Facebook took down the pages of a lot of legit people I know and follow. So did Twitter. The solution is not better AI or blocking, it's for people in tech to start encouraging others to go back to the way we use to find data.
Are you using an RSS reader? If not, you should be. Don't use those useless YouTube subscriptions, but use the RSS channel feed. Tell people about RSS. "You remember Google reader, well there are some great alternatives like Feedly and Newsblur .. and you can export all your feeds if you ever want to switch and they never block anything or change the order in which you view things like Facebook/Twitter."
Are you on Mastodon or run an instance? You should and encourage other people to find an instance. If you know how, you can run your own for your friends and family.
The solution is for people in tech that know how to latch onto, run and encourage more distributed systems of getting our news, blogs and entertainment that don't filter things for us.
Carey Wedler wasn't banned from Facebook, but theAntiMedia, which is a left-wing, pro-Russia version of Infowars, was. (I guess Wedler lost her Twitter account?)
Interestingly, Facebook actually got dinged from real news outlets because its algorithm was ranking stories from theAntiMedia (and other conspiracy sites) higher than those of actual journalists during events like the Vegas shooting. So that might have played into it.
Punk Rock Libertarians is a group a colleague of mine ran for many years. They live-streamed video/podcasts every week and had an active posting and discussion-based community. They were removed without notice and for seemingly ambiguous reasons. Their group was a community in the vein of what, in my opinion, is not much different than a particular dog breed community group I belong to on Facebook. Meanwhile, I have made numerous requests for Facebook to remove a clearly non-existent person claiming to work for my company who regularly attempts to connect with me and other employees. Facebook does not respond and no action has been taken.
It is the same; they were “re-instated” after a lot of complaining and media interviews, but had to start again from zero followers. The 5k followers they have now is from the last few weeks and is orders of magnitude fewer than what they had prior to deletion. Their content was not restored either.
I can’t tell if your question is based in simple curiosity or implies some form of skepticism that mistakes were made or that problems actually exist.
I thought about running a Mastodon instance in my VPS since i do not really like the idea of relying on others to decide what i should or should not be able to see, but i ended up changing my mind once i saw what it actually needs to run... for a service that is essentially flinging short pieces of text around every now and then, it has way too high requirements and too many dependencies. I run a web site, a bunch of repositories, email, gopher, ssh and a bunch of other stuff on my VPS yet i barely scratch 200MB of RAM use (and most of it is spamassasin) whereas i'm not even sure it fits Mastodon's minimum requirements. If i try it i have a feeling it'll take over the entire thing.
If there was a server-only (no web-based client), super lightweight version that talked the Mastodon protocol and didn't require much in terms of functionality, i might have tried it. It kinda sounds like Go was made for projects like this, so i hope someone eventually makes one :-P.
Mastodon is really easy to run via Docker containers. I use the official container with three instances (web, streaming, sidekiq), a postgres container, an elastic search container and a redis container. I wrote these scripts to help bring it up, but you could do the same thing with Terraform + docker-compose:
It's super easy to run compared to Plreoma (which took me forever to Dockerize, the dockerfiles are in the same project). Years ago this was the problem with Diaspora too, but Docker has made this problem a lot easier.
I even have a container that backs up my volumes and database to Backblaze. If you want easy, cheap hosting, there's Masto.host.
Edit: I run on a $10 Vultr instance with some additional block storage and currently support <10 users without issue.
I already have a VPS, i do not really want to use another one just for a single program (imagine if everything i wanted to run needed its own VPS).
Also i do not really want to run docker in there... aren't dockers VMs themselves? Isn't this running a VM in a VM? Doesn't that kill any sort of performance?
TBH as i wrote above what i'd prefer is some self-contained binary i drop somewhere in my VPS and have it work automatically. See Fossil SCM and Gogs as a couple of examples for what i'm looking for.
Docker is NOT a VM. Anything in a Docker container runs with the exact same performance as a service installed on your system. Docker does introduce problems, but performance is not one of them. I've done a pretty detailed post on how Docker works over here:
Are you using an RSS reader? If not, you should be. Don't use those useless YouTube subscriptions, but use the RSS channel feed. Tell people about RSS. "You remember Google reader, well there are some great alternatives like Feedly and Newsblur .. and you can export all your feeds if you ever want to switch and they never block anything or change the order in which you view things like Facebook/Twitter."
Are you on Mastodon or run an instance? You should and encourage other people to find an instance. If you know how, you can run your own for your friends and family.
The solution is for people in tech that know how to latch onto, run and encourage more distributed systems of getting our news, blogs and entertainment that don't filter things for us.