Facebook

From IndieWeb
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Facebook is a popular content hosting silo and activity aggregator most well known for being the largest centralized social network on the web, the primary service of Meta Platforms.

Why

Despite IndieWeb community members largely moving off of Facebook, closing their accounts, or otherwise reducing their usage, there are still a handful of reasons why a few of us keep a Facebook account. If you still use Facebook for any of these reasons, feel free to add yourself to the ones that apply to you (or add a new reason).

How to

How to export your data

Update: For the most current steps and techniques for exporting all your content from Facebook and importing to your own site, see:

Or check out the individual steps:

You can export your data on Facebook by:

To export all photos in an album owned by others (such as all photos in which you are tagged):

To export Facebook messages:

Previously, Freedom.io could be used to copy Facebook posts. It is no longer maintained or recommended, but is available as an open source project.

Textile provides a service for massaging one's Facebook exported photos to put them back into galleries.

How to leave Facebook

If you'd like to move or migrate off of Facebook entirely, see Aaron Parecki's post:

You may also consider trying out Jonathan LaCour's experimental ditchbook project, an open source toolkit for migrating Facebook export data to any Micropub compatible website. ditchbook has been used to migrate a few people's Facebook content to their websites.


How to wean yourself from

If you’re looking to reduce your usage of Facebook, you may find that incrementally doing so (as opposed to doing a cold-turkey silo-quit) may be easier.

Here are some steps to take.

  1. Delete the Facebook native app. Use https://m.facebook.com/ instead, or https://mbasic.facebook.com/ for a no-JavaScript experience, including access to discussions in Facebook Messenger.
  1. Use https://facebook.com/events/calendar instead of facebook.com
    • Goal: stop checking Facebook's News Feed (for all the reasons given in #Criticism).
      • IndieWeb folks doing this: Tantek Çelik
      • Previously: fb.com/events - which now distracts you with "suggested events" at the top. /events/calendar shows you events you've RSVPd to or been invited to, and birthdays. More focused than /events
    • Still allows:
      • going to events organized on FB (seeing invitations, responding etc.)
      • seeing current birthdays (today, yesterday, tomorrow)
      • checking Friending activity (toolbar person outline icon)
      • checking Message activity (toolbar talk bubble icon)
      • checking Notifications (toolbar globe icon)
  2. Use https://m.facebook.com/events/calendar on weekend only, only on mobile
    • Goal: quickly check what events are coming up just for weekends (mobile web is faster to load / view than fb.com/events)
    • Goal: be even less distracted by all the other UI elements
    • Specifically avoid:
      • checking Notifications (toolbar alarm icon)
    • IndieWeb folks doing this: Tantek Çelik
  3. Use your profile URL https://facebook.com/me instead
    • Goal: be even less compelled to be distracted than even just checking events
      • IndieWeb folks doing/trying this: Tantek Çelik (since 2018-01-22 for ~3 days)
    • Still allows:
      • check your POSSE copies on FB
      • checking Message activity (toolbar talk bubble icon)
    • Specifically avoid:
      • checking Notifications (toolbar globe icon)
    • Optionally
      • minimize Friending activity (toolbar person outline icon), perhaps check/add only once a day/week?
  4. Take a week+ "off the grid" vacation during which you're unable to check Facebook notifications
    • Goal: stop checking Facebook notifications (toolbar globe icon)
      • IndieWeb folks who have done this:
        • Tantek Çelik 2016-08-07 for ~1 week, 2017-08-01 for ~1.5 weeks, 2018-01-14 for 2+ years, by being off Facebook the website completely for a week, still using FB Messenger app for comms, and then procrastinating checking notifications since. Checked notifications again ~2020-03-15 around once a day to once a week, reduced/turned off most notification sources, stopped again in April 2020.
        • Peter Molnar when he visited China (no Facebook there)

Weaning Brainstorming

More thoughts on how one could reduce one's Facebook usage

  • document all your Facebook use-cases as itches to implement on your own site
  • pick the easiest use-case to implement yourself, build it, and try stopping using Facebook for that
  • ...

How to POSSE to

Main article: POSSE to Facebook

There are multiple ways to POSSE out some things from your indieweb site to your Facebook profile. Specifically, you can POSSE posts and event RSVPs, but as of the 2.x Facebook API, not comments or likes. Comments and likes can't be PESOSed either.

Existing techniques:

from Twitter

  • Tantek POSSEs notes, articles by name + permalink, replies (including RSVPs) out from tantek.com to Twitter, and then uses the Twitter/FB integration functionality to cascade (except for plain replies) that POSSEing from Twitter to Facebook. Reasons:
    • insufficient marginal utility in writing a custom POSSE syndicator to FB.
    • FB just gets abbreviated summaries (thus placing more value on tantek.com original posts).
    • Exception: In 2014 Tantek started occasionally manually using Bridgy Publish to POSSE a few longer and more significant posts (notes and articles) directly from tantek.com to Facebook.
  • tommorris does likewise, because he's lazy.

IFTTT

Bridgy

Bridgy used to support POSSEing posts, event RSVPs, comments and likes, but Facebook eventually disabled that in their API.

Facebook API

Main article: POSSE to Facebook

Posting to one's wall used to be supported with the Facebook 'Graph API' - see POSSE to Facebook for details and examples - but they'll disable that in August 2018.

For broader overview of the Facebook API, see the Social Web WG analysis:

How to PESOS from

You can use the Facebook API to PESOS your posts, but as of the 2.x API, not your comments or likes.

How to backfeed from

There used to be a few programmatic ways to backfeed from Facebook post copies to your original posts, but Facebook pretty much shut them all down in May 2018.

Graph API

The Graph API is the official way of communicating with Facebook.

To get comments for a post, only from users who have logged into your Facebook app and granted its permissions, use /object/comments: 

 https://graph.facebook.com/v2.2/POSTID/comments?limit=LIMIT&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN

POSTID is the id of a post; no need for any user id, just the regular, post id LIMIT how many comments should be shown in one request ACCESS_TOKEN is the Oauth2 access token to the service

Similarly, to get likes for a post, only from users who have logged into your Facebook app and granted its permissions, , use /object/likes: 

 https://graph.facebook.com/v2.2/POSTID/likes?limit=LIMIT&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN

Note recent limitations / challenges:

FQL

  • before Graph API 2.2, there was FQL that could be used as:
  • FQL makes this surprisingly easy. For example, here's a query to get all comments on the posts from a given user with links in them:
 SELECT post_fbid, time, fromid, username, object_id, text FROM comment
   WHERE object_id IN (SELECT link_id FROM link WHERE owner = USER_ID)
   ORDER BY time DESC
  • And here's the follow-up query to get the URLs of those links (where LINK_IDS is a comma-separated list of the object_ids from the above query):
 SELECT link_id, url FROM link WHERE link_id IN (LINK_IDS)
  • See example code here. There's also this example code that fetches and processes comments from the posts found by those queries.
  • API is sometimes slow. Most backfeed solutions will/should poll in offline processes though, so they won't usually block end user requests.
  • Returns extremely unclear failed results for API calls to posts by under-18s
    • This is bloody annoying for us minors. It's more "bothersome" than "protecting" -- barnabywalters
  • How best to represent external users?
    • Facebook URI (not preferable)
    • Can we grab their personal URI from their profile?
    • Detect comments from originating user?

Bridgy backfeed

Bridgy used to backfeed Facebook comments, likes, reactions, and RSVPs, but stopped in May 2018 due to Facebook's restrictions.

How to delete your account

Deletion of an account is made deliberately awkward and uncomfortable by Facebook. Note that there are two separate types of account deletion, viz. Deactivation and Deletion.

Deactivation of an Account

Deactivation of an Account can be achieved using the normal Facebook menus.

The system in January 2018 was as follows:

  • Click the account menu at the top right of any Facebook page
  • Select Settings
  • Choose Manage your account and then scroll down to click Deactivate your account.
  • You are asked to choose the reason for deactivation, such as 'It's not fun' or 'I don't feel safe' - Facebook will provide 'solutions' to the issue you choose such as 'make more friends'
  • You are also presented with a selection of your friends with prompts that 'xxxx will miss you' in an attempt to emotionally manipulate you into staying.

Surprisingly, deactivation is not hidden away under layers of menus; it is in plain sight being in the description of the Manage your account section of settings.

Note that Deactivating your account just means that your profile becomes 'hidden' to other Facebook users. Your posts, photos, tags, comments are all still present on Facebook, as is all data Facebook hold about you, whether that was provided by you in profile settings or otherwise. Messages you have sent to other users will still be visible to them. If you change your mind, simply logging back into Facebook restores all data to a user-accessible state.

Deletion of an Account

Deletion of an Account cannot be accomplished using the Facebook menus.

Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, you will have the option to cancel your request.

Deleting your account removes all photos, tags, comments and all user-provided data from Facebook. It does not delete non-user-provided data, such as your identity in 'tags' from other users photographs, your telephone number and email address if provided by another user (e.g. by accessing Contacts on a smartphone)


See also: delete your account

Features

(this section is a stub, when it has been more well filled-in, move to top of page after dfn, similar to Twitter page)

User features on Facebook's site:

Facebook has a number of interesting post types, each with different appearances and interfaces. Some better than others.

User features Facebook handles on other sites:

Status Update

Status updates are notes similar to Twitter tweets, that, including status updates with links (see below) are perhaps the most common type of top-level post on FB.

2011 limitation and Note distinction:

  • 419 character limit as of 2011-02-16. When you try to post 420 or more characters, you get an alert:

5450622726_a12b9d13f4_o.png

Status updates must be less than 420 characters. You have entered 1,035
characters here. Notes can be much longer. Would you like to edit and post
your update as a Note instead?

via http://tantek.com/2011/047/b1/facebook-installed-application-activities-not-deletes

Link

Links posts are essentially status updates, but they have a different presentation due to the link-preview that is shown for the first link mentioned in the update.

Photo

Photo posts are perhaps the second most popular type of top-level post on FB.

Event

Main article: event#Facebook

Facebook's event posts were quite clean and nicely designed, until they started rolling out a new design on 2014-02-27. Here is the design just before that point:

Sometime in 2015(?specific date), Facebook launched a new event UI which includes:

  • a related events box in the right column, just underneath the "Invite Friends" box below the attendees box showing interested, going, invited numbers, as well as a few friends who have RSVPd at least interested/maybe or yes.

Comment

Comments are perhaps the overall most popular type of post, as people comment A LOT on other top-level posts, and Facebook has a two level notion of comment threading. That is, you can both comment on top-level posts, and comment on comments on top-level posts. The above event post screenshot demonstrates this two level commenting interface.

Aggregator

Facebook performs the function of a feed aggregator of all your friends' activities.

Some examples screenshots can be found here:

Analysis of some of the algorithms Facebook uses to choose what to display to users:

Comments Embed

Facebook has a feature called Comments Box which "is a social plugin that enables user commenting on your site." Indieweb sites can use it to embed a comments box on blog posts.

Though this does encourage your readers to sharecrop (on Facebook) their comments on your posts, it also provides them a single place to view their comments they've made across any/all sites that use Facebook for comments.

No indieweb community members are currently using this on their own sites.

IndieWeb community members that have tried this and their experience:

  • Aaron Parecki:
    • "Facebook tends to get more comments [than Disqus] for me probably because everyone has an account and is always logged in"[2]
    • "eventually I decided the quality of comments I was getting wasn't high enough and I didn't actually care about peoples' random crap they were leaving on my site"[3]

Groups

Facebook groups have a variety of privacy settings.

Removing someone from a group prompts to delete their posts or comments from the last 7 days.

If you are the last member of the group and you leave the group, a confirmation is displayed saying that the group will be deleted.

Anti-patterns

Some things that Facebook implements are actually anti-patterns and to be avoided:

Subsidiaries

Facebook owns the following companies / products / services:

Activities Examples

  • Alice shared Bob's status update.
  • Alice shared Bob's photo.
  • Alice likes Some Page.
  • Alice likes a photo.
  • Alice and 8 other friends wrote on Bob's timeline for his birthday.
  • Alice added 3 new photos to the album Some Album.
  • Alice updated her cover photo.
  • Alice changed her profile picture.
  • Alice commented on a link.
  • Alice shared a link.
  • Alice was tagged in Bob's photo.
  • Alice played 10 sounds on SoundCloud.
  • Alice added a job at Some Company to her timeline.
  • Alice likes a photo on Instagram.
  • Alice shared a story via Some Page.
  • Alice made your photo her profile picture
  • Alice just posted for the first time in a while.

rel-me

Facebook does not currently support rel-me on their user profiles.

However, they do have a "website" field in the UI which you can set.

And then applications that wish to use that field for a one-off rel-me equivalence test can access that through their API:

Careful parsing it, people often put multiple whitespace- or newline-separated urls.

Criticism

Summary on nearly all of the issues of Facebook: Get your loved ones off Facebook.

New York Times 15th Anniversary video

Collects App Data Usage from other Android Apps

Here’s the bad news: seven apps, including Yelp, the language-learning app Duolingo and the job search app Indeed, as well as the King James Bible app and two Muslim prayer apps, Qibla Connect and Muslim Pro, still send your personal data to Facebook before you can decide whether you want to consent or not. Keep in mind: these are apps with millions of installs.Privacy International

Does Little to Limit Attacks on Female Politicians

In the 2018 Congressional and state elections in the United States female candidates faced increased online threats on Facebook that ranged from sexist attacks to death threats [4]

Under the current policy, there is no recourse for harassment via an anonymous Facebook page until a threat is made. Waiting for harassment to escalate isn’t a tool designed to protect women. It’s endorsing a culture in which violence against women is the norm.State Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, Connecticut, USA

Paying Teenagers for Root Access to Cell Phones

Facebook, after having their apps banned by Apple Store decided to pay teenagers $20 a month for root access to their cell phones in order to spy on competitors

Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access to network traffic in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity.Facebook pays Teens to Install VPN that Spies On Them

It was later revelead that 18% of participants in the program were teens and not the 5% that facebook originally claimed.

At the time we ended the Facebook Research App on Apple’s iOS platform, less than 5 percent of the people sharing data with us through this program were teens. Analysis shows that number is about 18 percent when you look at the complete lifetime of the program, and also add people who had become inactive and uninstalled the app.Facebook admits 18% of Research spyware users were teens, not <5%

Isolation: cartoon of a prisoner using a large Facebook 'f' logo shaped periscope to look outside through a barred window, despite the perisope being attached to an unlocked door they could use to escape outside Comic about Facebook being a donut mobster, not allowing a donut maker to give their donuts to everyone that choose to get them

Preying on Children

Even after complaints from employees that the in app purchases may confuse children facebook refused to provide refunds to parents resulting in lawsuits. Internal documents reveal that facebook referred to children who accidently charged parent credit cards heavily as "whales," a term used by casinos and con artists to note easy lucrative and naive targets.

In one of the unsealed documents, two Facebook employees deny a refund request from a child whom they refer to as a “whale” – a term coined by the casino industry to describe profligate spenders. The child had entered a credit card number to play a game, and in about two weeks racked up thousands of dollars in charges, according to an excerpt of messages between two employees at the social media giant.Center for Investigative Reporting

Algorithmic Filtering

Facebook uses a proprietary algorithm to show you a fraction (what they think you want to see) of the posts from your friends, and people & pages you follow. Up to 85% less than "all".[5]

This has been criticized many times.

Attacks and spoiling campaigns to discredit critics

  • In November 2018 a NYT research revealed the tactics behind Facebook’s crisis management. Following their Cambridge Analytica data scandal they hired several republican PR agencies like "Definers" to discredit critics.

TechCrunch published a memo by FB manager Elliot Schrage wich was "officially published" 2 days later in the night before Thanksgiving [6]. While Schrage took blame for hiring "Definers" shortly afterwards dpa (german press agency) tickered that several agencies were hired too. (deu) [7]

These PR agencies produced Fake News and antisemitic conspiracy theories to attack George Soros [8] because he characterized Facebook and Google as a “menace to society” at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018. It seems to be irrelevant for Facebook that Soros supported the company financially before, for example by paying their german factcheckers (deu) [9] …]

API Degradation

Version 2.0[10] of the Facebook API mostly makes sensible changes to help tamp down spammy or privacy-violating apps (e.g. prevents you from seeing a user's friends unless the friends have also granted privileges to the app). But this change has broken some features that IndieWeb sites and Bridgy Publish depend on. Full discussion on IRC

  • Apps are given app-scoped user IDs now (i.e. they are unique to the application, as opposed to the global user IDs v1.0 used)
  • However, given a user's username, you can apparently no longer find their user ID.
  • Which means that you cannot get the post ID for a post from its URL.
    • For some posts you can look them up by /v2.2/{post-id} but most posts expect /v2.2/{user-id}_{post-id}, and there doesn't seem to be any predictable way to tell if a post wants the former id or the latter.

API Inconsistency

The ID for a number of comments has changed over time, resulting in Bridgy sending apparently duplicate mentions to the same post. The symptom is that the same comment will be received with an ID of the form USERID_POSTID, and later the same comment will have an ID with a different form, containing colons and apparently magic numbers.[11]

On 2015-04-07, Facebook support let us know that this "IDs like these can appear sometimes", and that it will not be fixed.

Hand-approval required to post via API

Unless the application developer is the only user, Facebook now requires applications to be hand-approved by the Facebook team if they are to post to a user's stream. This requires an application logo, complete screenshot walkthrough, and full privacy policy.

Big data collection allows intrusive inference

Facebook's big data collection allows intrusive inference about you

  • 2016-01-28 Gerd Leonhard: The evilfication of Facebook: boiling frogs, faustian bargains, and the pleasure trap: 10 arguments for quitting Facebook
  • A 2013 study found that accurate predictions can be made about the personality, political preferences and even sexual orientations of Facebook users based only on which Facebook pages a user "likes", even if a user hasn't explicitly revealed that information on their profile. (Huffington Post writeup)
  • A 2009 study at MIT found that social network analysis of Facebook friend relationships could also reveal a user's sexuality. (Mashable)
  • The inference is often so accurate that many people are convinced that Facebook is listening to their phone's microphone. Reply-All's podcast episode 109, published 2-11-2017, Is Facebook Spying on You?, demonstrates the futility of trying to persuade people that it is not spying, just data-gathering and manipulation that makes Facebook so creepy. Also supports the old journalistic epigram about the correct response to a headline that is a question. Of course, Facebook could also be spying.

Real Name demands

While not as bad as Google+, Facebook have been attempting to enforce the "real name" policy. In 2014-09, it was revealed Facebook had disabled the accounts of a number of drag queens requiring them to use their legal names. [12]

2014-09-17: Accounts which don't seem like they have "normal" names have also been challenged by Facebook's policy. [13]

2015-06-26: Facebook disabled a user's account because of their name, the same name they used to work for and get paid by Facebook as an employee:

Image used in link preview

On 2014-09-29, when I pasted a link to a blog post in a Facebook status, the link preview used one of the comment's avatars instead of the og:image meta element I have had in my HTML for years. I had to manually click through the images until the correct logo appeared. I am not sure if this is a glitch or if Facebook has changed their algorithm.

After using Facebook's Open Graph Object Debugger, I found it reported:

og:image was not defined, could not be downloaded or was not big enough. Please define a chosen image using the og:image metatag, and use an image that's at least 200x200px and is accessible from Facebook.

The image I'm using currently is only ~120px square. I guess that explains it, but it seems silly for Facebook to ignore the explicit og:image element I have set up. — gRegor Morrill

Duplicate Events Created without Confirmation

On 2014-10-20 I ( Kyle Mahan) tried to create a new HWC event using the "Copy Event" UI. I filled in the appropriate fields and clicked "Create". The button greyed out momentarily, and then re-enabled without any confirmation that the event had been copied. I checked my activity feed to see if it was there, and it was not, so I proceeded to click Create two more times before it seemed to go through. Some time later, 3 identical FB events all appeared (maybe an eventual consistency issue?).

Doesn't delete deleted data

Facebook does not really delete data when a user clicks on 'delete', but it flags the post as 'deleted', keeping all the data in it's database.

Encourages Bad Online Publishing Behaviors

comic2-2912.png Perhaps cliché and thus source for humor but with elements of truth. Unclear if these bad behaviors are due to Facebook's UI/UX (especially Newsfeed / like / share feedback loop), or just that Facebook is surfacing existing behaviors across a very broad spectrum of people. The humor in the cartoon works because these behaviors are fairly known / expected by users of Facebook. Still, specific citations would help with further analysis to see if the indieweb can do better (or is vulnerable to doing worse).

  • Posting about minor annoyances [citation needed]
  • Sponsored posts [citation needed]
  • Sharing of "clickbait" headlines [citation needed]
  • "Here's a friend crossposting from Twitter, so all these @ tags don't work." - perhaps a good reason to NOT secondhand POSSE from Twitter to FB. [citation needed]
  • Posting racist screeds that rely upon made-up quotes and statistics [citation needed]

Social experiment performed on users

  • A study published June 2, 2014 revealed that one week in 2012, Facebook tweaked the feeds of about 700,000 users to see if it could manipulate their mood and posting behavior [14]

Live user frustration test

Facebook deliberately artificially crashed their Android app as a live (unbeknownst to the users) user-test to test frustration / abandonment! https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/684124629963685888 and https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/684125090527752194:
CX5_uaQUsAEGKht.png

Harmful to Body Image

Facebook use causes decline in satisfaction

2013-04-17 The Economist: Facebook is bad for you: Get a life! Using the social network seems to make people more miserable

… the more someone uses Facebook, the less satisfied he is with life.

[…]

the more a volunteer used Facebook in the period between two questionnaires, the worse he reported feeling the next time he filled in a questionnaire. Volunteers were also asked to rate their satisfaction with life at the start and the end of the study. Those who used Facebook a lot were more likely to report a decline in satisfaction than those who visited the site infrequently.

But an earlier investigation, conducted by social scientists at Humboldt University and Darmstadt’s Technical University, both in Germany, may have found the root cause. These researchers, who presented their findings at a conference in Leipzig in February, surveyed 584 users of Facebook aged mostly in their 20s. They found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bons mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed. Real-life encounters, by contrast, are more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

Emphasis added.

Is Boring

Per grafitti in Minneapolis, 2014-234, photo by Tantek Çelik

"FACEBOOK IS BORING *IRL*"

Reinforcing shallow dopamine responses

Pacifies isolates people with comfort bubbles

  • 2016-05-10 Hossein Derakhshan: Mark Zuckerberg is a hypocrite - Facebook has destroyed the open web[15]

    All the videos, images, and articles we see in our newsfeeds are picked for us based on our habits, based on our previous likes and reshares, which have taught Facebook about our preferences. Naturally, most of us only like what or who we agree with, and Facebook therefore rarely upsets, challenges, or surprises us.

    It is heart-breaking to see how Facebook has changed the internet into little more than a portal for entertainment

    While Zuckerberg laments at walls and admires bridges, the fact is that his Facebook algorithms have created billions of these comfort bubbles that are even more isolating than walls.

    Emphasis added.

Builds demographic profiles including "ethnic affinity"

Facebook does not ask you about your ethnicity, but builds demographic profiles based on what you do on the site, including an "ethnic affinity". ProPublica demonstrated and reported that ads for housing could exclude people based on this "ethnic affinity". Facebook has since announced they will disable "ethnic affinity" targeting for housing, employment, and credit-related ads.

Let advertisers target users interested in Nazis

Despite promises of greater oversight following past advertising scandals, a Times review shows that Facebook has continued to allow advertisers to target hundreds of thousands of users the social media firm believes are curious about topics such as “Joseph Goebbels,” “Josef Mengele,” “Heinrich Himmler,” the neo-nazi punk band Skrewdriver and Benito Mussolini’s long-defunct National Fascist Party.

Downtime

Though typically rare and brief, Facebook does go down / offline from time to time, most recently:

2021-10-04

Facebook and services it owns such as Instagram, Messenger, and Whatsapp, suffered a global outage.

Initial reports stated that the outage was caused by a DNS issue, as seen by this comment posted by someone claiming to be from the "recovery team" on Reddit:

As many of you know, DNS for FB services has been affected and this is likely a symptom of the actual issue, and that's that BGP peering with Facebook peering routers has gone down, very likely due to a configuration change that went into effect shortly before the outages happened (started roughly 1540 UTC). There are people now trying to gain access to the peering routers to implement fixes, but the people with physical access is separate from the people with knowledge of how to actually authenticate to the systems and people who know what to actually do, so there is now a logistical challenge with getting all that knowledge unified. Part of this is also due to lower staffing in data centers due to pandemic measures.

This thread was documented on Hacker News.

This outage caused initial complications with many other services, as seen on the popular status reporting website downdetector.co.uk at the time of the outage:

Facebook services reportedly showed an error message initially before then returning no requests at all, as seen in the screenshot below:

The DNS issues Facebook ran into then caused issues with other services. Cloudflare's CTO commented on how they had to coordinate a response due to the retries to their 1.1.1.1 DNS service caused by Facebook's servers not returning any content:

Now, here's the fun part. @Cloudflare runs a free DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, and lots of people use it. So Facebook etc. are down... guess what happens? People keep retrying. Software keeps retrying. We get hit by a massive flood of DNS traffic asking for http://facebook.com

Source: https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1445066136547217413

2017-10-11 Outage

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/the-wrap/article/Facebook-Goes-Down-Users-Turn-to-Twitter-to-12269781.php

https://twitter.com/NesiKa11/status/918135764759613440

2017-08-26 Outage

Saturday morning turned out to be social-media-free for a number of Facebook and Instagram users, albeit involuntarily.

Some people reported difficulties accessing the two social platforms beginning at about 9 a.m. ET

from http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/26/technology/business/facebook-down/

2016-08-26 Partial Outage

  • 2016-08-26 ~16:00-16:10 (at least) flakey / apparent unavailability of page events pages:

Sorry, something went wrong.

2014-08-01 Outage

2014-08-01 CNBC: Facebook goes down for many users

  • 2014-08-01 ~9:00-9:40 flakey / intermittent availability with lots of "Something went wrong" messages, e.g. on a permalink page when logged in:

  • on a group page when logged in:

  • and on the home page:

  • on a previously loaded FB page, the "Notifications" globe drop-down just rotated a progress image for minutes and never loads:

Prefers Pageviews Over Efficient UX

Per the documentation in reader#Integrated_Activity_Reading, one of Facebook's UI experiments involved an integrated reading experience that showed by posts and other "activities" in a single reading stream:

gpnggaky8d1gog_small.jpg

What they found was that it was too efficient - users were reading things and not clicking to see additional pages.

Thus they abandoned the experiment, instead preferring a UI that generates more pageviews over a UI that is more efficient for users.

This may present an opportunity for IndieWeb UX to exceed silo UX.

Link Wrapper Problems

Link Wrapper Unreliability

Facebook's link wrapper lm.facebook.com sometimes has outages, thus breaking all links in content in Facebook.

E.g. 2014-08-10 ~21:25-21:32 (at least)

Hyperlink Fear Interstitial

BjNq5GbCUAAMf1Z.png

Facebook mobile app (apparently) warning the user about Twitter t.co link-wrapped links as having "a problem".

via https://twitter.com/kyle_wm/status/446818317408280576

Censorship

Changed emails to @facebook.com

Scraped call and SMS logs from Android phones

Inflated Content Viewing Statistics

…complaints dating back to early 2015…

LogOutFacebook

Advocates

Robert Scoble defended using Facebook in a post, "What will you miss when you quit Facebook?"

1. Filtered feed. Truth is this is a mixed bag. For me it's a HUGE deal because I have put thousands of hours into tuning my feed and I have many of the world's top technologists on Facebook.

Someday Facebook will change something (or just disappear), and all these hours will be wasted. Imagine if he'd spent just 1/10th of that time working on his own site. — gRegor Morrill

Deactivation Prompts

When a user attempts to deactivate an account, a number of prompts appear, and a user is required to complete one to progress the deactivation procedure.

Mottos

Facebook has some development mottos that we can perhaps learn from.

Move Fast And Break Things

From ??? until 2014-04-30, Facebook infamously had the motto:

  • Move Fast and Break Things

Even in their IPO paperwork[17]

Move Fast With Stable Infra

On 2014-04-30[18], in a public announcement, Facebook changed their motto to:

  • Move Fast With Stable Infra

Articles

Articles that may provide insights on how to motivate individuals to move from Facebook to the indieweb (most recent first):

See Also

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