Facebook blocks links to Pixelfed, a federated Instagram alternative | Hacker News Reader

Facebook blocks links to Pixelfed, a federated Instagram alternative

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179 pointsboramalper66 comments

I have used facebook probably daily since 2007 - until a few weeks ago a recent phone update moved some icons around and offloaded the facebook app. Where facebook used to be on my home screen was replaced by LI for some reason, and I found that I was for a few days reflexively clicking "linkedin" notifications when I clearly was absent mindedly trying to reach facebook. When I realized what had happened, I decided not to re-install facebook to see if I actually missed it or if it was just a dumb, idle compulsion. Haven't missed it at all! I wouldn't have believed this if I hadn't accidentally gone through this. It had somehow wormed itself into my habits in a really compulsive way that was also not even providing me value, clearly, because now that I think about it more and more, I cannot think of a single reason why I would log into facebook. Even when I occasionally use messenger app, that's entirely separate from the facebook app now and has been for a while, plus whatsapp/telegram/discord is better anyway, so what is my incentive as a user to even log in to facebook? Who is that site even for anymore?

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.

I have similar story. Recently facebook forced me to enable 2-factor auth but adding SMS did not work for me for a whole week and I just deleted the app. Later I opened facebook from mobile browser and added SMS as 2nd factor and now I have opened Facebook from mobile browser only once in more than a week and I don't miss it much. It was the only "social" network I used besides reddit and hacker news

Related ongoing thread:

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)

I'm not sure why this isn't considered anti-competitive behavior. Once a communication company has 1-billion users perhaps we need to classify them as a more of a utility and hold them to stricter standards of openness.

> why this isn't considered anti-competitive behavior

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.

It remains to be seen how big-tech friendly the incoming Trump administration will be, but friendlier than Biden’s would be a low bar to clear.

States are governments too and a lot of them are suing big tech.

Probably why Zuck is getting all cozy with the incoming administration - to see to it that something like this won't happen.

He has three hundred million reasons to "cozy up" to it. Trump believes (and not without evidence) that he lost in 2020 because of $300M+ Zuckerberg spent on electing Biden. Really difficult times could be ahead for Meta - Trump is extremely vindictive. I strongly suspect Musk will be "cozying up" to the next administration similarly in 2028, or outbidding everyone else again. Neither Zuck bucks, nor Musk bucks bode well for democracy, IMO.

> Trump is extremely vindictive

He’s cultivated an aura of vindictiveness. I’m not recalling any great examples of him being unpragmatically vindictive.

Not against businesses, but he did destroy several political dynasties by now: Romneys, Clintons, Bushes, some argue even Obama's minions are dead in the water. In Zuck's case there are plenty of 100% legitimate issues the Trump administration could (and IMO should) legitimately bring up against Meta. Indeed, they could bring up the exact same issues that the Biden administration was already bringing up, but ratchet things up a notch or two. If Zuck insufficiently bends the knee, that's what's going to happen. So far I see his efforts as half-hearted, and I'm not even Trump. Trump would see them as laughable at best, or even insulting.

> he did destroy several political dynasties by now: Romneys, Clintons, Bushes, some argue even Obama's minions are dead in the water

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.

Those dynasties - problematic as they inherently are - have survived presidencies in both parties over the decades. I would argue its destruction and I'm pretty sure folks like Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham when they think no one is listening, would agree. They've bent so far and so deeply to stay afloat.

Cruz and Graham know all too well that they will politically outlive Trump and whoever comes next. They look at each occupant of the White House like it is a future ex-wife, get good prenups, milk it for the good times and wait out for the next one. They could generally care less who is there and they know it, suck up a bit and ride it out :)

Cruz might. Graham won't take the wind-down of the "forever wars" well, and will therefore be ostracized.

One can hope @ein0p!!

the forever wars are not winding down :)

and if graham is pissed all he has to do is wait for 2028 :)

We'll see I guess. Trump at least got us out of Afghanistan. There are early signs that he managed some kind of a (temporary) settlement in Gaza also, even before inauguration. Will he wind down everything? Probably not. But by god, someone should at least try. We can't keep spending trillions we don't have on killing millions of people halfway across globe for no good reason.

you mean Biden got us out of Afghanistan, right? :)

Trump negotiated getting out of Afghanistan, withdrew most of the troops but left Biden with getting the last presence out without any manpower for an orderly exit, which was a very stable genius move on his part. Biden was in a lose lose situation: he could either bring back troops to cover the exit and get everything out (unpopular), or just leave in a messy uncovered exit (also unpopular). It was pretty much lose-lose for him at that point.

Absolutely. Wild, isn't it?

Michael Cohen has a story about the DOJ -

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.

Isn't Facebook's investors the same as the VP? I suspect FB & Whitehouse are closer in ties in 2024 than 2020 or 2016 based on that and less about the red vs blue theatrics of politics.

yep, he could have done a number on hillary but didn't.

In general I feel like social medias tends to downrank links, and I think that's a very bad thing to internet

They definitely do. On both Twitter and Meta related products, posts with links in them get heavily downranked in the algorithm. It's why so many influencers have the link in the first reply instead.

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?

Downranking is bad, outright blocking is far worse.

webrings used to be the essence of the internet. And then somebody business minded decided why should I help ANY other website.

I have never heard of Pixelfed before. Seems to support ActivityPub, which is nice.

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelfed

Yup, it's cross-compatible with mastodon for the most part. It's pretty neat how they inter-operate

It's curious how even when you report things that egregiously should be taken down, they're not

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

Facebook also exposes less of a business page now unless you are logged in. This is a problem because for some reason many businesses only update their Facebook page and not their website. Social media has become increasingly hostile and closed off.

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.

I am happy to avoid any business, club or anything that thinks it's reasonable to have their opening hours, or any information on Facebook only (or Instagram for that matter).

If I am not supposed to know, why even try.

I'm pretty sure the extra overhead of maintaining a website (/equivalent) is a few orders of magnitude more than losing out on the 1% tech-amish.

Tech is hard, it's difficult for us to understand how hard.

I think you would be suprised just how many people are no longer active on social media anymore. I am honestly not sure who still uses Facebook regularly.

I don't disagree.

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.

So could they use any other obscure platform. Ex. Restaurants are prone for not having their own proper/updated websites, but there are thousands of website builders just for that. There is zero reason to use Facebook as business website if your target is to make business with anyone else than Facebook users.

Your average person is incredibly technologically illiterate. Even something as simple as learning a new basic, streamlined CMS is going to be a lot. Using Facebook, which they mostly already know how to use is much easier.

The majority of people I know does not have a Facebook account. They are most likely never finding the business in first place.

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?

So much for free speech, huh

It's free speech, but only if Uncle Zuck agrees with it.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t have heard about it if it wasn’t for the block :)

Streisand's effect at its finest :)

Free speech has never prevented a private company from policing their own platform and Facebook especially does not promise "free speech".

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

You seem to be referring to the United States' First Amendment, whereas freedom of speech is a western liberal value. The parent comment was pointing out that Zuckerberg does not uphold the value.

What free speech? Facebook always reserved the right to control what is published on their platform. Facebook has never been about "freedoms" of any kind, why is this recent news surprising in the least?

Oh boy my favorite HN comment

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

We are literally less than a week since Zuck fired all the fact checkers because he said Facebook and Instagram were now all in on “free speech”.

Wrt/ free speech, see the official announcement for yourself:

"It's time to get back to our roots around free expression."

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/its-time-to-get-back-to...

Literal quote from Zuck in just the past week regarding the changes he wants for his shitty platform:

“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.

That’s interesting. They obviously see it as a legitimate strategic threat.

Nobody commenting here wants to hear it but this is almost certainly just a bug or ai misbehavior. Some new domain pops up and gets flagged as being associated with spam or bad content. It’ll be silently fixed but nobody will hear about it or change their mind.

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.

LinkedIn does this. Posts with links can get hidden from other users.

https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-admits-it-deleted...

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.

Could be an error but it also means they have the worst automated flagging system of all time

it's so weird that it's become normalised for social media sites to just ban links to competitors. I don't recall this being common until Twitter started doing it in the last couple of years, and now it's seemingly ubiquitous.

I don’t like Zuck because, IMO, he’s a fraud. I don’t use his platform. I feel sorry for people who are forced to use FB for business or social reasons, such as students who need to stay in touch with their classmates… Facebook is just an ugly side of the Internet.

Unfortunately people stopped posting on Craigslist, and offerup is almost as dead. Facebook marketplace and local free stuff groups are the best places to find used goods.

Facebook Marketplace and the niche groups are great. Too bad forums are dying, it’s still much better than a discord chat.

OK, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

We're trying for a high information/indignation ratio and comments like this are the other way around.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fuck the world

No need to, just Meta. This is Meta's fault

Reply on news.ycombinator.com