Yet if you want to delete your accounts on purpose you have to complete a gauntlet.
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
58 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
88389 readers
3535 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
If you want to permanently delete your account, just say something critical about Mark Zuckerberg.
One Canadian lost 18 years of data on Facebook after posting photos from a family trip, and had a second account banned when she tried to return. Others lost accounts vital to advertising their businesses.
If you're putting all your eggs into one basket that's owned by someone else, you deserve everything coming to you. People who use Facebook as their only internet presence for their business are fucking idiots.
Too many businesses are forgoing the (fairly trivial) cost of a domain and website and setting up Facebook instead.
One bad decision and you’ve lost the customer facing presence.
Yeah, I'm sorry, but this is on the business. There are business-class services where you will pay to have someone available to talk to you and deal with your data integrity. Facebook is not that.
And this isn't a "hate on Facebook" comment, either. I'd say exactly the same thing if someone set up a business on lemmy.today and then was outraged that the server had data loss and that the server admin wasn't providing personalized human tech support. It's not that lemmy.today is a bad service when used for its intended purpose, but that it'd be an extremely bad decision to make it your business's identity.
If someone has irreplaceable photos (or any other data) that they absolutely cannot lose, sticking their sole copy on some free online service is a really bad decision.
EDIT: Actually, that is kind of a neat advantage of the Fediverse that I'd never really thought about. If there were enough demand, I'm sure that you could get a Threadiverse instance with that level of service for you. I know that there are at least two providers that I've seen that provide managed instance service, and while I don't know what-all they include, and it's probably not the most-extensive level of support, I bet at least backups are in there.
searches
https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
Deploy Lemmy as a fully managed service starting at $11/mo. Get automated backups, SSL, updates, and monitoring included.
With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated, and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.
Benefits of Lemmy fully managed by Elestio
Deploy a fully managed instance of Lemmy in few minutes on Elestio. We handle installation, configuration, encryption, security, backups, live monitoring, software & OS updates. No more DevOps.
Mastodon and PeerTube
Our Service
Backed Up & Portable
We keep backups and we let you take them with you.
Smart Management
We're raising the bar to make the Fediverse easier. One interface to manage all your instances.
Help & Support
Whenever an issue arises, we write a help article to help future Fediverse users solve their problems.
Affordable
Get started owning your persence on the Fediverse for just $4 a month.
You're not gonna get much human time for $4/mo, but they do apparently offer custom packages, and I'd imagine that one could probably arrange for a higher level of service if one wanted.
You don't even have to make a bad decision. Just a completely innocuous one that gets flagged by shitty AI with no human review and no recourse.
Which seems to be the case in the op. I say it's 100% on the people trusting Meta with any of their information, let alone anything essential and apparently not keeping backups. Baffling ineptitude on display there.
Unfortunately there is a lot of societal and professional pressure to use Meta products.
Crazy, right?
Even most of those that I deal with that do have a website, don't have a contact form or email address. Just a link to their facebook page and their app, as if everyone in the world has a smartphone and mobile coverage.
Did her a favor
…..And nothing of value was lost…..
The only regulation required is for everyone to terminate their Meta accounts. A Big Brother nanny state is not utopia, except for the few in power.
A law saying there has to be human customer support available is not a nanny state, stop being ridiculous.
Requiring Meta to have humans accessible in customer support will not solve any of the real problems at Meta. Unless Meta wants to hear from and meaningfully, helpfully respond to their data sources, it will do nothing but allow abusive people to abuse the humans in customer support. And if they want to hear and respond, they don't need a law to require them to do it. Nothing is stopping them from doing it, except their own priorities.
I just spent a month and many interactions with real humans at my electricity provider, which is a service much more important to health, safety and quality of life than anything Meta provides. The issue was one of safety and security of supply issue due to degraded equipment.
The humans in customer support were uniformly ignorant of technical requirements and business processes. Unable to answer basic questions about roles, responsibilities, timelines or even the possibility of getting anything done about the issues.
The only tool at their disposal was a job system in which they could create jobs. So they asked me what sort of jobs they should create. I don't know their business organization or processes, so I couldn't advise them. All the jobs they created were rejected due to being created incorrectly or inappropriately. Never with any feedback to me, of course. I had to call back and wait half an hour to an hour to speak to a human, each time I wanted an update. They didn't even have a means to escalate my call to someone with knowledge of the business processes or authority to do anything other than open more jobs. They couldn't re-open jobs that had been closed without any action taken or information provided. They couldn't open new jobs with any priority on the basis that weeks and multiple prior jobs had resulted in no useful response. They had no information about when a job might be dealt with: they could not articulate any commitment to response timelines.
It wasn't the fault of the humans in customer support, beyond their choosing to continue working in such a dysfunctional organization. It was the fault of the management that deliberately created the dysfunctional organization and business processes. But none of that management was available via customer support.
If Meta doesn't want to hear or respond to their data sources, they won't. It makes no difference if there are humans in support or not.
Fortunately, I was able to switch electricity providers.
Regulating trivial aspects of trivial services is not beneficial. It's just an additional increment of control for those in power, available to be abused for more wealth and power. And a precedent for yet more regulation.