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Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

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Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#51

Post by snowwrestler »

jabart wrote: post #44
snowwrestler wrote: post #31

Why not use full domains for a service like this? Instead of client.your domain.tld, register client-your domain.tld. This would prevent one bad actor from nuking your whole business. Yes it has a cost, but it’s like $10 a year for a new domain, which I bet pales in comparison to other direct costs of running a SaaS.

So let's look at this situation. It's a shop page, shop.{clientdomain}.tld. Now you need SSL for this, using AWS you need a TXT record from their ACM. You also need a CNAME to your domain (ideally) or to a Cloudfront instance. For your customer you now need them to make 2 DNS entries. This is from my experience having non-profit like entities setup DNS. - Well the person who set that up stopped responding, isn't ther…

No, you automate all this on behalf of your clients. The customer is not registering the domain and managing DNS, you are.

The best reason not to do full domains is the risk of bad actors re-registering domains you release, as schroeding points out in another reply.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#52

Post by Bud »

holoduke wrote: post #39
indymike wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. No. Giving this additional power to the government will not have the outcome you want. When something becomes too powerful, the solution is not to further concentrate that power into less accountable hands.

Maybe the service itself will be crap once run by governments. But at least things are covered by law. things like fair hearings and proper customer support. Now you can be banned from those ecosystems just like they do in dictorial states.

I'm especially entertained by this notion that making a company government-owned will magically ensure "proper customer support".

That might be the funniest thing I've read in weeks, actually.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#53

Post by indymike »

psychoslave wrote: post #33
indymike wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. No. Giving this additional power to the government will not have the outcome you want. When something becomes too powerful, the solution is not to further concentrate that power into less accountable hands.

Nationalization is not necessary more concentration and less many accountable hands. Well, it depends on the governance obviously. If you talk some autocratic regime, where the king proclaimed "I am the state", that fits your description for sure. On the other hand, if you are looking at a direct democracy regime, you could hardly make the power more pervasive, and every citizen has to carry its part of accountabilit…

> Well, it depends on the governance obviously.

Three reasons why nationalization is a bad idea:

* Power disparity. As it is, Facebook is destroying people and business without any accountability. Now we hand that to the state who:

* Has all the incentive to destroy anything that competes, and the government has the ultimate way to do it: just outlaw the competition. If you think the product is bad today, imagine how fantastic it will be in 10 years of no competition.

* Has all the incentive to make people use it. So, it becomes oppressive and horrible and the government decides, hey, let's make everyone use this thing for essential services like payments and democracy!

All in all, nationalization of a social network is one of the worst directions we can take, regardless of politics. It's just a bad idea.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#54

Post by jrochkind1 »

Are there any US grounds for a lawsuit when this happens? I can't think of any, but it seems like there should be, right? Not a lawyer, but who wants to write a memo on it?

I guess it's actually the same thing as the social media "Free speech" wars... meta has the first ammendment right to deny service to whomever they want for whatever they want (sans discirmination against protected classes), they can legally decide to ruin this company's business just cause they don't like them, even if it wasn't an accident? Yeah, the problem is facebook is too powerful, they aren't just any random business choosing not to work with you.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#55

Post by helsinkiandrew »

Are any of the sites using FB events/analytics? It depends on what the non-profit sites are doing, but the Facebook rules for prohibited domains [1] seem to include what a lot of non-profits may do:

"Predominantly target or serve an audience likely to have suffered from mental, emotional, financial or physical harm, or facing severe economic hardship that directly affects housing, food security or freedom."

I'm guess if a single one of your non-profit sites does all the sites would be blocked. Apart from pleading with FB, using domains for each would be a better solution to stop this happening the next time rules change or one of your sites does something not allowed

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/851247612299604?id=18...

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#56

Post by snowwrestler »

schroeding wrote: post #43
snowwrestler wrote: post #31

Why not use full domains for a service like this? Instead of client.your domain.tld, register client-your domain.tld. This would prevent one bad actor from nuking your whole business. Yes it has a cost, but it’s like $10 a year for a new domain, which I bet pales in comparison to other direct costs of running a SaaS.

Apart from the cost, this would allow bad actors to reregister domains, once a shop is expired, though. Subdomains do not.

This is true. But this risk should probably be weighed against the risk of a bad customer getting your entire root domain deny-listed.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#57

Post by bo1024 »

schroeding wrote: post #43
snowwrestler wrote: post #31

Why not use full domains for a service like this? Instead of client.your domain.tld, register client-your domain.tld. This would prevent one bad actor from nuking your whole business. Yes it has a cost, but it’s like $10 a year for a new domain, which I bet pales in comparison to other direct costs of running a SaaS.

Apart from the cost, this would allow bad actors to reregister domains, once a shop is expired, though. Subdomains do not.

Or preregistration domains for nonprofits that aren’t on your service (or not yet).

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#58

Post by capableweb »

paintman252 wrote: post #24
capableweb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is approaching 100 acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... Feels like a lot and not just three entities. Additionally, Facebook primarily does acquisitions as a form of hiring, according to Mark Zuckerberg himself. They buy the company so they can get the employees to come and work at Facebook.

Sure, they OWN a bunch of stuff, but (besides Facebook/Instagram/Whatsup) none of it is a massive success. It's not like Google which has 1)Search 2)YouTube 3)Maps 4)Android 5)Chrome 6)Gmail 7)Analytics just from top of my head

Oculus VR, Giphy, Mapillary and more are also successful in their space.

Just like Google's successes, the "successes" are actually built by others (almost all you list were acquisitions), but the difference (as mentioned before) is that Google sometimes acquire products for the product itself, while Facebook generally doesn't.

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#59

Post by bachmeier »

paintman252 wrote: post #2

This is why massive companies like Meta and Alphabet needs to be nationalised. They simply have too much power over lives of billions. This article is just another reminder of this. At scale that Meta operates, this algorithmically decided domain blockings mean nothing to them, but everything to hundred's of non-profits. There need to be legally mandated protections so things like this never happen again.

Paul Romer has offered a proposal: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/nobel-laureate-paul-romer-ho...

Re: Our domain and 700 non-profit sites got blocked by Meta

#60

Post by jrochkind1 »

pilgrimfff wrote: post #45

Buy a handful of alternative domains that redirect to your primary (you could stand up a minimal url shortener on each domain). Even if you get unblocked this time, it could easily happen again. Until there’s systematic reform to this nonsense, you just have to work around it with redundancy. If they’re going to treat you like a scammer, work around it like the scammers do.

I believe the facebook crawler will crawl redirects, such that a URL that results in a redirect to a blocked domain is still going to get blocked.

(Even if it were a satisfactory solution to say "message all your customers and tell them they have to start using the new domain for ticket sales, including for events that are already promoted with ongoing ticket sales" which of course it isn't, although I follow you that it would be perhaps better than nothing).

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