I mean, this isn't really a surprise. On many social media platforms, you get instantly banned/shadowbanned if you post an external link, if you can publish that post in the first place at all. From the platform's perspective, there is almost no incentive to allow external links (spam, leakage etc). There is no law to mandate that third party links must be allowed.

I don't like this but also don't see how this can be different in the real world.

Simply insane. But honestly if anyone is using Facebook still that's on them. I can't fathom how people still use it.

And I just discovered today that posting a tweet via the X API costs $0.20 if it contains a link. They'll all head this way as they think they're too big to fail.

Rug pull!!!! I love it

Genuinely, I think having a postal code based swap system run by post offices would be the ideal situation

You get both the safety of a public place to meet and identity verification through your post office representative

Seems like a win for everyone and we get FB out of the way

Don't become dependent on these greedy corporations.

yep, run a small non-tech business too (new for me) so I got to learn all about 'normie' FB marketing and it's absolutely trash from a business perspective

- we had this link limit for a few months already

- every business portal to upload content etc is super buggy, just shows loading spinners, you never know if a post has worked or not

- we're locked out of our instagram account as we took it over from old owners who don't know password and none of the reset options arrive even though they have access to them

- we finally got an email 2fa to go through to recover the account and that then asked for the SMS too, which never arrives

- there is of course absolutely no way to contact support

Unfortunately it's the only platform all our customers are on. They don't even have Google accounts, it's all WhatsApp, Facebook and phones.

I hate to devil's advocate this. But is the observed behavior of 'is this an outgoing link' the only practical way to defend against external bot advertising campaigns? Aside from Facebook obviously wanting you to pay them for advertising, how does any independent forum deal with this at scale without banning links?

Said it before, but this company's product managers are pure evil.

Engineers are enablers at best. If you are not trapped there by visa issues or vesting problems you should take your money and RUN.

In think in the future, they will charge users for posting anything more than x times a months.

Generating slop content is cheap now, but you need to store it and very few people will see it, so you can't show more ads.