I’ve been a social media hermit for the past 3 years but recently I’ve given up and created a few accounts across different apps again. It’s unreal how strict the requirements are now.
- Give e-mail (ok)
- Give phone number (… eeh, ok)
- Use the new account for a while
- Account suspended, please upload selfie to continue (no thanks xi). There are also some verification promps where you have to record a video and rotate your face left to right
If this isn’t a message to move to indie web I don’t know what is
I’m a little gutted that I lost my Facebook account, if only because it was so old I had a username. Instead of my profile only being facebook.com/<number>, my profile was like facebook.com/tweak. People were really surprised by that.
However they blocked my account because I used 3rd party web wrapper apps and once had a poor internet connection in a remote location. It asked me to log in again, I did, then it said “you’ve done something strange” and demanded government ID. I actually complied (although I taped up most of the info, like it said I could) but it kept automatically rejecting it. I think it was because my profile used the shortened version of my name, which I go by on a day to day basis, while my ID uses the full version.
One of these days I might twist their arm with GDPR and get them to grant me access, however my local ICO has been pretty toothless under the current right wing government. I don’t really miss Facebook, but there are friends and family on there I’d like to contact, and I was a member of a particularly good meme group.