from Hacker News

Facebook blocks links to Pixelfed, a federated Instagram alternative

by boramalper on 1/13/25, 6:53 AM with 66 comments

• by JohnMakin on 1/14/25, 6:45 PM

  I have used facebook probably daily since 2007 - until a few weeks ago a recent phone update moved some icons around and offloaded the facebook app. Where facebook used to be on my home screen was replaced by LI for some reason, and I found that I was for a few days reflexively clicking "linkedin" notifications when I clearly was absent mindedly trying to reach facebook. When I realized what had happened, I decided not to re-install facebook to see if I actually missed it or if it was just a dumb, idle compulsion. Haven't missed it at all! I wouldn't have believed this if I hadn't accidentally gone through this. It had somehow wormed itself into my habits in a really compulsive way that was also not even providing me value, clearly, because now that I think about it more and more, I cannot think of a single reason why I would log into facebook. Even when I occasionally use messenger app, that's entirely separate from the facebook app now and has been for a while, plus whatsapp/telegram/discord is better anyway, so what is my incentive as a user to even log in to facebook? Who is that site even for anymore?

  I used to get value out of some private groups, support groups - but those have slowly become infested by bots/trolls in a weird way that I can't really prove but the experience for me at least has been increasingly poor over the last few years.

  All this is to say it does not surprise me that facebook aggressively protects its moat - someone over there realizes the power of habit/compulsion, it's clearly baked into their app and UI and everything about that ecosystem. Long gone are the before-times where app growth was focused on making a compelling user experience, we're in pure extraction mode now that pretty much anyone that will ever make a facebook account already has made one.

• by dang on 1/14/25, 6:40 PM

  Related ongoing thread:

  Meta admits it deleted links to decentralized Instagram competitor Pixelfed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42694547 - Jan 2025 (3 comments)

  (apparently they've fixed it now)

• by zug_zug on 1/13/25, 2:01 PM

  I'm not sure why this isn't considered anti-competitive behavior. Once a communication company has 1-billion users perhaps we need to classify them as a more of a utility and hold them to stricter standards of openness.

• by burgerrito on 1/13/25, 9:27 AM

  In general I feel like social medias tends to downrank links, and I think that's a very bad thing to internet

• by bhouston on 1/13/25, 7:23 PM

  I have never heard of Pixelfed before. Seems to support ActivityPub, which is nice.

  More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelfed

• by alex1138 on 1/13/25, 3:55 PM

  It's curious how even when you report things that egregiously should be taken down, they're not

  But link your (forced) Oculus account to Facebook? That's a ban (yeah, automatically flagged, but still)

  Or any number of unspecified community guidelines violations

  Or accounts getting hacked constantly

• by etempleton on 1/13/25, 1:22 PM

  Facebook also exposes less of a business page now unless you are logged in. This is a problem because for some reason many businesses only update their Facebook page and not their website. Social media has become increasingly hostile and closed off.

  As an aside, Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments criticizing Apple for not innovating and trying to lock users in is laughable in the face of Meta’s complete lack of innovation and user hostile practices.

• by arielcostas on 1/13/25, 9:02 AM

  So much for free speech, huh

• by mdhb on 1/13/25, 7:44 PM

  Literal quote from Zuck in just the past week regarding the changes he wants for his shitty platform:

  “It's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram”.

  Add it to the already impossibly long list of people shouting about “free speech” when they absolutely, positively do not give a single shit about that topic outside of the context of how they can use it against others.

• by bn-l on 1/13/25, 2:33 PM

  That’s interesting. They obviously see it as a legitimate strategic threat.

• by chis on 1/13/25, 5:41 PM

  Nobody commenting here wants to hear it but this is almost certainly just a bug or ai misbehavior. Some new domain pops up and gets flagged as being associated with spam or bad content. It’ll be silently fixed but nobody will hear about it or change their mind.

  I’m not a FB defender by any means. Just being realistic. Twitter has broken new ground in just banning competitor links from their platform (substack) but FB doesn’t do that.

• by bananapub on 1/14/25, 7:05 PM

  it's so weird that it's become normalised for social media sites to just ban links to competitors. I don't recall this being common until Twitter started doing it in the last couple of years, and now it's seemingly ubiquitous.

• by MaxGripe on 1/13/25, 3:19 PM

  I don’t like Zuck because, IMO, he’s a fraud. I don’t use his platform. I feel sorry for people who are forced to use FB for business or social reasons, such as students who need to stay in touch with their classmates… Facebook is just an ugly side of the Internet.

• by ppp999 on 1/13/25, 10:50 PM

  Fuck the world