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lrvick parent
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.

reddalo
>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...

closewith
Yeah, this is a perfect example of the need for regulation of the mega-apps.
lrvick OP
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.

6510
It depends entirely on comments like the one you wrote here.

To me it is obvious they had more than enough time and opportunity to do it properly themselves and the tools at their disposal get more glorious every year. Users grow more and more dependent on them. Services control more of our lives.

They have LLM's now! Really good ones! So good they can format and sort 90% of the customer service issues into well known boxes.

You can also have people pay for support. 1000 euro might be nothing compared to losing an account. Write me a nice report what exactly went wrong. It can be [] my fault [] their fault. It can result in [] permanently banned [] account restored. They can [] refund the fee [] ask for ____ more money.

They thought themselves to important to do it themselves. You are unworthy of even the worse kangaroo court and unworthy of trial by robot. Those are pretty damn low standards.

It will eventually happen because we have lots of wealthy influential people in the global law apparatus and they are really being mocked here.

Mega corps are going for the heaviest punishment they can apply for all possible offenses they chose not to describe. LOL You aren't sentenced to death only because they lack the means to do it but I'm sure they are killing plenty of people indirectly.

I even think out taxes should pay for their customer service.

closewith
It's already happening in the more stable democracies.
cbeach
I’m in Europe and the EU was certainly no help when Google blocked me from Adsense with no recourse.
reddalo
Did you open a complaint with a certified Out-of-Court Settlement Body?
Kuinox
This is a 3 year old act, when were you blocked ?
jstummbillig
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.
Sammi
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.
lrvick OP
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.

jjani
> b2b

There you have it. Now try B2C.

thunderfork (dead)
amelius
Whatever the reason, they should have at least communicated it before banning the user. Leaving people in the dark makes them rightfully angry.
ulfw
This is exactly why Google, Meta, etc shouldn't have the power to own such a huge part of the (western) web
lrvick OP
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.

OccamsMirror
What kind of mobile phone do you have?
kldg
lol, unrelated to anything, but I had a police detective in my house about a year ago for something unrelated to me, though he did question me. At the end, he asked for my phone number. "Oh, I don't do phones. I've got a VOIP number if you want." He was so friendly up to that point, but then he clearly SCOWLED at me; I was so taken aback that I laughed at it.
dredmorbius
I know this is OT for the thread, but I'd be interested in hearing how you're using VOIP, provider(s) you've used, and any interesting hacks.

I'd recently twigged that I don't want a mobile phone that forwards to, say, an Asterisk server I control, but an Asterisk server (and VOIP number(s)) I can optionally forward to a mobile or other service (e.g., possibly Jitsi Meet or Signal).

That last I could then interact with on a subnotebook laptop or tablet device. The phone would principally exist as a tether or true-emergency comms.

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