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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

We're half way there already. It always hits me whenever I am doing some mapping for OpenStreetMap and I'm looking up local businesses without their own internet presence. They use Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. for their digital calling card. I normally don't use Facebook (or Instagram, and gave up on X) and have no account there, and every time I follow one of those links, you get some info, and then you get a dialogue screen telling you to make an account or get lost, or you just get some obscure error.

I don't mind registering an account for private communities, but for stuff which people put up thinking it is just going to be publicly visible it's really annoying.

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> ... but for stuff which people put up thinking it is just going to be publicly visible ...

I don't think these business owners really understand. Most normies just think everyone has a Facebook/Instagram account and can't even imagine a world where that is not the case.

I agree with you that it is extremely frustrating.

>Most normies just think everyone has a Facebook/Instagram account and can't even imagine a world where that is not the case.

The people without a basic internet presence aren't likely to be customers anyway so it's not a huge loss. It's trivial to setup a basic account for any site that doesn't contain any personal data you want to keep hidden, if you aren't willing to do that, you're in a tiny minority.

I don't have a Facebook or Instagram account, but I definitely eat tacos and I was put off when I couldn't see a new taco place's opening hours without an instagram accoutn.

I'm not sure why you think why people who don't have a Facebook account wouldn't eat at restaurants

You're in a tiny enough minority that it doesn't matter to them. It's like Amish complaining that they can't use a drive-thru window or something. Except it'd take you 30 seconds, one time, to solve your problem forever.

> Except it'd take you 30 seconds, one time, to solve your problem forever.

And those 30 seconds are a harrowing pit of despair out of which comes the rest of your life filled with advertisements, tracking, second-guessing, and accusations of being a hypocrite.

I haven't had any of that just from having an FB and IG account. I honestly forgot I had an IG account for a long time until someone shared something with me and I realized I had one.

To be fair, they've been shown to still track unauthenticated users via fingerprinting and mapping it to known data from your friends who do have Facebook and upload this data (phone numbers, first, last name, etc). NOT having an account doesn't mean you aren't being tracked.

Not that it means you should just make an account to make their tracking easier...

I’m a little optimistic here. Step by small step lately the more normal people in my life have been joining this demographic.

There are ways to access public Instagram content without an account, gallery-dl for eg works most of the time. Tweeper can also be useful.

https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl https://git.ao2.it/tweeper.git

> It's trivial to setup a basic account for any site that doesn't contain any personal data you want to keep hidden

It's equally trivial for a restaurant to set up a custom domain with their own 2-page website (overview and menu) on any of a hundred platforms that provide this service.

Most of these services are not free like FB, but any business that can afford a landline phone can afford a real website.

> Most of these services are not free like FB

There are free ones as well, just as a subdomain (something.wordpress.com or something.wix.com), not a full top level custom domain.

>It's equally trivial for a restaurant to set up a custom domain with their own 2-page website (overview and menu) on any of a hundred platforms that provide this service.

Sure but they don't want to. If you want to see the menu they have online you need to follow their rules, not your own.

And if they want me as a customer, they have to follow _my_ rules.

Obviously the restaurant has enough other customers and I have enough other restaurants to go to, so we both will be fine.

>And if they want me as a customer, they have to follow _my_ rules.

Sure, but putting their menu behind a trivial to access account shows they don't want you as a customer. You're the one complaining, not them.

There's no "basic Internet presence" for an individual. If you think it through, every attempt to make that a thing has wound up being MySpace, Facebook, or the next dumpster.

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