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Hi all! Co-owner of Dreamwidth here. Pretty cool to see my project hit the front page of HN, but definitely a bit of a /shrug moment on the subject itself. "Fa

by xb95 6y ago

Hi all! Co-owner of Dreamwidth here. Pretty cool to see my project hit the front page of HN, but definitely a bit of a /shrug moment on the subject itself. "Facebook gonna Facebook" I think is approximately how we feel about this. I know here on HN we're used to hearing stories about scrappy startups trying to carve a piece of the pie big enough to exit on, but that is pretty much the exact opposite of what Dreamwidth is. Our motivations are very different, so this FB block is mostly a curiosity to us. Dreamwidth is a small, neighborhood corner store kind of site. We're run by a couple of dedicated part-time staff (who have other jobs/responsibilities in life -- I personally work for Discord!) and a cadre of amazing volunteers who donate of their time and energy to make a nice little corner of the Internet that isn't driven by the cycle of VC and growth and user monetization. We do not have any goals around growth, we don't advertise, and we ultimately don't care that much what the other platforms do. Our goal is to give people a stable home where they don't have to worry about their data being sold, their writing being monetized. Users choose to pay us for a few more advanced features (like full text search), and we support ourselves entirely off of that. We are home to a large group of online roleplayers, Hugo Award winning fiction writers, Linux kernel developers, parents, security researchers, artists, activists, recipe bloggers, educators, and everything in between and around the edges who would rather work with a service owned and run by people who are motivated by something other than get-big-and-exit. Large communities of online roleplayers who get together and build whole worlds on Dreamwidth, who tell stories together. I'm constantly impressed by the creativity of our community. Anyway, it's super cool to see Dreamwidth on the home page here. It's been my side project for over a decade now, and I'm quite proud of it. Even if modernizing a 20+ year old Perl project is a hellish undertaking at the best of times... but we keep going. :)

mrtksn 6y ago
Super cool to have people with a mission(other than optimizing KPI for profit). It wasn’t obvious for me how to discover quality content though, any words on how to use this site or how to think about it? Do we need to know people beforehand that publish things that we want to follow?
- xb95 6y ago
  There are a couple of discoverability mechanisms, but it really depends on what you're looking for. Usually people follow the network -- find one person that's interesting, see who they talk to, and go from there. Another approach is to see what "interests" are popular and click through to see who shares those/is active: https://www.dreamwidth.org/interests?view=popular https://www.dreamwidth.org/interests?view=popular But, TBH, there's a lot of happenstance and serendipity (or are those the same).
evo_9 6y ago
Great to hear all around. I like the focus on doing your own thing and ignoring the other platforms (and likely naysayers). We could all use a healthy dose of this in our side projects! Also - I would take it as a positive you are blocked on FB. My wife and I tried to setup a simple business page for our local store we opened less than a year ago; they flag us as a fake/fraudulent account multiple times when we tried to created one; neither of us have personal/active FB accounts so I guess that's the reason (and this behaivor, yeah makes me double down on NEVER getting a FB account now). I even tried to emailed them 'proof' as they requested because my wife was worried it would really hurt us, nothing ever came of it. We finally decided it wasn't worth our effort, forgot about them and our store has thrived since. I'm happy to grow our business without having to deal with them. We've been using local and other ad platforms such as NextDoor.com, which I'd never heard of but one of our older customers brought to our attention. People talk about getting rid of Facebook, to me it starts with the actions you guys take and how my wife and I are going about it. Don't support Facebook at all, they don't deserve it.
JoshuaZ 6y ago
I really like the product you've made, and use it regularly. It might be helpful for your user base, and the project as a whole if one responded with a little more than a shrug. Facebook may be more willing to listen to you if you contact them then random users in getting this resolved.
- xb95 6y ago
  Yeah, that's fair. We did follow up and I'm told we're unblocked now.
_ps6d 6y ago
This might come off as a little rude, but it's sincere advice from someone who used to work in anti-spam (not at Facebook): I had a quick look through Dreamwidth's "latest" page (https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest) earlier today, and a major portion of the posts on there were blatant spam for things like credit card scams, "Work from home and make $1000/day!", and so on. You seem to be hosting a lot of spam, and those spam posts are also far more likely to be getting linked externally on sites like Facebook, since that's the reason they're being created. Because Dreamwidth is effectively free website hosting along with a free new subdomain for each account, blocking individual subdomains is futile, and it's difficult for external sites to distinguish between spam and legitimate blogs. I'm sure Facebook will unblock you fairly soon, but unless you get the spam on Dreamwidth under control, this will probably happen fairly often with different sites blocking it. It would be easy to end up with an impression of Dreamwidth being a spam-hosting site, and decide to block it (either manually or automatically). Blogspot has always been in a similar situation and would get blocked from a lot of sites due to the sheer amount of spam it hosts.
- mindslight 6y ago
  Controlling spam used to be about stopping unwanted messages sent to users. Now it has morphed into this idea that every site has the responsibility of content-policing their own users, lest what they publish be used to facilitate spam. Your advice may be pragmatic, but it shows how far we've slid down the slippery slope.
  - jsnell 6y ago
    > Now it has morphed into this idea that every site has the responsibility of content-policing their own users, lest what they publish be linked from spam. Not sure what you mean here. The problem Deimorz was bringing up wasn't just about users writing something, and spammers linking to it. It was that this site was being used to host the spam payloads. By spammers, not by actual users. And this is how a lot of the early spam fighting worked: by finding hosts that allowed sending spam and publishing their IPs on blocklists. All mail traffic from those IPs, even if legit, would then be rejected by a large proportion of mail servers that subscribed to these blocklists.
kradeelav 6y ago
Want to personally thank you as a user of DW for a few years that migrated over from tumblr after the NSFW ban - I can't thank you and the team enough for what y'all provide. It's a haven and a remnant of the "old web" that is honestly the one thing aside from my personal webring-esque site that I can /trust/ not to change with trends (whether it be payment trends or idiotic aesthetic changes that end up making more of a mess than not). Having a place for fandom analysis and journal posts and just to exist with some level of privacy is a rare treasure. Glad to see your thoughts on this FB ban.
chrisoverzero 6y ago
It’s really great to see how far Dreamwidth has come since the start.
PostThisTooFast 6y ago
What is Dreamwidth?
smsm42 6y ago
As a Dreamwidth user, I would like to use this occasion to express my thanks for this decision. I've seen too many blogging platforms being swallowed by large companies, shut down, "improved" into oblivion by marketers and made completely unusable in the chase of "growth". You're doing it right. Thank you.
whatsmyusername 6y ago
Hot take: In 2020 getting blocked by Facebook is a badge of honor. At least from an advertising perspective, Facebook is where we spend money when we want to reach the 'boomers with more money than sense' demographic. For everyone else we spend money with Google. From the outside (I haven't used Facebook in a decade) it just looks like where you go when your opinions are too scuffed for every other platform save the, 'chans.' Or when you get kicked off Twitch for similar reasons.

by xb95 6y ago

mrtksn 6y ago

Super cool to have people with a mission(other than optimizing KPI for profit). It wasn’t obvious for me how to discover quality content though, any words on how to use this site or how to think about it? Do we need to know people beforehand that publish things that we want to follow?

xb95 6y ago
There are a couple of discoverability mechanisms, but it really depends on what you're looking for. Usually people follow the network -- find one person that's interesting, see who they talk to, and go from there. Another approach is to see what "interests" are popular and click through to see who shares those/is active: https://www.dreamwidth.org/interests?view=popular https://www.dreamwidth.org/interests?view=popular But, TBH, there's a lot of happenstance and serendipity (or are those the same).

evo_9 6y ago

Great to hear all around. I like the focus on doing your own thing and ignoring the other platforms (and likely naysayers). We could all use a healthy dose of this in our side projects! Also - I would take it as a positive you are blocked on FB. My wife and I tried to setup a simple business page for our local store we opened less than a year ago; they flag us as a fake/fraudulent account multiple times when we tried to created one; neither of us have personal/active FB accounts so I guess that's the reason (and this behaivor, yeah makes me double down on NEVER getting a FB account now). I even tried to emailed them 'proof' as they requested because my wife was worried it would really hurt us, nothing ever came of it. We finally decided it wasn't worth our effort, forgot about them and our store has thrived since. I'm happy to grow our business without having to deal with them. We've been using local and other ad platforms such as NextDoor.com, which I'd never heard of but one of our older customers brought to our attention. People talk about getting rid of Facebook, to me it starts with the actions you guys take and how my wife and I are going about it. Don't support Facebook at all, they don't deserve it.

JoshuaZ 6y ago

I really like the product you've made, and use it regularly. It might be helpful for your user base, and the project as a whole if one responded with a little more than a shrug. Facebook may be more willing to listen to you if you contact them then random users in getting this resolved.

xb95 6y ago
Yeah, that's fair. We did follow up and I'm told we're unblocked now.

_ps6d 6y ago

This might come off as a little rude, but it's sincere advice from someone who used to work in anti-spam (not at Facebook): I had a quick look through Dreamwidth's "latest" page (https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest) earlier today, and a major portion of the posts on there were blatant spam for things like credit card scams, "Work from home and make $1000/day!", and so on. You seem to be hosting a lot of spam, and those spam posts are also far more likely to be getting linked externally on sites like Facebook, since that's the reason they're being created. Because Dreamwidth is effectively free website hosting along with a free new subdomain for each account, blocking individual subdomains is futile, and it's difficult for external sites to distinguish between spam and legitimate blogs. I'm sure Facebook will unblock you fairly soon, but unless you get the spam on Dreamwidth under control, this will probably happen fairly often with different sites blocking it. It would be easy to end up with an impression of Dreamwidth being a spam-hosting site, and decide to block it (either manually or automatically). Blogspot has always been in a similar situation and would get blocked from a lot of sites due to the sheer amount of spam it hosts.

mindslight 6y ago
Controlling spam used to be about stopping unwanted messages sent to users. Now it has morphed into this idea that every site has the responsibility of content-policing their own users, lest what they publish be used to facilitate spam. Your advice may be pragmatic, but it shows how far we've slid down the slippery slope.
- jsnell 6y ago
  > Now it has morphed into this idea that every site has the responsibility of content-policing their own users, lest what they publish be linked from spam. Not sure what you mean here. The problem Deimorz was bringing up wasn't just about users writing something, and spammers linking to it. It was that this site was being used to host the spam payloads. By spammers, not by actual users. And this is how a lot of the early spam fighting worked: by finding hosts that allowed sending spam and publishing their IPs on blocklists. All mail traffic from those IPs, even if legit, would then be rejected by a large proportion of mail servers that subscribed to these blocklists.

kradeelav 6y ago

Want to personally thank you as a user of DW for a few years that migrated over from tumblr after the NSFW ban - I can't thank you and the team enough for what y'all provide. It's a haven and a remnant of the "old web" that is honestly the one thing aside from my personal webring-esque site that I can /trust/ not to change with trends (whether it be payment trends or idiotic aesthetic changes that end up making more of a mess than not). Having a place for fandom analysis and journal posts and just to exist with some level of privacy is a rare treasure. Glad to see your thoughts on this FB ban.

chrisoverzero 6y ago

It’s really great to see how far Dreamwidth has come since the start.

PostThisTooFast 6y ago

What is Dreamwidth?

smsm42 6y ago

As a Dreamwidth user, I would like to use this occasion to express my thanks for this decision. I've seen too many blogging platforms being swallowed by large companies, shut down, "improved" into oblivion by marketers and made completely unusable in the chase of "growth". You're doing it right. Thank you.

whatsmyusername 6y ago

Hot take: In 2020 getting blocked by Facebook is a badge of honor. At least from an advertising perspective, Facebook is where we spend money when we want to reach the 'boomers with more money than sense' demographic. For everyone else we spend money with Google. From the outside (I haven't used Facebook in a decade) it just looks like where you go when your opinions are too scuffed for every other platform save the, 'chans.' Or when you get kicked off Twitch for similar reasons.