From the article: > 1) Facebook is a free service. Users are not customers. And although Birch was outraged by the “terrible customer service” he received from

From the article: > 1) Facebook is a free service. Users are not customers. And although Birch was outraged by the “terrible customer service” he received from Facebook, he shouldn’t have been. Facebook is providing an online social community free of charge to the user. The Facebook Team is not a “customer service team,” and users should not expect the type of personalized attention a complaint would receive from a company of which they are actually paying customers. > 2) When you sign up with Facebook, you agree to its terms and conditions. If you violate any of those terms, you can get banned — with no clear-cut methods of appealing the decision. > 3) Facebook doesn’t owe you an account. There are no current laws that require Facebook to allow anyone to participate. Please try to make your friends, family, circles understand this, and offer an alternative by setting up interest based services for them. Let that be a messaging service (Prosody XMPP server + Conversations on Android or Siskin on iOS); an image board (Pixelfed); a file sharing service (nextcloud); an email server (mail-in-a-box); we can do it, we can move them. Appeal to them being their friendly neighbourhood IT person/sysadmin, and that if they have any problems, they know an actual face to turn to with their problems. The network effect is somewhat overrated in the light of interests, especially niche ones. Give people what they want - image of grandkids for grantparents, etc - but in exchange, ask them to use your service.