Comment by lrvick
6 months ago
Remember that Whatsapp belongs to Mark Zuckerburg, not you, the users, or the developers. They can ban anyone for any reason at any time, and it does not need to be a good reason. There is no appeals court for corpotech.
This is a great lesson on the fragility of building businesses on private, centralized, and proprietary platforms.
It is a lesson I wish I learned a lot earlier in my career.
>There is no appeals court for corpotech.
Unless you live in the EU. [1]
[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-out-co...
Yeah, this is a perfect example of the need for regulation of the mega-apps.
This will never happen in any useful way internationally on an open internet.
The only winning move for users is to invest in decentralized open source unkillable alternatives.
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I’m in Europe and the EU was certainly no help when Google blocked me from Adsense with no recourse.
Did you open a complaint with a certified Out-of-Court Settlement Body?
This is a 3 year old act, when were you blocked ?
Meanwhile, in the real world, people who actually run businesses have to rely on quasi utilities like the stuff that meta offers, because building a business for the people who are willing to to use mastodon is not a fucking thing.
Buy a domain and make your own system. Only use other people's platforms for marketing and pr, or as commodity providers that are easily replaced. You can make your own business that you actually own and control. It's even cheap - only need a domain and a vps.
Both domains and VPSes aren't yours. More importantly, your customers will never find it because they're idiots who only look on Instagram. Meta encourages this kind of idiocy, of course. You get to choose: accept reality as it is, or deal in false reality and go out of business accordingly.
I run a profitable b2b tech company that does not use any Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Meta products.
Is that the easiest choice? Hell no. But it makes us a lot harder to kill, and is great for morale.
> b2b
There you have it. Now try B2C.
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Whatever the reason, they should have at least communicated it before banning the user. Leaving people in the dark makes them rightfully angry.
This is exactly why Google, Meta, etc shouldn't have the power to own such a huge part of the (western) web
We, the users, gave them that power. We can also take it away.
You actually can lead a productive socially rich life and even run a tech company in the modern world without using any products by Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, etc.
There are open source alternatives to everything if we do research beyond what is advertised to us.
What kind of mobile phone do you have?
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Some users gave them that power over other users. It's not enough to avoid Meta yourself. Your would-be customers need to also avoid Meta, and good luck making them do that, when you have no contact with them, because you're not on Meta where they're looking!