- One of the reasons I've been thinking about Facebook today is that Instagram blocked a post of mine yesterday and it really pissed me off. #
- Instagram, for me, has been a rare bright spot in going online over the past few years. Not due to anything the company has done really but because I have some kind and generous friends and colleagues on there who send positive vibes (or at least "likes", haha) when I post pictures, mostly of my kids.#
- Instagram seems to have created a positive space, with its focus on pictures and, admittedly, with some of its UI decisions. A positive space at least for some users, like me.#
- Anyway Instagram decided a picture of my 4 and 7 year olds shirtless in public in Brooklyn was unacceptable nudity and blocked it. I clicked some "appeal" button then immediatley posted a picture of a note, telling my friends I would be deleting my account soon because of this.#
- I then did some digging into Facebook's "community guidelines" and found that technically I did break the rules! You are not allowed to post any "uncovered female nipple" from a child. Even for a 4 and 7 year old outside on a summer day cooling off the way boys are free to do. I find that sexist and dumb.#
- Then an unexpected thing happened, the appeal worked basically instantly and my photos went up. So I sheepishly deleted my "I'm leaving Instagram" note, calculating that I get a little more emotionally out of Instagram, as of today, than it drains from me.#
- The next day I got a nice Instagram mention from my fitness instructor, who I think is just great.#
- What a melodrama! I resent even that I care enough to write a post like this. I hate being in the position of having to care what a corporation thinks about a picture I took of my kid in public. I hate that we as users have to constantly do cost/benefit calculations about whether it's worth the humiliations doled out by so many big platforms. Do I quit Amazon because they censored the review where I said "this [cheap] caviar is great but turned my poop blue"? (True story!) Do I quit Apple because they might report me to the cops for that same picture of my kids, if and only if I have iCloud Photo turned on? Do I use Amazon Web Services even though they were among the first to sell out Julian Assange?#
- Anyway, all this is a way of saying, if a worthwhile effort comes along to make an open nice version of Instagram, I'm definitely helping out. How hard can it be? :-) #
- Since my previous burst of blogging in September I edited this story at The Intercept where we published Facebook's blacklist of banned people and groups and dove into how this list works and more importantly how it affects people not on the list (you can't praise certain people on the list, but the list itself has been secret).#
- Since that came out, I've been talking to people internally and externally about this story and (of course) about Facebook more generally , including the recent group journalism project around some secret Facebook documents released by a whistleblower who used to work at the company.#
- One theme that comes up over and over is that it's frustrating people have to care so much about how Facebook behaves, including its rules on what it bans and allows, and how well or poorly it enforces those rules, and about its privacy practices, etc etc.#
- We have to care because the open web has not caught up to Facebook (~17 years after its founding), which is to say, we as a society have not, in an open and sustainable way, caught up to Facebook. People feel trapped on Facebook, or trapped into talking about and caring about Facebook, and it becomes like pressure in an Instant Pot. It's a huge powerful thing, which causes people to get worked up about it.#
- Key point, if there were enough competition for Facebook, and if there were more open formats and systems for sharing information across social networks, and standards that made it easier to build new social networks, and maybe if there were some laws ensuring we could control and transport our personal data in an interoperable way — in this fantasy world, so many people wouldn't need to get so exercised about Facebook. I honestly don't want anyone telling a private company (or nonprofit, or group of friends, or church, or bowling league, or whatever) who they should be banning or even (most of the time) who they should not be banning.#
- I agree with the critics who say that journalists as a group have been way too eager to egg on censorship on Facebook and other platforms, and reductive in talking about how Facebook is used. The solution will never come from Facebook, or from focusing on Facebook. It will come from all of us collectively — at the level of policy, technology, and civil society, at minimum.#
- I enjoy Drummer but I'm not a big fan of this change, which makes blogging in Drummer less fun for me. #
- Background: Drummer is an outline based blogging system. You create an outline in the web app, then publish it. I love this. You can just fluidly drag things to re-arrange them. To make a new post you could literally just hit the Enter key which is right there on your keyboard. You could take a tangent four levels down in a post and just quickly drag it up to the top level so it becomes its own post. It felt powerful and cool.#
- With this change, you need to click a special "plus" icon to make a part of the outline be on the web. Otherwise, if you just hit enter, or drag some part of another outline up so it's a the top level, it won't publish for some reason. I'm not sure the reasoning behind the change, maybe because I was away from Drummer for a bit.#
- I miss the fluidity. This change to me makes Drummer feel less like outlining, which I love, and more like regular modal blogging software, which I don't so much love :-)#
- On September 18, I wrote that I was surprised blogging platforms don't detect when one of your posts is mentioned elsewhere and notify you, in the manner of Twitter's mentions pane. Andy Sylvester, a developer, helpfully pointed me at a w3c recommendation called Webmention, which calls itself "a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site.#
- Well, I guess I find Webmention not simple enough :-)#
- In my original post, I linked the HTTP referrer header, because it seems like this should be enough for someone to create a mentions pane with. Browsers supported this for years. It told the destination web server which page you came from, if you clicked a link on that page. But apparently the only people who really used it were advertising brokers and others who prey on privacy, so now it's been basically disabled, browsers only send the top level domain that linked to you, not the path to the specific post / content. #
- And if you want this functionality that was baked into the web from the start, you have to rebuild the infrastructure yourself with something like Webmentions. I find it a little depressing.#
- Oh well. #
- Anyway, silver lining, if I understand correctly, a website can opt-in to real referrers again, setting a header that will cause browsers to send the full path when a user clicks a link on that site. That seems easier than setting up the sending of Webmentions, but doesn't help you properly detect inbound mentions.#
- PS Webmentions were created presumably because they are richer. The spec says "a response can be an RSVP to an event, an indication that someone 'likes' another post, a 'bookmark' of another post, and many others." Sounds complicated.#
- PPS Andy Sylvester has a Drummer blog. Thank you Andy.#
