
Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth - AndrewDucker
https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3861716.html
======
xb95
Hi all! Co-owner of Dreamwidth here.

Pretty cool to see my project hit the front page of HN, but definitely a bit
of a /shrug moment on the subject itself. "Facebook gonna Facebook" I think is
approximately how we feel about this.

I know here on HN we're used to hearing stories about scrappy startups trying
to carve a piece of the pie big enough to exit on, but that is pretty much the
exact opposite of what Dreamwidth is. Our motivations are very different, so
this FB block is mostly a curiosity to us.

Dreamwidth is a small, neighborhood corner store kind of site. We're run by a
couple of dedicated part-time staff (who have other jobs/responsibilities in
life -- I personally work for Discord!) and a cadre of amazing volunteers who
donate of their time and energy to make a nice little corner of the Internet
that isn't driven by the cycle of VC and growth and user monetization.

We do not have any goals around growth, we don't advertise, and we ultimately
don't care that much what the other platforms do. Our goal is to give people a
stable home where they don't have to worry about their data being sold, their
writing being monetized. Users choose to pay us for a few more advanced
features (like full text search), and we support ourselves entirely off of
that.

We are home to a large group of online roleplayers, Hugo Award winning fiction
writers, Linux kernel developers, parents, security researchers, artists,
activists, recipe bloggers, educators, and everything in between and around
the edges who would rather work with a service owned and run by people who are
motivated by something other than get-big-and-exit. Large communities of
online roleplayers who get together and build whole worlds on Dreamwidth, who
tell stories together. I'm constantly impressed by the creativity of our
community.

Anyway, it's super cool to see Dreamwidth on the home page here. It's been my
side project for over a decade now, and I'm quite proud of it. Even if
modernizing a 20+ year old Perl project is a hellish undertaking at the best
of times... but we keep going. :)

~~~
Deimorz
_This might come off as a little rude, but it 's sincere advice from someone
who used to work in anti-spam (not at Facebook):_

I had a quick look through Dreamwidth's "latest" page
([https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest](https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest))
earlier today, and a major portion of the posts on there were blatant spam for
things like credit card scams, "Work from home and make $1000/day!", and so
on.

You seem to be hosting a lot of spam, and those spam posts are also far more
likely to be getting linked externally on sites like Facebook, since that's
the reason they're being created.

Because Dreamwidth is effectively free website hosting along with a free new
subdomain for each account, blocking individual subdomains is futile, and it's
difficult for external sites to distinguish between spam and legitimate blogs.

I'm sure Facebook will unblock you fairly soon, but unless you get the spam on
Dreamwidth under control, this will probably happen fairly often with
different sites blocking it. It would be easy to end up with an impression of
Dreamwidth being a spam-hosting site, and decide to block it (either manually
or automatically).

Blogspot has always been in a similar situation and would get blocked from a
lot of sites due to the sheer amount of spam it hosts.

~~~
mindslight
Controlling spam used to be about stopping unwanted messages _sent to users_.
Now it has morphed into this idea that every site has the responsibility of
content-policing their own users, lest what they publish be used to facilitate
spam. Your advice may be pragmatic, but it shows how far we've slid down the
slippery slope.

~~~
jsnell
> Now it has morphed into this idea that every site has the responsibility of
> content-policing their own users, lest what they publish be linked from
> spam.

Not sure what you mean here. The problem Deimorz was bringing up wasn't just
about users writing something, and spammers linking to it. It was that this
site was being used to _host the spam payloads_. By spammers, not by actual
users.

And this is how a lot of the early spam fighting worked: by finding hosts that
allowed sending spam and publishing their IPs on blocklists. All mail traffic
from those IPs, even if legit, would then be rejected by a large proportion of
mail servers that subscribed to these blocklists.

~~~
mindslight
> _this site was being used to host the spam payloads_

Calling these "spam payloads" is incorrect. The spam payloads are on
Faceboot's servers. These are sites that are linked to by the spam, ostensibly
for the purpose of funneling to whatever the spam is trying to market. Trying
to police generic web pages, rather than the spam itself, seems like an
exercise in futility given the basic philosophy of the Internet.

> _And this is how a lot of the early spam fighting worked: by finding hosts
> that allowed sending spam and publishing their IPs on blocklists_

The situation has a similar shape, but there is a distinction as Dreamwidth is
not actively _sending_ spam but rather responding to requests from viewers.
Still, we can look at the outcome of what happened to the email ecosystem -
increased centralization of providers - for a warning of what's to come.

~~~
thoraway1010
Malware and childporn reduction efforts also often go after the hosts of that
content. I'm not sure why calling the folks hosting this stuff what it is
incorrect. Sure, childporn folks don't actually necessarily "send" child porn,
they just respond to requests from viewers. But they host it.

These scam sites are like that - do you really think you can make $30,000 a
week working 30 minutes a day from your home computer if you just send these
idiot $25?

~~~
mindslight
You're just listing the earlier stops on the slippery slope. Make hosts
responsible for policing information when it's viscerally-revolting child
porn. Then make hosts police content when it's directly harmful to people's
computers. Then make hosts police content when it's an attempt to scam.

There's already a call to control political information when it has harmful
effects on society. Next up is "your website was blacklisted because you
allowed a user to link to Plandemic". I agree _Plandemic_ has no redeeming
purpose, but censorship is not the answer.

~~~
thoraway1010
I'm explaining why sites that HOST but do not necessarily send content are
blocked.

I've got no problem with their operation, but YOU are going down a VERY
dangerous and slippery slope by saying I can't block domains that clearly host
trash because they might host something else.

On my network I can block child porn, malware sites, scam sites and even
entertainment sites like youtube. If you are running a service that mixes the
content together, then you may be blocked by folks (like me) who don't have
time to chase down every (free) subdomain you allow scammers to create.

That is my right. Period. Full stop. That is not censorship.

Folks here get censorship confused. The govt does virtually nothing to stop
these scam sites - so they are certainly not being censored. I'm fine if govt
does nothing, as long as communities of people can block these places.

And yes, if you run a site on the internet and don't make it slightly
difficult for scammers to use your site to host crap, then other folks in the
neighborhood will move the heck away from you.

~~~
mindslight
> _Folks here get censorship confused. The govt does virtually nothing to stop
> these scam sites - so they are certainly not being censored_

It seems like _you 're_ getting confused on what censorship is.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship)
. Censorship can be done by the government, and it also can be done by
sufficiently powerful private entities.

Also, nowhere have I argued that anyone shouldn't block whatever they'd like
on their personal infrastructure. Although if you do it to your kids, then you
are indeed _censoring_.

------
corywatilo
The same thing happened to my domain name about a month ago. (I also posted
about it here.) This is happening more and more frequently, and the fact they
block entire domains rather than a specific subdomain is really poor design.

I finally got it unblocked, but only thanks to a former colleague (engineer)
who now works at Facebook. If that didn't work, my next step was going to be
filing a lawsuit, just to try to get their attention.

A summary from spending a month trying to get this fixed:

1\. The "Report" link doesn't actually do anything, or if it does, you have to
get loads of people reporting to surface it to a human.

2\. The best resolution may be through Ads billing, by trying to post an ad
and reporting a problem displaying an ad.

3\. This affects a lot more than just blocking links. It also affects messages
in private DMs (including from a Facebook for Business inbox), links on
Instagram, any Facebook APIs you may be using, and even getting password reset
emails to that domain.

For more context, here's my post: [https://watilo.com/facebooks-community-
standards-censorship-...](https://watilo.com/facebooks-community-standards-
censorship-has-far-reaching-consequences)

~~~
disgruntledphd2
It seems likely that what's happening here is some combination of:

1) Spammers using one domain and multiple sub-domains

2) A poorly calibrated ML model for spam.

It is worth noting that FB get probably the world's largest amount of
spammers, fraudsters and general bad people due to the fact that they have an
absurd amount of users.

Honestly, though, if this stays on HN it will get fixed, but it's deeply
concerning that if this is happening a bunch of times (and it probably is) but
those sites don't appear on HN, then this will not get fixed.

It's also possible that someone has weaponised the FB spam system against
dreamwidth (which seems less likely to be me, to be fair).

~~~
fauigerzigerk
_> It is worth noting that FB get probably the world's largest amount of
spammers, fraudsters and general bad people due to the fact that they have an
absurd amount of users._

Yes, and they make a ton of money from those users as well. So the question is
why the Facebooks and Googles of this world don't have proper procedures in
place to deal with these things in a sensible way.

If a decision gets reversed only after exploding on Hacker News or Reddit it
should be considered a bug.

~~~
jsnell
> If a decision gets reversed only after exploding on Hacker News or Reddit it
> should be considered a bug.

The problem is that we only see the cases that go viral. We don't see the
cases that didn't, and thus can't actually judge how many cases get reversed
via the official escalation channels.

------
geoah
Interesting place, never heard of it before.

> Dreamwidth Studios is an Open Source social networking, content management,
> and personal publishing platform. Our mission in life is to make it easy for
> you to share the things you make, and easy to find the people who are making
> the things you want to enjoy.

> We have all the features you've come to love in social networking sites,
> including privacy and security features, community interaction, content
> aggregation, multimedia support, and more. We're committed to adding
> features that you'll find useful and relevant, as well as working to
> integrate our site with the other Internet services you regularly use.

> Dreamwidth Studios is based upon the LiveJournal codebase offered by
> LiveJournal, Inc. We've taken the LiveJournal server code and updated,
> modernized, and streamlined it -- and we make all of our changes available
> under an Open Source license.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Yeah, it's an actually good blogging site.

Main thing it has against it is the lack of an app.

(And that Facebook has just blocked it)

~~~
rowanG077
The lack of an app is something for it. Literally every app of some website
has the worse experience. Even worse the website will keep begging you to
install their shitty app.

~~~
easton
I'd say Apollo (or Reddit is Fun on Android) is a heck of a lot better than
new Reddit, and about as good as old Reddit. And Google Maps' app beats their
site by a county mile on iOS.

There's no good Hacker News client for mobile though, at least one that's
better than the web page. Not that I'm saying someone should make one either,
the site is responsive as heck.

~~~
bzb3
Apollo is a bad example since Reddit purposely sabotage their website so you
use their app.

It's perfectly possible to write a good Reddit web client; they chose not to

~~~
wolfgke
> It's perfectly possible to write a good Reddit web client; they chose not to

Good for whom? "Good for the user" does not mean "good for Reddit".

~~~
rowanG077
I'm not really sure how you could interpret that comment as anything else then
"Good for the user".

------
ldoughty
Adding my own story to the article... I get where they are coming from...

I had to deal with the Facebook developer platform support recently, it was
(still is) a nightmare... We only have 100 or so Facebook users, but dealing
with their app approval process, review process, and repedative re-review
process, has probably cost me 4 weeks of "maintenance" work in the last year
to keep OAuth working for them.. And here's the best part: we request no
additional scopes! We get first name, last name, email address, profile
picture, the minimum to OAuth... No post read/write, no photo permissions
(aside from profile picture), no friends access, nothing. We are literally the
lowest risk app to end users that you can make on Facebook's platform...

They started a review on us a few weeks ago, we reported saying we needed more
information (their wording was unclear)... They acknowledged the request for
information, then a month later banned us without ever providing the
information. We had an outage for Facebook users for 2-3 days while we waited
for their support to read or appeal again asking for information. It's now
been 7 weeks, and both requests for the same information has not been
answered, I'm afraid they are going to ban us again in a week it two still not
working with us...

Facebook is a nightmare to work with, we have no developers that actually want
to keep working with them. It's offensive to most our developers that we have
to link personal accounts to our work Facebook application.

~~~
heavyset_go
Thanks for sharing this, I was considering using Facebook for OAuth login, but
now I'm not.

------
seesawtron
In the past there was a news about Paypal banning Dreamwidth. Not sure if its
related:

"About six months after opening, PayPal -- our payment processor at the time
-- demanded that we censor some of our users' content (mostly involving people
talking about sex, usually fictionally, in explicit terms) that was legal and
protected speech but that they felt violated their terms for using PayPal."

HN discussion on it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15099761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15099761)

~~~
scarface74
“Protected Speech” means that the _government_ can’t censor it, not private
corporations.

~~~
spacebear
In 2020, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Cloudflare are bigger gatekeepers of
free speech than any government.

~~~
scarface74
_any_ government?

Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by
a theocracy.

Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or
force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.

~~~
searchableguy
China has 1.4 billion people.

Facebook has over 3 billion users.

Gmail has over 2 billion active users. All their products combined probably
have more than 3 billion.

US has 350 million people.

By those numbers alone, aren't tech companies more powerful arbitrators?

But that's a bad metric. We should talk about enforcement rather than raw
numbers. Government's interest and design won't allow it to censor expressions
in the same way that private companies [0] do. Private companies can _filter_
anything and since tech companies are digital, the enforcement itself can
scale a lot more than government. Government maintains some sort of appeal
system while tech companies don't have to.

Algorithms responsible for gmail _filter_ billions of mails daily probably.
Obviously, not all of it can be called censorship as majority of it is spam
but anything wrongfully filtered is _censorship_ , no? That's going to be a
huge number that can't scale offline in enforcement.

0] [https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-
us...](https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-
discrimination/)

[1][https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-
marketing/2019/05...](https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-
marketing/2019/05/shocking-truth-about-how-many-emails-sent)

~~~
scarface74
_Enforcement offline is hard to scale and limited even for china._

You don’t have to tell 1 billion people in China not to say F%%% China”. You
just punish a few and the rest fall in line.

Once you punish a few, the rest self censor.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
Imagine if Facebook or Google started doing this.

"Oh, you're friends with someone who says X? Welp, you must be a Bad User and
your posts will receive a lot less visibility and the validation that you
desire. But if you were to stop interacting with your Bad Friend, you could
become a Good User again."

And oops, "Bad Friend" no longer gets invited to real-life parties because
most people still consider FB the most convenient way to organize them and
people only rarely remember to forward the invites.

~~~
manicdee
It already does work like this with Facebook and Twitter controlling which
posts are displayed for you.

The enforcement works better when you aren’t aware of it. Being covert means
you don’t protest so loudly.

------
cblconfederate
I wonder how long it's going to take for small developers to draw the line and
stop voluntarily feeding the beast that is facebook and other centralized
media companies. The feedback loop is continuously going to be against them,
since they are basically training their users to use social media for
discovery instead of visiting them directly. I moved my former facebook games
away from their platform and even from their login to have peace of mind. A
smaller community is healthier, and it will still be there when ordinary users
get their brains completely fried from online bickering.

~~~
swiley
I think a lot of content producers have solved the problem by creating
presences on many platforms and asking for donations. Developers are in the
position of being able to host their own content (although you lose push
notifications if you tick apple off which is something this site probably
would do.)

------
donohoe
If you use FB's url debugger it gives the message:

"We can't review this website because the content doesn't meet our Community
Standards. If you think this is a mistake, please let us know"

So an unhelpful; start but a start to understanding what may have happened.

Link:
[https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2...](https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fandrewducker.dreamwidth.org%2F3861716.html)

My guess is that FB should have blocked a sub-domain but instead blocked a
whole domain because of a small set os users.

~~~
wcerfgba
Of course you need a Facebook account to use the Sharing Debugger. As if I
needed /another/ reason to hate this website. D:

~~~
thih9
I believe that this kind of unfriendly UX helps companies like Facebook only
in the short term. Long term these minor annoyances add up and people
eventually go to a different platform.

------
axiosgunnar
If Dreamwidth has any aspects of a social network whatsoever, I am sure the AG
preparing anti-trust litigation against Facebook would like to hear about this
blocking.

~~~
bdcravens
Don't most sites have those features? Some of the hate sites out there that
much of the Internet applauds being blocked also have much of the same
features.

------
goatinaboat
Dreamwidth is a blogging site, an offshoot of Livejournal, I would expect
content on it to be across the full spectrum of both opinions and quality.
Banning it as a domain makes about as much sense as banning Wordpress or
Blogspot.

~~~
egypturnash
Facebook has banned Wordpress' autocrossposter for years, nobody following me
on Facebook ever sees any of my posts any more because I just cannot be
bothered to manually cut and paste an excerpt and link to my WP-based site.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Facebook banned automated posting to personal accounts a year or so ago.

You can still manually post links to any site that isn't banned though.

------
AndrewDucker
If anyone knows someone at Facebook who can get an explanation of why, that
would be great.

This is a blogging site with tens of thousands of users, around for years.

------
seesawtron
1\. Is Facebook also blocking creation of new posts with links to Dreamwidth?

2\. Are other Facebook users with posts linking to Dreamwidth also
experiencing this deletion of posts?

Edit: Yes and Yes.

~~~
peterteter
I tried to create a new post including the dreamwidth link, I got no error but
its just not getting posted.

I bet it was added to some spam list automatically because some ppl really
used it for spam.

------
jimnotgym
If you want to be the centre of the world, if you want to be a public utility,
if you want to be the front page of the internet... then you have to have a
proper complaints procedure, a proper independent appeals process. Yes it
would be very expensive, tough luck.

~~~
rocqua
How about federating censorship (/curation).

That is, anyone can pick who gets to censor / curate their stream. And
Facebook just provides the platform. Maybe, for legally required censorship,
the platform can still take action. But for anything else, let people pick
their censor.

~~~
zaptrem
Then Facebook quickly becomes a platform of super-bubbles, and their influence
on humanity becomes 100X worse over night. Content management policies exist
because sometimes the creators of these platforms don't like them being used
for evil.

------
rozab
I'm afraid I can't remember the exact example, but I think about 4 years ago
there was some open-source-y, privacy-focused Facebook alternative that got
blacklisted in a similar way. Private messages containing the URL or name just
wouldn't go through.

~~~
wincy
Based on a previous post like this, it not only disappears the existing
messages but reaches into the past and memory holes every message that’s
contained the link in the past!

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I suspect that DW has some interesting stuff.

At first blush, it looks like LiveJournal 2.0. There's probably some
pretty...interesting stuff, but it's not aggregated and promoted, like FB. It
looks like each account is pretty insular.

~~~
ben_w
That’s exactly what it is — they forked the LJ codebase.

------
josteink
I bet Matthew Garret of Linux Kernel fame is going to be ecstatic about this.

[https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/](https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/)

------
paulgb
This is why I'm so cynical about the Zuckerberg's stated stance on “free
expression”. You can't go around positioning yourself as if you're the last
bastion of free speech online[1] and then turn around and block large swathes
of indie content because they are hosted on a particular domain.

[1]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-
standing-voice-free-expression/)

~~~
luckylion
Those are different things though. You can most likely write whatever you want
to link to on Facebook, so they're not really censoring speech. They censor
some off-platform links.

~~~
paulgb
I could see an argument for this if:

1\. They limited themselves to blocking content that was decidedly harmful
(phishing sites, malware, etc.), AND

2\. They were transparent about what links they blocked and why.

It seems that neither was the case here.

~~~
luckylion
The limitation might be there, but bans are usually not surgical. If you have
a thousand subdomains of some domain hosting spam, you'll likely block the
domain if it's not a major player like wordpress.com.

Transparency would be nice indeed. The argument I keep hearing against it is
that they believe it would help the spammers.

------
sebastien_b
Time to contact your local AG.

~~~
driverdan
About what? FB can block anyone they want for any reason they want.

~~~
kps
About abusing its monopoly power to prevent users from linking to a
competitor.

~~~
rocqua
Interestingly, if FB censors some one/thing that isn't a direct competitor,
that means anti-trust doesn't apply. At the same time, the problem of a forum
essential to public discourse censoring speech persists. Even worse there is
very little appeal possible against the censoring.

So, whilst anti-trust might help sometimes. It is not the best tool here. What
we need is legislation.

------
wcerfgba
I was not aware that Facebook blocked users from posting links to specific
domains. Is the list made public anywhere?

~~~
easton
It's not a public blacklist, but this thingy[0] from another comment seems to
tell you what's up with a specific site if you give it a URL. At least, I
think it does, since you have to sign in with Facebook.

0:
[https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/](https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/)

------
L_226
I just navigated to dreamwidth.org/latest and got a seriously NSFW picture. I
assume this is not normal?

~~~
manicdee
Dream width is where people go to post stuff that isn’t allowed elsewhere.

So while explicit imagery is not the norm, nor is it normative, it’s not
unusual and is to be expected.

------
lrnStats
Reminds me of Apple and Amazon.

These gatekeepers flexing should be a huge red flag, akin to the BP oil spill
in the tech world.

This might be the last straw for me to delete my Facebook. I would be a bad
capitalist if I didn't.

------
llimllib
Reading that page gave me k5 flashbacks

------
mrfusion
What is dreamwidth? Why was it blocked?

------
blumomo
@AndrewDucker: I’m curious to know why you picked the “eye in the pyramid” as
the icon of your post, which is also known as the symbol of the Illuminati.

~~~
AndrewDucker
That's my default post icon. Because it's being silly about the Illuminati. No
real reason it's my default except that it amused me.

------
bzb3
Dreamwidth contains lots of spammy blogs.

~~~
annadane
You think this is a justification to do this? On Hacker News? Really? I do not
understand the mindset of some people

~~~
Barrin92
If it causes them more trouble than it's worth it's understandable. Someone
else pointed out that there was a lot of questionable sexual content on the
site and you can't really expect Facebook to micromanage every subdomain.

~~~
wnoise
I don't see why Facebook needs to censor "questionable" sexual content.
Individual users and groups have adequate tools to control what they
themselves see.

The only point of Facebook's censorship is to control what the willing can
see.

~~~
Barrin92
because asking the average user to fine tune their experience to avoid
questionable sexual content is going to piss a ton of users off who expect
this to be the default experience on the site. So Facebook does a calculation
and the result is that removing that stuff is easier than having a million
people complain about being exposed to it and that's that.

The same reason any other forum or platform moderates their content and
usually removes sexual content, you want the default experience to be good for
the average user on the site.

