16 ms·

Facebook has blocked Dreamwidth

433 points by AndrewDucker 6y ago

wcerfgba 6y ago
I was not aware that Facebook blocked users from posting links to specific domains. Is the list made public anywhere?
- z9e 6y ago
  I heard they are doing it with Bitchute now, I wonder if there’s an actual list somewhere as well.
- easton 6y ago
  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/
- seesawtron 6y ago
  Sure, they block most of the porn websites or mirror websites hosting copyright content from posts or private messages.
- strstr 6y ago
  This is typically used for anti-spam/anti-malware. FB has a lot of automation to try to stop obviously malicious content. Just, sometimes, it hits things that aren't malicious. I'm most familiar with the malicious links that, when you click them, cause you to spam your friends with the same link. People don't notice this automation exists, except when it doesn't work. Then they either complain "Why didn't XYZ get caught! This is obviously spam! I could write better automation." or "OMG they banned dreamwidth!". It's possible they extended this (or something similar) to filter out sites with hate speech/"community guideline violations". And in that case some sub-domain of dreamwidth posted something horrible. And then the automation slammed the hammer on the whole domain.
donohoe 6y ago
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%2Fandrewducker.dreamwidth.org%2F3861716.html https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2... 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 6y ago
  Of course you need a Facebook account to use the Sharing Debugger. As if I needed /another/ reason to hate this website. D:
  - thih9 6y ago
    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.
- swiley 6y ago
  Why would you need a URL debugger? What’s to debug about a URL?
  - zerocrates 6y ago
    I believe that thing does stuff like making sure Facebook can access the link and checking OpenGraph tags and so on, so you can see how Facebook will "preview" links to your site if people post them.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  They probably have some threshold for rolling the block up to the domain, and dreamwidth hit it. Alternatively, it was a fat-finger.
rozab 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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!
sebastien_b 6y ago
Time to contact your local AG.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- driverdan 6y ago
  About what? FB can block anyone they want for any reason they want.
  - kps 6y ago
    About abusing its monopoly power to prevent users from linking to a competitor.
    - rocqua 6y ago
      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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
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 6y ago
  That’s exactly what it is — they forked the LJ codebase.
blumomo 6y ago
@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 6y ago
  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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AndrewDucker 6y ago
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.
geoah 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
      - peterteter 6y ago
        Maps is a good example, it bad on mobile because they made it bad, to force you to use the app. Its still useable but it sucks. Thats a development I often see.
cblconfederate 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.)
- indymike 6y ago
  Personally, I've been burnt twice by Facebook, and I'm not ever planning on building anything on Facebook. First time, it was being unable to even get access to the jobs API (we had some fortune 500 customers that wanted use to help them do jobs on Facebook the right way) and the second time, it was arbitrary bans of pages, leading to our just shutting down any operations that were dependent of Facebook. Oh, and then there was the night I caught a hacker trying to buy $36,000 in ads via a chat agent's account. I'm still waiting for a call from Facebook support on that one.
axiosgunnar 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
seesawtron 6y ago
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.
- mannschott 6y ago
  Yes, facebook is blocking the creation of new posts with links to Dreamwidth. Or at least, they did so when I attempted to create a post containing a link to the post under discussion here about 5 minutes ago. I am located in Austria if that makes any difference.
- peterteter 6y ago
  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.
bzb3 6y ago
Dreamwidth contains lots of spammy blogs.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- andybak 6y ago
  So does the internet in general. It's still poor form to block entire platforms without warning.
  - jopsen 6y ago
    Not really... I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook just blocks an entire domain when abuse report incidents hits some threshold. I'm not saying it's ideal, but I understand how it got this. DW should be on: https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/ And maybe FB moderation should consider the public suffix list. Another solution is to moderate content on your domain. Or require users have separate domains.
    - kps 6y ago
      > DW should be on: https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/ If only there were some universally supported distributed cached database of domain properties.
  - seesawtron 6y ago
    Recently Indian government blocked Tik-Tok. Does anyone know if they gave a warning to the users or the app developers? One can argue that governments should have the right to censorship when its a matter of urgency or emergency or national security (though this is debatable), does the same power lie with Facebook (or any other platform) to exercise a censorship on its users? It goes back to the big debate whether they are accountable for what gets shared on their platform.
    - danaris 6y ago
seesawtron 6y ago
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
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  demanded that we censor some of our users' content (mostly involving people talking about sex, usually fictionally, in explicit terms Livejournal was a hotbed of dubious fanfic (shall we say) in which one or more characters was underage. Maybe such a thing is technically not illegal but even so, many left that platform once it started to develop a reputation for it. Then it went bust and was sold to a Russian company, it is still used for normal blogging in Russia.
  - leereeves 6y ago
    > Dreamwidth [is] what's known as a "code fork" of LiveJournal: the software that runs LiveJournal was free and open source software, licensed under the GNU GPL, which meant anyone could copy it and improve it. Sounds like Dreamwidth is an entirely different site from Livejournal, it just uses the same open source code. How does dubious fanfic on Livejournal relate to the banning of Dreamwidth? If that fanfic migrated to Dreamwidth, why not just say there was dubious fanfic on Dreamwidth?
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Many users migrated wholesale.
      - jimhefferon 6y ago
        From Livejournal to Dreamwidth? Did they bring the dubious content with them?
goatinaboat 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
paulgb 6y ago
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/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...
- luckylion 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
corywatilo 6y ago
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-has-far-reaching-consequences https://watilo.com/facebooks-community-standards-censorship-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  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).
  - Buge 6y ago
    I would expect email to have worse spam than Facebook, because Facebook controls who can make accounts. An email provider has no control over who can make accounts to send emails to the provider's users.
josteink 6y ago
I bet Matthew Garret of Linux Kernel fame is going to be ecstatic about this. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/ https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/
ldoughty 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing this, I was considering using Facebook for OAuth login, but now I'm not.
xb95 6y ago
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. :)
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Super cool to have people with a mission(other than optimizing KPI for profit). It wasn’t obvious for me how to discover quality content though, any words on how to use this site or how to think about it? Do we need to know people beforehand that publish things that we want to follow?
  - xb95 6y ago
jimnotgym 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
lrnStats 6y ago
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.
mrfusion 6y ago
What is dreamwidth? Why was it blocked?
charliebrownau 6y ago
Fakebook like most mainsteam are Global left poltical arms for the state and NWO 2030 Take it with a badge of honor that they blocked/banned your site from their platform It admits that your right, correct and have factual truth on your side/site
charliebrownau 6y ago
Just checked, more wankers that support "diversity and inclusive" and anti merit/hard work Shame I enjoyed using LJ back in the day Just another case of the left eating its own i guess
llimllib 6y ago
Reading that page gave me k5 flashbacks
L_226 6y ago
I just navigated to dreamwidth.org/latest and got a seriously NSFW picture. I assume this is not normal?
- AndrewDucker 6y ago
  It's certainly unusual. But I very rarely go to "latest". I tend to read "friends" or a subset thereof.
- manicdee 6y ago
  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.

433 points by AndrewDucker 6y ago

wcerfgba 6y ago

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

z9e 6y ago
I heard they are doing it with Bitchute now, I wonder if there’s an actual list somewhere as well.
easton 6y ago
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/
seesawtron 6y ago
Sure, they block most of the porn websites or mirror websites hosting copyright content from posts or private messages.
strstr 6y ago
This is typically used for anti-spam/anti-malware. FB has a lot of automation to try to stop obviously malicious content. Just, sometimes, it hits things that aren't malicious. I'm most familiar with the malicious links that, when you click them, cause you to spam your friends with the same link. People don't notice this automation exists, except when it doesn't work. Then they either complain "Why didn't XYZ get caught! This is obviously spam! I could write better automation." or "OMG they banned dreamwidth!". It's possible they extended this (or something similar) to filter out sites with hate speech/"community guideline violations". And in that case some sub-domain of dreamwidth posted something horrible. And then the automation slammed the hammer on the whole domain.

donohoe 6y ago

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%2Fandrewducker.dreamwidth.org%2F3861716.html https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2... 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 6y ago
Of course you need a Facebook account to use the Sharing Debugger. As if I needed /another/ reason to hate this website. D:
- thih9 6y ago
  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.
swiley 6y ago
Why would you need a URL debugger? What’s to debug about a URL?
- zerocrates 6y ago
  I believe that thing does stuff like making sure Facebook can access the link and checking OpenGraph tags and so on, so you can see how Facebook will "preview" links to your site if people post them.
disgruntledphd2 6y ago
They probably have some threshold for rolling the block up to the domain, and dreamwidth hit it. Alternatively, it was a fat-finger.

rozab 6y ago

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 6y ago
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!

sebastien_b 6y ago

Time to contact your local AG.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
driverdan 6y ago
About what? FB can block anyone they want for any reason they want.
- kps 6y ago
  About abusing its monopoly power to prevent users from linking to a competitor.
  - rocqua 6y ago
    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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

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 6y ago
That’s exactly what it is — they forked the LJ codebase.

blumomo 6y ago

@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 6y ago
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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

AndrewDucker 6y ago

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.

geoah 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
    - peterteter 6y ago
      Maps is a good example, it bad on mobile because they made it bad, to force you to use the app. Its still useable but it sucks. Thats a development I often see.

cblconfederate 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.)
indymike 6y ago
Personally, I've been burnt twice by Facebook, and I'm not ever planning on building anything on Facebook. First time, it was being unable to even get access to the jobs API (we had some fortune 500 customers that wanted use to help them do jobs on Facebook the right way) and the second time, it was arbitrary bans of pages, leading to our just shutting down any operations that were dependent of Facebook. Oh, and then there was the night I caught a hacker trying to buy $36,000 in ads via a chat agent's account. I'm still waiting for a call from Facebook support on that one.

axiosgunnar 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.

seesawtron 6y ago

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.

mannschott 6y ago
Yes, facebook is blocking the creation of new posts with links to Dreamwidth. Or at least, they did so when I attempted to create a post containing a link to the post under discussion here about 5 minutes ago. I am located in Austria if that makes any difference.
peterteter 6y ago
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.

bzb3 6y ago

Dreamwidth contains lots of spammy blogs.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
andybak 6y ago
So does the internet in general. It's still poor form to block entire platforms without warning.
- jopsen 6y ago
  Not really... I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook just blocks an entire domain when abuse report incidents hits some threshold. I'm not saying it's ideal, but I understand how it got this. DW should be on: https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/ And maybe FB moderation should consider the public suffix list. Another solution is to moderate content on your domain. Or require users have separate domains.
  - kps 6y ago
    > DW should be on: https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/ If only there were some universally supported distributed cached database of domain properties.
- seesawtron 6y ago
  Recently Indian government blocked Tik-Tok. Does anyone know if they gave a warning to the users or the app developers? One can argue that governments should have the right to censorship when its a matter of urgency or emergency or national security (though this is debatable), does the same power lie with Facebook (or any other platform) to exercise a censorship on its users? It goes back to the big debate whether they are accountable for what gets shared on their platform.
  - danaris 6y ago

seesawtron 6y ago

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

goatinaboat 6y ago
demanded that we censor some of our users' content (mostly involving people talking about sex, usually fictionally, in explicit terms Livejournal was a hotbed of dubious fanfic (shall we say) in which one or more characters was underage. Maybe such a thing is technically not illegal but even so, many left that platform once it started to develop a reputation for it. Then it went bust and was sold to a Russian company, it is still used for normal blogging in Russia.
- leereeves 6y ago
  > Dreamwidth [is] what's known as a "code fork" of LiveJournal: the software that runs LiveJournal was free and open source software, licensed under the GNU GPL, which meant anyone could copy it and improve it. Sounds like Dreamwidth is an entirely different site from Livejournal, it just uses the same open source code. How does dubious fanfic on Livejournal relate to the banning of Dreamwidth? If that fanfic migrated to Dreamwidth, why not just say there was dubious fanfic on Dreamwidth?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Many users migrated wholesale.
    - jimhefferon 6y ago
      From Livejournal to Dreamwidth? Did they bring the dubious content with them?

goatinaboat 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

paulgb 6y ago

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/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...

luckylion 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.

corywatilo 6y ago

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-has-far-reaching-consequences https://watilo.com/facebooks-community-standards-censorship-...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
disgruntledphd2 6y ago
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).
- Buge 6y ago
  I would expect email to have worse spam than Facebook, because Facebook controls who can make accounts. An email provider has no control over who can make accounts to send emails to the provider's users.

josteink 6y ago

I bet Matthew Garret of Linux Kernel fame is going to be ecstatic about this. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/ https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/

ldoughty 6y ago

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 6y ago
Thanks for sharing this, I was considering using Facebook for OAuth login, but now I'm not.

xb95 6y ago

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. :)

mrtksn 6y ago
Super cool to have people with a mission(other than optimizing KPI for profit). It wasn’t obvious for me how to discover quality content though, any words on how to use this site or how to think about it? Do we need to know people beforehand that publish things that we want to follow?
- xb95 6y ago

jimnotgym 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

lrnStats 6y ago

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.

mrfusion 6y ago

What is dreamwidth? Why was it blocked?

charliebrownau 6y ago

Fakebook like most mainsteam are Global left poltical arms for the state and NWO 2030 Take it with a badge of honor that they blocked/banned your site from their platform It admits that your right, correct and have factual truth on your side/site

charliebrownau 6y ago

Just checked, more wankers that support "diversity and inclusive" and anti merit/hard work Shame I enjoyed using LJ back in the day Just another case of the left eating its own i guess

llimllib 6y ago

Reading that page gave me k5 flashbacks

L_226 6y ago

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

AndrewDucker 6y ago
It's certainly unusual. But I very rarely go to "latest". I tend to read "friends" or a subset thereof.
manicdee 6y ago
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.