6mo ago

Facebook started blocking links to Pixelfed, a federated Instagram alternative using ActivityPub

bsky.app

AJ Sadauskas (@ajsadauskas.bsky.social)

More discussion on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/113819523685288481

15 comments

https://mastodon.online/@DrPen@mastodon.social/113819854078612789
This seems more likely to be an automated spam filter that kills short messages with links in them.
- Are you referring to this bit?
  update: Tried again, this time it worked, writing a longer post and putting the words in apostrophes.
  Putting the words in apostrophes may’ve worked as it prevents pixelfed.social from being linked to. It must be then the URL, not the “pixelfed” keyword, that is being blocked.
  
  Someone else reported that if they posted it with a picture that was fine, and I think someone else said if they posted it in a longer message, that also worked.
Yeah defederate everything facebook then.
That would be really weird, since if I recall correctly meta funds fediverse projects, I think including Pixelfed. I think they've even run an event to help devs, maybe multiple.
Dansup the creator of pixelfed has talked about it and is generally a little more comfortable with meta than I can fully get on board with
(regardless of having generally engaged positively with the Fediverse as far as I've seen, they still facilitated genocide, enabled mass misinformation campaigns, exploited people's privacy, etc.)
Edit: from other comments it sounds like this is just a spam filter for short posts with links, and doesn't get blocked if the post is longer and/or has an image 🤷‍♂️
they're scared, as they should
What was it? Meta wanted to integrate to the fediverse just a few months ago? And a lot of people couldn't see the problem with it
- This was a wolf in sheep's clothing move. They don't care about federation.
  
  As freaking everybody warned but nooooo, they had to toll out the red carpet for them...
  
  Yeah but some people were going on about free speech. I hope they see it now, especially after Metas new policy on "free speech" where they say they will openly allow for the most racist kinds of speech to go unregulated. God I hate Zucc so much, sometimes I wish hell were real
- For me it was less about not seeing the problem with it (I don't trust them at all), and more about making sure that people pick Mastodon instead of Threads.
  Which is why I was pushing for instances to not fully defederate, but use settings that hide the content by default and let users opt in to see it. That way if someone has 1 friend/local entity that they want to follow on threads, they can still pick Mastodon and opt in to see that content.
  After the recent changes, I'm not sure if that's the right move anymore

15 comments