Category: Social Media and the Web

Social media, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, web design, and all the stuff that isn’t here yet. Subcategories highlight some areas of particular expertise.

Rebooting The Blogosphere (Part 1: Activities) [en]

Some thoughts (part 1 of 3) following exchanges on Bluesky with Dave, amongst others. My Facebook exile is clearly bringing to a boil my preoccupation with our reliance on big capitalist platforms for our online presence and social life. Though I never “stopped blogging”, I clearly poured a lot more energy over the last decade into what I now think of as “The Socials” (Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon and the like).

Why? How did that happen? What makes it so much more “easier” to hang out over there than to write here? Dave rightly points out to “1-click subscribe” as a killer feature that Twitter brought to the table (written summary of the podcast if you don’t want to dive into listening). But there is more than that.

I am pondering a lot on what I am “missing”, having lost facebook. On what is “difficult” about blogging, in comparison. Where is the friction?

Very clearly, one thing that The Socials (I’ll drop the uppercase soon) do very well is:

  1. bring everything (reading, writing, responding) together in one seamless interface/site/app
  2. shift interaction closer to real-time and what we perceive as “conversation”.

The rest of this blog post covers the first point. A second one will cover the second one. And finally, in a third post I’ll try and put together a proposal for how we can use our understanding of how the socials manage “so well” to remove friction from blogging and help reboot the blogosphere.

As I was writing this post I poked around in my archives to link to where I’d spoken about some aspects of the topic, so here are a some of those I dug up, in addition to those linked in the text itself (realising I wrote so much about this stuff it makes my head hurt):

I see three main “activities” for taking part in the text-based social web, and a fourth that may be worth distinguishing from the third:

  1. Reading or consuming: basically, taking in things that others have put there.
  2. Responding, commenting, reacting: expressing oneself based on something somebody else has provided.
  3. Writing: making available to others ideas, stories, in a broad sense, our creations.
  4. Sharing or boosting: highlighting for our network/readership things that are not by us.

Some comments regarding this typology (bear with me, it will come together in the end).

Reading

RSS does a good job of allowing us to collect things to read from different sources into one place. Many different tools make RSS feeds available. Many different tools read/collect/organise RSS feeds. However, they usually keep this collection of feeds private.

As Dave says, subscribing to an RSS feed generally requires too many steps. Too much friction. The socials make it 1-click (sometimes two) to follow or friend (connect to) somebody. And it’s right there in front of you, a button that calls you to do it. Inside blogging platforms like WordPress.com or Tumblr, you have some kind of 1-click subscription, but it keeps you in their internal reader (just like the socials do, by the way).

Commenting

Responding/commenting is a can of worms, in my opinion. When I started blogging, blogs had no comments. We responded to each other’s publications by writing on our own blogs and linking to what we were responding or reacting to. I actually wrote about this a couple of days back.

After a few months of blogging, I added comments to my blog, so one could say it’s pretty much always had them. (For the nostalgic: the blogger discuss thread I got my comments from, and the page on my site which for some time provided the PHP comment script to hungry bloggers.) And most blogs have them too, though far from all.

Comments come with issues, as well as opening new doors:

  • first of all, you’re leaving your stuff in a space that somebody else controls (ring any bells?) – when the “host blogger” deletes their blog or their post, there goes your comment
  • second, the way comments are designed invite shorter contributions or reactions – this makes the exchange more conversational and less epistolary, tightening the relationship between the different parts of the exchange provided by different people and quickening the pace
  • comments link back to the commenter’s blog, therefore creating an incentive to comment for visibility and not just for what one has to say
  • the visibility incentive leads to people commenting while adding little value (in the best cases) and outright spam (in the worst, widespread case)
  • the lack of a frictionless system to be informed of responses to comments (think “response notifications” on the socials) leads to interrupted interactions (I liked the term “drive-by commenting“)
  • the widespread presence of comments on blogs raises the bar for what is perceived as “deserving” to be a blog post, possibly contributing to the idea that writing a blog post is a “big thing” that you might need to make time for (or that might suck up half your day), in comparison with just “leaving a quick comment” after reading something
  • the visibility of comments led to it becoming a measure of blogging success, increasing a kind of competitiveness in the space, and, in some cases, even its commercialisation.

I see comments as solving two main problems:

  1. attaching the “discussion” about a publication to that publication: all in one place, instead of spread out in blog posts you might not even know exist
  2. lowering the barrier to entry for participating in said discussion: you don’t need any sort of account to comment.

Over the years, many tools have attempted, in some way, to “fix” the problems that come with comments. A few examples:

  • coComment: solve the “notification” issue by tracking comments made over different blogs – and somewhat, the “ownership” issue, by giving the commenter a central repository of their comments
  • Disqus: solves notifications and central repository (but limited to Disqus-enabled sites) and maybe spam, to some extent
  • Akismet and all the other spam-fighting systems…

In a world without comments, people who read a post will not necessarily know there is a “response” somewhere else out there in the blogosphere. The blog author might see it if the person responding tells them (some way or another), or if they check their referrers (didn’t we all use to do that). But the reader cannot know, unless the blog post author knows, and links to the response. Trackback and Pingback came in to solve this issue, creating a kind of automated comment on the destination post when somebody linked to it (with all the spam and abuse issues one can imagine).

Tags and Technorati also played a role in “assembling” blog posts around a specific topic, which could be seen as some kind of loose conversation.

But it’s not the same thing as having the different contributions to a conversation one below the other on the screen at the same time.

Writing

This one is simple. There are many good tools (many open-source) to write blog posts. You can create an account somewhere and get started, or install software on a server somewhere – with a hosting company or in your basement. They work on mobile, in the desktop browser, or even in apps. There are generally ways to export your content and move to another tool if you want. Some are full of bells and whistles, others are pared down.

Blogging has no character limit – the socials do. This, implicitly, encourages writing different things. Design also does that: is the box I’m writing in something that takes up the whole page (like the one I’m typing this blog post in) or is it a little box that might expand a bit but not that much, like on Facebook (which also doesn’t have character limits)?

I think this is a crucial aspect which should not be ignored. The blog posts I wrote in 2000-2001 are, for many of them, things that would be updates on the socials today. They are not the same as blog posts, and we need to keep that. The way we interact with “updates” or “blog posts” is also different (I’ll come to that below if you’re still reading by then). They generate a different kind of interaction. And sometimes, we start writing an update (or even a comment/reply) and it transforms into something that could be a blog post. How do we accommodate for that?

Sharing

Sharing is trickier, and this is why I’ve separated from writing. If writing can be thinking out loud or telling a story I have in my head, sharing is “I saw something and you should see it too”. Maybe I want to add an explanation to why I’m sharing it, or “comment” (hah!), but maybe I just want to put it out there, nearly like a shared bookmark. Of course, if what I write about what I’m sharing starts taking up a lot of space, I’m probably going to be writing a blog post with a link in it. And if I’m just sharing a link to something, I might as well be using some kind of public bookmarking tool (remember delicious?)

Bringing it all together

This is what I said the socials were great at. When I’m on Facebook, I am on my news feed (reading). I can 1-click-share and 1-click-comment on what I see, in addition to 1-click-subscribe if something new I want to track crosses my radar. If I want to write something, the box to do so is in the same view as my news feed – or pretty much any “reading” page I’ll be looking at (a group, for example; groups are another thing to talk about, but that’ll be another post).

I don’t really have to determine if I want to read, write, share, comment – I go to the same place. Whatever I want to do, the tool and environment remains the same. Tumblr does that well too.

Whereas look at blogging:

  • I want to write a post, I go to my blogging software
  • I want to read stuff, I open my RSS reader (confession: I’ve never been good at this) or conjure up a blog URL from somewhere (memory? bookmark? blogroll? link in another post?)
  • I’m done reading something (in my RSS reader) and want to comment: I need to click over to the blog itself to do that – or wait, do I want to comment, or write a whole blog post? I have no clue how much I’m going to want to write once I get going, I just know I have something to say.
  • I read a great blog post (or other thing online, for that matter) and want to share it, I need to pick up the link and write a blog post. Or maybe, instead, I just stick the link in a toot on Mastodon? There are “blog this” bookmarklets, but what about if I’m on my phone?
  • Yeah, I could post my “statusy updates” to my blog like it’s summer 2000, but do my blog subscribers really want to see “spent a lot of time feeding the sick old cat” in their RSS reader?

Think about community platforms like Discourse: want to post, want to respond, want to read? All in the same “place”. You get notifications, you can configure them. I think there is a lot to learn from this type of platform and the socials to bring “blogging stuff” together.

And before somebody says: “your blog should replace your socials” or “you should just blog on mastodon”, wait for the post I plan on writing tomorrow about what I see as a very important distinction in between these two types of online “social” spaces: exchange intensity and pace.

Ideas like making WordPress and Mastodon work together and FeedLand (in short, it makes your RSS subscriptions visible on your blog; check the new shiny blogroll in my sidebar, thanks for the shoutout, Dave!) are absolutely on the right track, but if we treat all “conversation” and all “publication” the same, we will fail in building an open, independent social web that is integrated and frictionless enough to be a realistic alternative to the facebooks of this world for more than just us few geeks.

Continue reading with part 2!

Blogging On My Phone (Facebook Suspension Day 17) [en]

The post « Blogs don’t have to be so lonely » (via Dave) has had me thinking, in between two feedings for my poor old Oscar. Manuel’s blog doesn’t have comments. Just like this one in its early days, and pretty much all blogs at the time.

We linked to each other.

Comments changed that: it became less about linking to others, more about leaving your link on other people’s blogs.

Less invitations for your neighbours to join you, more peeing on the bushes in their garden.

Comments aren’t all bad of course. It’s great to have a space for discussion that is strongly connected to the post that sparked it. But they can be subverted and it can go overboard.

When it comes all about the comments, we end up with Facebook, Twitter (RIP), Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and the like.

This is a shortcut and it’s debatable. What I’m getting at is the respective importances of « writing » versus « discussing » on various platforms/tools. Just like with martial arts (bear with me), the distance between the protagonists determines the style.

How immediate and interactional are our online spaces? And how do those characteristics make us more or less likely to default to using a given medium or platform, or drift away?

One thing that is very clear to me is that I use « the socials » on my phone a lot, but I never blog from my phone. I’m doing it now, to try to understand this better — but that really never happens. I’ll write comments on my phone, I’ll write blogpost-length entries on LinkedIn or Facebook (well, before I was disappeared) that should have been blog posts, but when I think of something to write here, I want my keyboard and the digital environment my computer provides.

Because it’s more « I have something to write » and less « oh, I have something to tell you or share with you ».

On the socials, it’s a quick passing something in my mind that I want to catch and make available to whoever is around right now. On my blog, it’s something that I feel deserves a longer shelf-life. But I think that distinction in my gut is a bit of a fallacy: otherwise I wouldn’t be so broken up about losing 18 years of « stuff » on Facebook.

What I’ve wanted for a long time is the easiness and immediacy of « social sharing » with a way to « transform » some or all of it into blog posts, or blog post material. Something parallel to what I’ve done with my voice memos (I need to blog about this) which allows me to capture snippets of passing thoughts throughout the day in a frictionless manner, and then nearly automatically merge all those tiny audio files into one, that gets transcribed and digested.

I would like Openvibe (or whatever client I happen to be using, ideally seamlessly synced between phone and desktop, like the « Facebook experience » was) to allow me to mark posts (by me or others) as « for the blog » in some way, and also « switch to blogging » if I realise mid-writing that « this should be a post (too) ».

So, how was writing this on my phone? Not that bad. Is it just a question of habit? The small size of the screen, which means I do not have a « zoomed out » view of what I’ve written, bothers me. Adding links is OK (now I’ve realised I can just « paste » the link on selected text) but it seems to sometimes shift the link one character to the right (super annoying). Writing… well, it’s writing in a phone. My thumbs complain. It’s slower. I need to correct more mistakes than when I’m typing.

So, maybe it’s not so much that Openvibe or whatever social client should accommodate my blog, but that my blogging client should allow me to follow my socials and post to them. And why not, subscribe to my RSS feeds. (Now I’m wondering if I’m going to look very silly because it already does this 😅.)

Time to continue feeding the cat!

Facebook Suspension: Day 11 [en]

It’s been 11 days since my Facebook account was suspended. Where are things at?

The appeal, predictably, didn’t yield any results. No response, no e-mail, no change, nothing. I have no other “official” appeal routes, as I cannot access the platform at all. So I wrote up my appeal in a blog post.

What you can do to help: share my story or my appeal, give visibility to my situation – including on Facebook where I have become inexistant. If you know people who might know people, please ask. It seems pretty clear that unless a case manages to gather the attention of the right people (including, it seems, through the media), not much will happen. Going public helps. A huge thanks to those of you who have already shared my posts or updates, reached out to your networks, etc. Facebook is where I had the most reach, and without it, I am struggling to raise awareness on my situation. The reach I have in normal times is, of course, abnormal. A working system should not depend on people having a platform or connections to work right and be fair.

False Positives

My old friend Kevin Marks pointed me to this extremely interesting article: Cost of False Positives (Kellan Elliott-McCrea). Two take-aways:

  • with scale, false positives in identifying abuse of a social site create a huge problem to deal with, even when the detection methods are “very good”; Kellan runs through some numbers, and it’s way beyond what I could have imagined (and the article was written nearly 15 years ago)
  • early adopters (like me!) are outliers in the data and are at higher risk of “looking funny” to abuse detection algorithms; indeed, we are not “normal users”; I share huge quantities of links; my account goes back nearly two decades so there are lots of publications to sift through and which might be flagged; I am at times extremely active in (human) ways which could seem “unhuman”: amount and type of content, speed, etc.

Automation

Just now, I was reading this article from Ars Technica: Social Media Probably Can’t Be Fixed. (It’s an open tab in my browser, not too sure how it go there.) It feels like it.

Even at my social “scale”, when I think about the main community I run (diabetic cats, 7k members), we run into scale issues where it becomes more and more difficult to treat everybody fairly and in a human way. And when I think of how to improve things from a management perspective (because volunteer ressources are limited, always will be) I find myself thinking in terms of automation, how to use AI to support the team doing content moderation or to improve the “member journey” in the community. Less personal, less human.

With automation, you get scale (and with scale you end up needing automation), but with that, you lose personal connection and at some point it comes crumbling down.

Life Without Facebook

How have I been coping with being un-facebooked? Well, beyond the shock and the hurt and the grief and the anger and the injustice of it all, and setting aside the extra “admin work” this is adding to my plate, being forced off Facebook has done two things for me:

  • regroup on my blog and other platforms, and in the process, get to experience different “connection spaces” than the main one I had on Facebook
  • imagine a life without/after Facebook: less connection maybe, a slower pace – I am getting to measure how “caught up” I get in the platform and how good it is at keeping me there.

Before we go all “silver linings”: this sucks. I didn’t need this. It has been extremely distressing and has had a negative impact on my health, in particular my recovery from post-concussion syndrome after my accident. I feel more disconnected and isolated, because I have lost my access to the people I was in touch with on a daily basis (some of them “online-only” friends, many of them not). Life on Facebook continues without me. I’m not being flooded with mails and messages of people asking me what’s going on or how I’m doing. It’s mainly silence.

Losing my content is also dreadful. I’ve spent some time this week-end going through my various archives from various platforms and tools over the years, organising them somewhat, checking they actually work, and exporting recent archives of the places I’m still at. My last proper facebook export is nearly 10 years old. I mentioned before, I think, that I tried to do an export in June, but gave up because it required me to manually download 52 files weighing 2Gb each, at a snail’s pace, and which made my network drop. The “export to Google Drive” didn’t work. So, my stuff on Facebook is a 104Gb export. Outliers in the data, anybody?

Why I’m Fighting

I made the choice to try and fight this, instead of sitting back and saying “oh well, that’s that”. I made the choice to fight because it is meaningful to me in different ways:

  • I care about my content locked up in the platform and would like to get it back.
  • I run a busy support group there, thankfully with a wonderful team who is holding the fort, despite being worn out by six months of my post-accident absence and a couple more years of me struggling to make time for the community amidst the other stuff going on in my life; I also have two decades worth of connections on the platform, which I do not want to just “cut off” like that – be it regarding the community or my network, real relationships are at stake, and if the future is away from Facebook, I want to be able to manage the transition and not be thrown off the plane in mid-air.
  • I am not alone: this is not just about me, but about a systemic, structural issue that has real impact on thousands of people’s lives; I’m lucky I don’t have a business that depends on my facebook presence anymore, but it could have been the case. Others aren’t that lucky. We are innocent casualties in the war against the bad actors of online social spaces, and deserve some kind of justice.
  • Meta, as a company, and Facebook, as a platform, want to play an important role in shaping our world. They want to be an indispensable tool for businesses, and also for normal people, without which they have no value for businesses. To me, it is unethical to have such ambition regarding their role in society and not provide even a semblance of support to those who make it possible – even if, as the saying goes, they “are the product”, because they do not pay. In my small modest way, taking a stand against enshittification.

This means that for the last 11 days, in addition to dealing with the impact of this suspension, I have been looking up articles, searching for solutions, writing blog posts, posting on a bunch of social media platforms I am normally dormant on, DMing friends and vague contacts, drawing up an action plan in my head, and putting my poor injured brain through the ringer to try to figure out what to do, where to start, what to prioritise, who to contact or speak to, in hopes of getting this suspension reversed. All that, knowing that chances are extremely slim and that it is probably useless.

Reconnecting Elsewhere

So, now that you’ve read all that, and without losing sight of it, what has been interesting? Clearly, reconnecting with my blog and feeling motivated to invest in ways of connecting to others and building community where I am not ceding control of everything to the Borg. (No, not that Borg – the new one.) That was already underway, but it has now been prioritised.

It has also made me aware of how facebook encourages a certain type of writing/publication and a certain type of discussion. Not so much in terms of content, but in terms of form. And there is value in doing it differently. I actually wrote some e-mails to people, since my suspension. I shared shorter snippets of stuff (passing thoughts, comments on links I found, ideas, daily anecdotes) because on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Twitter and Mastodon, for example, there are character limits. On my blog there are none, so I have had a chance to ramble along more. I have rediscovered people who left the Facebook boat already and with whom I had lost touch, because I poured almost all my sharing and connecting energy into Facebook.

I also published a couple of videos on Youtube, and plan to do more.

Shared Content

One thing I have become acutely aware of is that even when platforms allow you to export your content, one’s content in a social space is not just one’s publications. It is also comments, participation in the shared content that is a conversation, or a community. All the comments I ever made on Facebook have gone with my suspension. There are conversation threads with holes in them now. All the comments and conversations that took place because I published something, or because I commented and somebody answered – gone. Once people interact with your content, build upon it, it is not 100% yours anymore.

This has been an ongoing preoccupation of mine in shared social spaces. I remember, many many years ago, when blogs were young, a blogger I was actively following deleted their blog one day. And with it, all the comments I had taken the trouble to leave on their posts. “Leaving a comment” does not adequately reflect it, actually. It makes it feel like a small gesture done for the benefit of the other, but it’s not that. A comment can have as much value as a blog post. What makes it a comment is that it is a response, not that it is small or insignificant. It can be something valuable given to the community, and it should not be the right of another person to unilaterally destroy it.

I do not remember who the blogger was. It happened more than once.

Some years back, a few of my contacts on Facebook started a kind of automatic removal of their posts after a certain amount of time had gone by, taking my shares and comments with them. I stopped sharing and commenting on those posts.

I know, the lesson is: if you don’t want something you write to disappear, write it on your blog. But context matters.

Content and Community

This “it’s my content, I’m allowed to delete it” mindset is also an issue in Facebook groups. In the diabetic cat group, it thankfully didn’t happen very often, but when it did, it was infuriating. Somebody would post with an issue. People would expend time and energy in providing good answers and support. Then the person would delete their post, and all the answers with it. The whole point of a support group is that what is said to one person may also help another, who is reading. As a community, we also get to know our members and connect to them, and in that respect, their history in the group is important. Being able to refer back to that history is what allows a support community to function at a certain scale. Facebook does not allow group admins to prevent members from deleting posts and comments – something the platform I’m looking at for the future, Discourse, allows. It’s not all black and white of course, if you post something stupid and want to remove it an instant later, you can. But you can’t take down whole comment threads because you don’t like your post anymore. Participating in a community comes with a certain amount of responsibility towards other members of that community.

On the web side: Cool URIs don’t change. And also: cool content doesn’t disappear.

So, back to Facebook, what has been lost – for me, but also for others – is not just my posts and the pages of my cats, but it’s also a shared history, through discussions in comment threads and reposts on other people’s walls.

If we were connected on Facebook, and you would like to stay in touch, think about subscribing to this blog, and find me on the socials of your choice: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or LinkedIn. I’m still on the bird site but not very active there. I want to do more videos on Youtube, so it might be a good move to subscribe to my channel. I haven’t managed to recover my Tiktok account, so that’s that for the time being. I also have Instagram and Flickr (dormant, maybe it needs waking up), and I’ve created a little WhatsApp community – mainly francophone – where you can get announcements when I publish something here and a little chat-space with others and me, a kind of weird version of my Facebook wall off Facebook (ask me to join).

Of course, I always like it when people leave comments. I promise not to delete my blog.

Appeal Regarding the Suspension of my Facebook Account @stephtara [en]

Given the official appeal process for the suspension of my account did not provide me with the opportunity to argue my case, I am doing it here.

I believe that my account, like others, has been wrongfully suspended in the context of the “Facebook ban wave” that has been going on these last weeks and months. I would like my appeal to be reviewed by a human being.

An authentic personal Facebook account

My account has been active since early 2007 and has been used to post authentic content and share photos, links and insights with my large network.

Over the years, I have also created and managed various support communities using Facebook groups (most notably and recently, for diabetic cats) as well as pages – for my cats, or my business and projects when I was self-employed. I actually helped many small or medium businesses here in Switzerland get set foot on facebook back in the early days and have been a strong advocate for what the platform has to offer both people and organisations.

I have done my best to use the platform to connect with people, add value around me, share personal content or high-quality information, promote respectful discussion – in a nutshell, use Facebook for what I understand it was designed for. I am also known as a blogger, since the year 2000, and I bring the spirit of collaboration, “not-for-profitness” and openness of the early social web to everything I do.

With this suspension, not only have I lost access to a large part of my network and reach, but I have lost irreplaceable memories of beloved people and pets, nearly two decades of my past, and a trove of information on a wide variety of subjects that I regularly referred to, using Facebook to “bookmark” ressources and interesting ideas. My network and communities on the platform have also been impacted by the disappearance of my content.

Details of the suspension

On Friday August 22nd, early afternoon, I made a comment in a 7000-member Facebook group I have be administering for over 7 years. The comment contained a link to a Discourse test site I was trying out. I immediately received notification that my account was suspended for 180 days for infringing community standards regarding cybersecurity. I appealed, confirming my phone number and providing a video selfie in the process. I have not heard anything back from facebook despite the appeal instructions indicating that appeals are reviewed in a bit over a day. I am confident that my account has not been hacked or otherwise compromised.

Earlier in the month, I got a warning concerning the removal of about 10 of my previous posts for various community standards infringements (mostly “spam”, without possibility of appeal. Here are some examples of removed posts:

This removals were accompanied by a warning that further infringements might put my account at risk, but I had no way of indicating that these were most certainly false positives, or of knowing which of my many posts or comments in the future might be similarly flagged.

Background and impact

Over the years, I have been faced with an increasing number of these kinds of post or comment removals which clearly seem to be in error. Sometimes an appeal is possible, sometimes not. Removals are regularly reversed. As the admin of a large and active support group, we are regularly faced with “waves” of posts misidentified as spam, moderators being blocked from mentioning members in the group, or messages being removed from community discussion channels while we try to help our members.

I assumed, knowing my use of Facebook is in line with community standards, that the post removals of early August would be reversed. I understand that algorithmic adjustments can have unforeseen consequences and that some hiccups can be expected.

As the administrator of a large and very active support group, and as a “hyperactive link-sharer”, I also understand that some of my behaviours on the platform could conceivably trigger red flags. For example, as a group administrator of a very active and engaged support group, I have often been in the situation of contacting people “I do not know” (group members) by Messenger. I also post messages that have similar content and mention groups of members, because we work very hard on keeping our members engaged and active – something that is appreciated and appropriate in the context of our group.

The main group I administer has been supporting French-speaking owners of diabetic cats since 2018 and is recognised for its high quality in terms of content, moderation, support and community. Veterinarians send their clients to us – and in parallel, I run a separate group for professionals counting 3000 members. This thriving community is now at risk, having lost not only its founder, but also the valuable content I have posted to it over the years.

I sincerely hope that this appeal may reach somebody in a position to give my account a fair evaluation regarding my respect of community standards. Also, given the many people around the world who find themselves in situations similar to mine, I hope that Meta, as a company, will commit to improving the way content and accounts are flagged, and to providing an efficient path to appeal for those of us who find ourselves unjustly removed from the platform.

Thank you for your attention.

I can be reached on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or LinkedIn. Or here in the comments, of course.

Les commentaires qui se transforment en article [en]

Je me souviens très bien d’avoir eu conscience, quand Twitter et Facebook ont commencé à prendre de plus en plus de place dans la vie en ligne des gens et dans la mienne, de l’impact que ça a eu sur les blogs, et surtout les commentaires. Notre énergie rédactionnelle et interactionnelle s’est trouvée happée par les plateformes, et nos blogs en ont fait les frais.

Laissant de côté la traumatisme de la suspension de mon compte facebook et de la perte probable de près de deux décennies de données, c’est clair que cette semaine sans facebook (on y est là, à l’heure près!) a donné un grand coup d’accélérateur à un mouvement intérieur qui prenait de l’ampleur: tenter de revenir au web ouvert et indépendant, humain et authentique, qui m’est cher depuis plus de 25 ans. Donc j’écris sur mon blog, parce qu’au moins ici je suis chez moi et c’est moi qui ai les clés et le titre de propriété, je réapparais sur d’autres plates-formes, je réfléchis à l’avenir de ma présence en ligne.

Toutes ces dernières années, je suis toujours surprise quand j’écris ici que je réalise qu’il y a des gens qui me lisent encore. Merci d’être là. Et des fois, il y a des gens qui commentent. Comme Olivier. Olivier qui a un blog, et qui comme tant d’entre nous, se dit “j’aimerais y écrire plus“. Du coup, je suis allée y faire un tour. J’ai lu quelques articles, et répondu. Laissé un commentaire. Vous savez qu’au début, il n’y avait pas de commentaires sur les blogs? Ni sur celui-ci. C’est dur à croire parce que ça fait tellement partie de notre “définition” du blog, les commentaires – mais en fait, au début, il n’y en avait pas. Quand on avait quelque chose à répondre, on faisait un lien vers le billet original, et on écrivait ce qu’on avait à dire sur notre blog. L’interaction était moins immédiate, moins publique. Mais ce qu’on écrivait restait chez nous.

La première étape, ça a été les fils de commentaires sous les articles de blog. Avec un effet collatéral: le blogueur qui vire sa publi et tous les commentaires avec. Plus ou moins de grogne. Il y a du des outils comme coComment et Disqus (qui est toujours en place, sur Blogger par exemple). Mais surtout, il y a eu la deuxième étape, les réseaux – Twitter, Facebook, mais il y en a d’autres qui ont déjà passé de vie à trépas – qui ont vu une accélération de l’interaction et des échanges, toujours plus sur la place publique, toujours plus éloignés du contenu dont on parle, et toujours moins entre nos mains. Les milliers d’échanges que j’ai eus sur Facebook au sujet de tel ou tel article, telle ou telle publication, qu’elle soit quelque part sur le web ou postée directement sur la plateforme, maintenant expédiés vers le néant par les robots en charge de la plateforme, en témoignent.

En mémoire du “bon vieux temps” du début des blogs, je vais reproduire ci-dessous ce que j’ai écrit dans les commentaires d’Olivier, avec lien vers ses articles originaux. Peut-être que ça vous donnera envie d’arrêter de scroller quelques secondes (c’est pas un jugement, je sais combien c’est conçu pour qu’on le fasse “malgré nous”) pour les lire.

Top IMDb : 2 ans plus tard

Bon, j’arrive tard à la fête, mais j’y suis! Ça fait longtemps que je ne regarde presque plus de films, après m’être fait un orgie Marvel à un moment ces dernières années. Pas parce que je n’ai pas envie, mais parce que je croule sous la pile énorme des choses à faire et des envies à poursuivre, et bloquer du temps pour me poser devant un film (même une série!) est compliqué pour moi. Pas par manque de volonté, mais disons par excès d’hyperactivité. Même depuis mon accident, alors que justement je devrais passer un peu plus de temps à glandouiller (c’est pas bien de passer la journée entière sur Netflix, mais s’envoyer un film ou une série de temps en temps, vu où j’en suis, ce serait pas mal).

Souvent, quand je me dis, ok je regarde un film, je ne sais pas lequel regarder. Parce que comme avec le reste, il y a un tel backlog de choses à voir que ça me paralyse. Je sais que j’ai raté tellement de bon films ces 15 dernières années. Comme avec la lecture, d’ailleurs, ma tendance naturelle c’est d’aller vers des genres “faciles et entertaining” pour moi: SF pour la lecture, Marvel et SF pour les films. Mais chaque fois que je lis ou regarde autre chose, ça me fait monstre plaisir. Le fameux décalage entre ce qu’on pense nous plaira, et ce qui nous plaira. Donc j’aime bien cette idée, prendre les top x et commencer par là. Je note 🙂

Grippe

Team vaccin ici aussi, depuis 2009 et la “Grippe A”! Je ne crois pas avoir eu la grippe adulte, par contre je suis une abonnée aux infections respiratoires. L’hiver 2023-2024 j’en ai enchaîné six entre début novembre et l’Ascension. J’ai quand même fini en consultation d’immunologie, rien de grave, suspicion de petite immunodéficience et terrain allergique (ça semble aller beaucoup mieux depuis que je suis sous anthistaminiques en continu, je n’ai d’ailleurs plus le nez qui coule en permanence, c’est magique!)

Ce fameux hiver, j’ai un syndrome post-viral après une des infections (qui n’était probablement pas le covid, le covid j’ai eu après, mais c’était peut-être aussi la première infection de novembre; bref). En effet, près de 3 semaines à me trainer. Je suis suffisamment souvent malade pour savoir comment ça va, chez moi, quels symptômes quel jour, comment ça évolue, combien de jours de travail je rate (car c’est systématique… tu me colles 37.1 de température je suis inutile). En gros, ça me bouffe une semaine, dix jours, puis je vais de nouveau bien, avec une toux qui traine encore et encore. 

Mais pas là. Là, au bout de dix jours, non seulement je toussais toujours, mais j’étais totalement à plat. Je me souviens être sortie me balader une vingtaine de minute dans le quartier, au pas de l’oie (instruction du médecin, faut mettre le nez dehors quand même un peu). Et je suis rentrée, je me suis posée sur le canapé, et j’ai dormi une heure. Jamais ça ne m’était arrivé, ce genre de chose. 

En bonne geek j’avais déjà quelques infos car j’avais suivi ce qu’on savait du covid long (j’y ai échappé jusqu’ici, mais c’était et ça reste ma hantise), et j’ai fouiné encore un peu, et eu confirmation: il ne faut pas se pousser, en cas de fatigue post-virale. Il faut respecter la fatigue et se donner du repos. Quand on se pousse, ça prend plus long, et c’est là que ça courte aussi un risque de se chroniciser. 

Ça va à contre-sens de mon fonctionnement, ça, de s’écouter et ne pas se pousser. Mais j’ai fait. (Et depuis mon accident j’ai encore pu bien mettre en pratique, et je continue – heureusement que j’ai eu l’entrainement de l’hiver d’avant pour apprendre les bases.) 

Et ce que j’ai trouvé incroyable, c’est que la “sortie” de cet état s’est faite extrêmement rapidement. Qu’on s’entende, l’état a duré, mais un jour, alors que je me trainouillais toujours de la même manière, j’étais en train de remonter les escaliers entre l’espace coworking et chez moi quand j’ai réalisé… que j’étais en train de retrouver ma vitesse habituelle. Et en l’espace de quelques heures, j’exagère pas, j’ai quasi retrouvé mon état normal. Ça m’a vraiment fait le même effet que lorsqu’en vélo électrique je suis par erreur en mode assistance “sport” (plus bas que d’habitude) et que je passe en “turbo” (le mode avec max d’assistance, habituel). 

Depuis, j’ai pu constater que dès que j’avais un peu de fièvre, je le sentais en fait très bien. Si monter les escaliers est un effort physique qui me coûte, c’est signe de quelque chose. Parce qu’en temps normal je monte ces escaliers rapidement, deux à deux souvent, comme une petite gazelle (même si je ne ressemble plus à une gazelle depuis longtemps).

Vous avez toujours votre blog? Manifestez-vous dans les commentaires – ou dans un billet!

Pourquoi mon compte facebook a-t-il été suspendu? [en]

Au-delà de mon petit drame personnel, je pense qu’il est important de comprendre les mécanismes sous-jacents qui décident de nos vies et “morts” numériques. (Parce que quand 18 ans de publications disparaissent en un instant, c’est un peu ça quand même.) On investit du temps et de l’énergie dans une présence en ligne, sur une plateforme qu’on ne contrôle pas. On le sait tous: si on paie pas, on est le produit. Mais le discours de la plateforme sera toujours “jouez le jeu, soyez authentiques, nous on s’occupe des mauvais acteurs, merci d’ailleurs de les signaler”. A partir d’une certaine échelle, automatisation et déshumanisation transforment l’espace communautaire en gouvernement totalitaire.

J’explique dans cette vidéo un peu longuette (la concision n’est toujours pas mon fort) “pourquoi” ou “comment ça se fait” que mon compte facebook ait été suspendu-supprimé. Parce qu’on me demande toujours ça, depuis une semaine: “mais pourquoi?!?”

Donc, explications en vidéo, pas juste pour satisfaire la curiosité des gens qui me connaissent et qui se demandent quel crime numérique j’ai bien pu commettre, mais aussi parce que c’est important de comprendre dans les grandes lignes comment ça marche derrière, et comment ça nous rend tous vulnérables, et que si votre présence en ligne et le contenu que vous partagez sur les plateformes comme facebook ou autres n’est pas quelque chose dont la perte vous laisserait de marbre, il vaut la peine de sortir de sa torpeur bordée de déni et faire une sauvegarde de votre contenu.

Demain, c’est vous qui pourriez vous retrouver devant un panneau “entrée interdite, et en plus on a balancé toutes vos affaires”. Vous n’êtes pas plus innocents que moi.

Si j’ai le courage, je complèterai cet article avec une synthèse écrite de ce que je raconte (merci TurboScribe et ChatGPT qui vont me mâcher le travail).

Edit 15:45 – les fameux points clés. Extraits par mes assistants algorithmiques, fignolés par moi.

Avec l’e-mail, on a des filtres à spam automatisés qui nous protègent du contenu indésirable. Sur les réseaux sociaux, il y a également une “course aux armements” automatisée entre les mauvais acteurs (arnaqueurs, etc) et les plates-formes.

Ces filtres sont imparfaits, et “attrapent” parfois à tort des contenus légitimes. On a tous vécu “l’e-mail qui arrive dans le spam”. Sur Facebook, des contenus inoffensifs sont parfois supprimés à tort. C’est ce qui est arrivé il y a un mois ou deux à une dizaine de mes publications, remontant jusqu’en 2016.

Il y a peu ou pas de possibilité de faire corriger ces erreurs ou de faire recours, et quand recours il y a, c’est également traité de façon automatisée. Les processus sont aussi “cassés” (on annonce une réponse en 24 heures, une semaine plus tard, toujours rien). Dans mon cas, je n’ai pas pu faire recours pour indiquer les erreurs de traitement lors de la suppression de ces publications. Par contre j’ai fait recours concernant la suspension du compte.

Mon compte était déjà “orange” faute à ces faux positifs, et un commentaire posté dans un de mes groupes avec un lien externe l’a fait basculer en “rouge”, entrainant sa suspension immédiate pour 180 jours, puis suppression si j’omets de contester la décision ou si mon appel n’aboutit pas.

Je publie beaucoup, et beaucoup de liens, donc statistiquement, probable qu’il y ait de temps en temps une publication qui déclenche l’alarme à tort; d’administre également des groupes assez grands et actifs, dans le cadre desquels j’envoie régulièrement des messages privés à des personnes qui ne sont pas dans mes contacts et qui ne me répondent pas. Ceci pourrait également avoir généré des “points négatifs” pour mon compte.

Le recours quant à la suspension est une procédure automatisée très basique qui ne permet pas d’argumenter ou de donner des explications. Il s’agit juste en gros de cliquer sur un bouton, et il y a très peu de chances qu’un humain évalue le cas.

Plus rien de ce que j’ai publié en 18 ans sur Facebook n’est visible, sauf ce qui est dans des groupes, visible seulement par les modérateurs. Les pages que je gérais ont disparu, sauf celles où j’avais mis quelqu’un d’autre comme co-admin.

Facebook veut être un acteur majeur de la société, mais peut suspendre ou supprimer des comptes de façon brutale et sans explication. Il n’y a pas de service client ou de moyen de contacter un être humain en cas de problème. Cette logique s’inscrit dans un fonctionnement de plus en plus déshumanisé de nos administrations et institutions, où les utilisateurs sont traités par des processus souvent défectueux et qui ne tiennent pas compte des situations réelles.

Ce qui m’est arrivé peut arriver à n’importe qui, vu qu’il s’agit d’erreurs de traitement. Si la disparition de votre contenu sur la plateforme a des conséquences pour vous, pensez à régulièrement demander un export de vos données (long et ennuyeux à faire, mais…). Si vous gérez des groupes ou des pages, assurez-vous toujours qu’il y ait au moins un autre administrateur en plus de vous.

Facebook Criminal [en]

I’m a facebook criminal
Eighteen years building bridges
Sharing insights life knowledge trivia
Connecting to people and connecting people
Building communities
Building trust
Thinking out loud and crying in words
Loving, debating, rarely hating
Being human, first and foremost
Being me

I’m a facebook criminal
Not like the scammers and spammers
Promoters of fake news
Shills and conspiracy theorists
No, not like them, upstanding netizens
Not like the shady marketers
The pyramid-scheme coaches
The sad trolls and the desperate incels

I’m a facebook criminal
Trying to do good in the digital world
Raising awareness
Saving sick cats
Giving reach to your cry for help
Finding a home for your houseplant
Sharing photos of a hike
Offering a place to crash

I’m a facebook criminal
The worst kind
Authentic
Posting every day
Sharing links to the world wide web
Nourishing the network
Pointing out bad actors
Too many cat photos I’m sure
But didn’t you know
The internet is made of cats
– Maybe not facebook

Eighteen years of posts and comments
Down the drain
All they carried too
Your comments your photos your thoughts
Conversations amputated 
Disappeared
They were yours too, you know
They were ours
Communities like Swiss cheese now
Emptiness where once the backbone was
Conversations with dead friends
Like on Ed Sheeran’s old phone
Gone, maybe for good, like them

I’m a facebook criminal
Convicted by a jury of bots
No humans for me, how ironic
For being too human
The machine will judge and sentence me
A digital death of sorts
Make way for the sycophants
The brands with deep pockets
Those waging the cyberwar
As long as it pays

All your good deeds are just fleeting electrons
But the red marks are hard-coded
Even if we were wrong
The Cluetrain is long gone
Somewhere in the scrap heap
The Gods of the Algorithm
Blinded by power
Will hear no prayers.

Facebookless Musings [en]

It’s been less than 24 hours since Facebook suspended my account. I don’t know if I’ll get it back, honestly. Maybe this evening it’ll be back online and this day will seem like a bad dream – like the 60 minutes a few weeks back when I thought that I had made a mistake that had killed my cat (he’s fine, he doesn’t know anything about it, it was in my head; another blog post). But maybe it’s gone forever.

I want to capture what I’m feeling, because it’s very strange. I’ve been on Facebook since late 2006 or early 2007, shortly after joining Twitter, if my memory serves me right. Ah, memory. That is my biggest feeling of loss right now. Nearly 20 years of personal documented history that have been disappeared. It feels like having sudden amnesia. Of course, there are also people and connexions. The people I’m in touch with now, I’m pretty confident that we’ll find each other somewhere else. But what saddens me the most is the people of the past, encountered at various moments of my life, loose ties that the common platform keeps just under the surface, a click away if needed. Gone.

I poured a lot into Facebook. Thank goodness it’s not critical to my professional activity right now. Thank goodness I still have my blog. Thank goodness I’m already present on other platforms, even if they’ve been largely in the background of my online presence until now. It really feels like a betrayal.

I’ll share screenshots of some of the posts Facebook took down these last months, posts from years ago, with innocent content, but labeled as spam, no avenue to appeal. And the post that trigged my removal, clearly, the link that freaked out the algobots, was in a closed online community I run, a comment telling people that we’re exploring another tool for the future of the community, here is the link. No, I don’t believe in anthropomorphising the machine to the extent of saying “oh, they didn’t like that you were pointing to the competition”.

As ChatGPT told me, it’s a structural issue. I’m the admin of a large, active, engaged group (and other groups too). I share a lot of links. Posts in the group I manage are flagged multiple times a week as spam because people are talking about giving insulin to their sick cats, or donating partly used syringe boxes because their cat no longer needs them – the happy story is when they’re in remission, the sad one is when they’re dead. We don’t remove inactive users, we encourage people to stick around. So the group is big, but maybe engagement is sliding down, even though the community is active and vibrant. There are 50 to 60 support posts a day in it.

It feels like a betrayal because I have done nothing if not “be social”. I have connected with my pears, I have shared knowledge, troubles and wisdom, exciting food and grief. I have connected people, brought them together, built online communities that are healthy, where people are nice to each other, free from spam and sales pitches. I have given more than I have taken. I have trusted that if you are an authentic human being, if you’re not trying to manipulate others or act only in your self-interest, if you are truly there to be “social”, then things will work out for you. The trust you have built with others will protect you.

You’ll recognise this thinking – it’s what I’ve called, in my mind, the “Cluetrain belief”. There are probably better labels, but that’s my personal mental one. It’s a vision of the online world where capitalism doesn’t win, where humans are at the centre, where truth rises to the top. It carried me through over a decade as an online consultant. Until it started seriously crumbling down a decade ago.

So I’m not naive: I’ve known for years I could wake up one morning and find that Facebook had arbitrarily taken down my group or my account. I’ve known for years that these platforms do not care about people anymore, but about money and influence. I’ve known for years that my behaviour as a real human being online regularly raises red flags. Nevertheless, I persisted. I shared links. I shared thoughts. I shared photos and videos of the shows I went to. I shared poetry. I responded, discussed, exchanged. I connected.

It feels like a betrayal, even though I knew it could come. I do guess I didn’t believe it would be so brutal. Two months ago my account had a spotless record. Then suddenly, Facebook told me it had removed 9 posts of mine, going back to 2016, because spam, because reasons, because I’m not adhering to “community standards”. Nine posts out of thousands, tens of thousands probably. No way to appeal. I was going to do a separate post for this, but let me show you some. You can judge for yourself.

I’m so glad I still have my blog. So glad I took care of keeping it up and running even when I didn’t write much, even when I couldn’t really bring myself to write here anymore.

So, have a look at my facebook crimes.

I’m not even going to comment, honestly. It’s just ridiculous.

Thankfully my communities are safe, even though mangled by the disappearance of all my content. I was cautious to make sure I was never the only admin of a group. I lost my Pages though, and that hurts a bit. When it became possible, I should have created separate accounts for them, to decouple them from my profile. I guess I thought the chances of something happening to my profile were really low – even though I knew it could happen.

So, 20 hours cut out of facebook, how do I feel? It feels like yet another blow in a string of losses. Over the last two years, I’ve lost too many loved ones. Five months ago I had a ski accident that resulted in “mild” cognitive issues that have been keeping me off work and out of a “normal” life. (Quotes, right.) About a month back I asked for the Facebook account of a recently deceased friend to be memorialised, and that resulted in its immediate and complete deletion (another blog post, was waiting to have the courage to write about it). It was extremely brutal. Just like this suspension is brutal.

Leaving Facebook on one’s own terms is one thing. Being kicked out feels a bit like being fired from the job you’ve held for twenty years and sent out without even being allowed to collect your stuff or say bye to your colleagues. Sure, there are other platforms. Sure, it’s a time-suck. Of course there will be “blessings”, we can always look for them, and often find them (not always). But let’s deal with the loss of connections, the betrayal, the erasure of history and lived time, the negation of hours and hours of work, of care and engagement. Let’s deal with that before we try and “look at the bright side of things”.

My main feeling right now is one of disconnection and loss of community. I feel like I’ve been digitally deported (yeah, sorry for the metaphors, I know losing one’s job or being deported is way worse than what I’m going through). My online life has been a large part of my life, and losing a big chunk of that in such circumstances is not trivial.

This also makes me sad about the way in which the world is changing. For the hopes and ideals I had as a younger adult, and how disillusioned I’m growing as the years go by, as the internet I loved and lived in breaks down, as our institutions crumble and money and fascism take over. Yes there are also very good things in today’s world. I’m not going to go all “good ol’ times” on you. But there are ugly things, and we can regret that they are so present.

If I do get my account back, the first thing I’ll do is ask for a complete export of my content. I did it when Facebook announced they would stop keeping Live videos online indefinitely, but gave up when I realised I had to download 50+ 2Gb archive files that made my connection drop again and again. Yeah, that many archive files – that’s how much content I poured into that platform.

I’ll continue preparing to migrate my support community off of facebook in the months or the year to come – I don’t want to rush things if we can get away with it.

And whether I get my account back or not, the way forward is going to be heading back to the times before Big Platforms, when we owned our content and our connections.

If you miss me, or just want to keep me somewhere in your digital rolodex for old times sake, here is where I am now: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads (but holding back somewhat there), Instagram (same, Meta-land, right?), LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr (maybe need to resuscitate my presence there?), Youtube (videos will be going there, need to check out Peertube too), and Discord as stephtara. WhatsApp is best for casual day-to-day chatting, instead of Messenger (my number isn’t hard to ding.) I’m dormant on the bird site.

Facebook Account Suspended WTF [en]

OK, so this just happened.

Lately, I got about 8-9 posts removed from Facebook because “spam” or something. Posts going back nearly 10 years, for some. Wonderful. Got warned “be a good girl or your account could be suspended”. No avenues to appeal.

And a few minutes ago, just as I posted a comment in one of my support groups with a link to the Discourse test site we’re trying out, the hammer falls. Must have been the last straw for a ticklish algorithm.

Messenger is blocked too. I have no way to reach out inside of Facebook, so if you’re amongst my contacts, thanks for spreading the word. And of course if you have any kind of access inside of Facebook to reverse this f***-up, it would be most welcome.

I can be found on Bluesky as @stephtara and on Mastodon as @[email protected]. My Threads account seems to still be up, as is Instagram. And on WhatsApp. My phone number isn’t hard to find if you know my coworking space. Or ask my brother on Facebook.

Now I’m sweating thinking of all the places I’ve used Facebook to “log in” — how is that going to work with a suspended account?

I’ve been on the path to moving away from Big Platform for a while (accelerating these last couple of weeks), and this is probably going to increase acceleration even more. I’m not going to continue investing time and energy into something that can be taken away from me so arbitrarily.

You can subscribe to my blog and get my posts by e-mail if you wish (if it’s broken let me know).

Edit 23:15 – pour les membres de DF, infos sur le site de DF.