have reported posts that actually were offensive, but they never remove them. Somebody told me, a person who has suffered with suicidal ideation for most of my life, that I should kill myself. I reported it, and they said it didn't violate Facebook "community standards".

I got banned from Fashboot for a few days for saying, verbatim, "You resemble that remark." I'm not even joking. Gorilla Monsoon used to say that to Bobby Heenan on WWF programming in the 1980s, and it basically means "What you just said about somebody could easily be used to describe you." I challenged the ban but it said I was violating "community standards". That isn't even remotely offensive in any way to anybody. Meta uses AI for moderation, which is irresponsible because AI is a primitive, half-baked technology that isn't developed enough to be used to make important decisions.

I would leave Facebook, but I would lose connections with a lot of friends, probably for life. I would even give up the groups that I moderate if it weren't for my friends. Hopefully something will come along soon and obliterate it. If you think Facebook is too big to fail, you didn't live through the Myspace era. It wasn't as big as Facebook is today, but it was ubiquitous and extremely popular, but Facebook came along and Myspace died a quick death. It's time for the same thing to happen to Fashboot.

[vdeane]

My impression is that there just isn't a lot going on over on BlueSky

I suspect a lot of that is because journalists, celebrities, corporations, and government organizations refuse to move off Twitter/X for some reason.

[Beltway]

Interesting. I have have posted "politically incorrect" material on Facebook since 2009 and have never been banned or suspended and only got one warning. I suppose I have posted to over 50 groups over time.

Probably because: it is not often enough or inflammatory enough to be on their radar screen.

[Molandfreak]

My impression is that there just isn't a lot going on over on BlueSky

I suspect a lot of that is because journalists, celebrities, corporations, and government organizations refuse to move off Twitter/X for some reason.

A lot of them are on threads, though. It seems like public figures only care about independent social media when they have enough of a beef with their former corporate employers that they work the underground angle pretty well.

[Molandfreak]

Interesting. I have have posted "politically incorrect" material on Facebook since 2009 and have never been banned or suspended and only got one warning. I suppose I have posted to over 50 groups over time.

Probably because: it is not often enough or inflammatory enough to be on their radar screen.

I think Facebook is just fine with any AI-generated content you post. 

[bugo]

Interesting. I have have posted "politically incorrect" material on Facebook since 2009 and have never been banned or suspended and only got one warning. I suppose I have posted to over 50 groups over time.

Yeah, and your politics line up with Zuckerberg's much more than mine do (which is nearly zero percent of the time). They will absolutely silence you if you have the "wrong" opinions.

[SSOWorld]

Easy solution.

Don't post political commentary on social media.

[Beltway]

Interesting. I have have posted "politically incorrect" material on Facebook since 2009 and have never been banned or suspended and only got one warning. I suppose I have posted to over 50 groups over time.

Yeah, and your politics line up with Zuckerberg's much more than mine do (which is nearly zero percent of the time). They will absolutely silence you if you have the "wrong" opinions.

Platforms don't moderate based on whether someone agrees with Mark Zuckerberg personally -- they moderate based on behavioral signals, automated detection, user reports, and policy triggers.

People across the political spectrum get suspended every day, and the biggest predictor isn't ideology but things like: how often your posts get mass‑reported, whether you use flagged keywords or phrasing, whether you post in high‑conflict groups, whether you've tripped automated filters before, whether you argue with people who weaponize the report button.

Someone who posts "politically incorrect" material but avoids flame‑wars, avoids certain keywords, and doesn't get mass‑reported can go years without a strike. Someone else can get hit quickly if they're in contentious groups or if other users target them with coordinated reporting.

It's not about "the wrong opinions." It's about how the moderation system is triggered, and those triggers are mostly mechanical, not ideological.

[Scott5114]

I've found Discord to be a poor substitute, despite belonging to about a dozen servers.  Discord doesn't lend itself to multiple simultaneous discussions as well as the forum structures on here and elsewhere, despite Discord's channels structure.

Discord sort of wants to be a forum replacement, but the 2000's internet service it actually replaces is IRC.

As for Facebook/Stag Ram/Meta—If It Zucks It Sucks.

[JayhawkCO]

Facebook is 99% for Marketplace and that's it.

[cahwyguy]

Interesting. I have have posted "politically incorrect" material on Facebook since 2009 and have never been banned or suspended and only got one warning. I suppose I have posted to over 50 groups over time.

Yeah, and your politics line up with Zuckerberg's much more than mine do (which is nearly zero percent of the time). They will absolutely silence you if you have the "wrong" opinions.

My politics don't line up with Zuck's (I'm decidedly progressive), and a lot^H^H^Hfair amount of what I post is political, plus random stuff and sharing my highway stuff. That said, I am never abusive to people, and I do my best to verify what I post. I limit how much I post to at most a few posts on a given days.

I don't know that I've crossed the invisible line, but I'll be careful what I say because bots and net scrapers have ears :-), and who knows what (not who) is reading these posts.

But that said: I find FB useful to keep up with my various circles of friends (not all roadgeeks). I find I get more comments on FB. I never get comments or responses from friends on Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, X, or Tumblr (the other places I post), nor on the really old-school Dreamwidth (which is RSS-fed to Livejournal, where I started on social media -- I don't use my LJ account anymore because of Russian ownership and LJ being now under the Russian legal structure)

Yes, I'm a boomer, which is why you don't find me on Discord, Twitch, TikTok, Youtube, or all these other newfangled things (I'm also not into recording video -- I don't have the patience to sit through videos).

That said, #insert <obligatory-get-off-my-lawn> and #insert <obligatory-USENET-has-gone-to-hell-since-we-let-the-AOL-folks-on>

[GaryV]

Easy solution.

Don't post political commentary on social media.

Tell my wife's relatives that. She often opens a conversation with, "Look what aunt/cousin posted now."

[kphoger]

Why hasn't anybody filed a class action lawsuit against Meta over "Facebook jail"?

On what grounds?

Facebook started going downhill when they opened it up to the general public. It wasn't the breaking up of the homogeneous society of students and recent grads that killed it, but the quest to milk as much money from it as possible and a lack of concern about user feedback.

It wasn't long before the feed stopped being a feed, and being a highlights package.

Facebook went downhill when we started seeing posts that weren't made by our friends.

[hbelkins]

I run Facebook and X/Twitter accounts for work. Our FB account gets much more traffic than our Twitter account. We have 1.9K followers on X and 33.4K followers on Facebook. I started our Twitter account first and followed up with Facebook about a year later (long before the state adopted a statewide account and made the districts set up accounts) and our Facebook account took off like gangbusters, while our Twitter account has been stagnant in the number of followers for quite some time.

Plus, X still limits the number of characters you can post unless you have a paid account. Facebook doesn't have such a limit. That's why Facebook is still superior.

[cahwyguy]

Plus, X still limits the number of characters you can post unless you have a paid account. Facebook doesn't have such a limit. That's why Facebook is still superior.

It's one reason I abhor X. Bluesky also has a character limit. Threads may. Mastodon does, but it is large. It's a real pain if you can't say anything concisely.

[Beltway]

Facebook went downhill when we started seeing posts that weren't made by our friends.

Happening in 2008 when I got on the app. and thenceforth.

That can be a problem when you see opinions posted on your screen from a non-friend. For example, 9/11 Truthers, Kennedy conspiros, "chemtrails," flying saucers, etc.

[CoreySamson]

My impression is that there just isn't a lot going on over on BlueSky

Well, if everyone on the platform generally agrees about everything, that doesn't really present a lot of opportunity for discussion, which is kinda one of the points of social media. I'll leave it at that.

I like Instagram. It's basically the only social media I use anymore.

[Molandfreak]

My impression is that there just isn't a lot going on over on BlueSky

Well, if everyone on the platform generally agrees about everything, that doesn't really present a lot of opportunity for discussion, which is kinda one of the points of social media. I'll leave it at that.

I like Instagram. It's basically the only social media I use anymore.

This goes both ways. It's why alt platforms such as gab, parler, and truth social are wastelands which aren't really the bastions of free speech that they claim to be.

Instagram and YouTube are pretty fun, and the folks I care about most are active on Instagram—which is what Facebook was originally supposed to be. I might have seen the appeal of TikTok a little more if I were 5 years younger.

[Rushmeister]

Facebook?  Never heard of it. Whatever it is, its name sounds really stupid.

[kphoger]

That can be a problem when you see opinions posted on your screen from a non-friend. For example, 9/11 Truthers, Kennedy conspiros, "chemtrails," flying saucers, etc.

"So-and-so #1 commented on So-and-so #2's post that you haven't seen."
And you don't know who So-and-so #2 even is.

[formulanone]

...which aren't really the bastions of free speech that they claim to be...

Everyone wants speech to be free until they are fed up with anyone and every-bot exercising that same right.

[Beltway]

Well, if everyone on the platform generally agrees about everything, that doesn't really present a lot of opportunity for discussion, which is kinda one of the points of social media. I'll leave it at that.

On the internet, that means that people start arguing over trivia.