Gregory's ServerFacebook and Youtube actively discourage external links (to anything) in posts/comments, there are also settings on YT where the channel owner can choose whether or not to allow external links (not sure whether FB allows community mods to decide this or applies its own automatic policies as I've never used it). I noticed this when trying to comment on YouTube with a link to the Dutch public news service; in this case the comment simply disappeared without any warning >>
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 there's also marketing tactics of startup social networks (including LinkedIn at one point) where they try and email all of your contacts to get them to join.. there may be is a case to use legislation against this, but it will vary between countries and there would need to be proof found that GAFAM are colluding to only share links amongst themselves (YT links on Facebook groups seem to get through) and its not local moderators leaving default setting active..  @vfrmedia @msh @VictorVenema and there's Instagram simply not supporting any link, giving us the cursed "link in bio" thing. I think there's definitely a certain hostility toward hypertext in their algos, and I suspect there is valid concerns for spam & malware, meeting their own interests in keeping people on their app. Spam is actually the argument used by Pixelfed for copying the anti-link approach of Instagram. And I was just thinking the other day... spam really does ruin a lot of things @vfrmedia @msh @VictorVenema it's an irrelevant anecdote, but I noticed last week that the newsletter of the non-profit where I work gets a high amount of hard bounces from mail providers whenever I've used an harmless unicode character in the subject. And of course, that's all because spammers have been abusing unicode characters to, among other things, circumvent spam filters. |
@VictorVenema @yhancik
I suspect the corporate social networks aren't singling out Mastodon as such, but discouraging *any* site that could lead the discussion elsewhere (as they are losing out on traffic and potential viewers of ads), a link to an old style forum about pets, cars, electronics would be quite likely to also trigger this (even on those forums if you make lots of links in your first few posts they are usually flagged up for the moderators to check)