[weinzierl]

Except that a least Facebook tends to show this kind of posts to no one. Instagram is worse in that your posts can't have external links at all. I guess all other social platforms will end somewhere on that continuum in their quest to keep you and your content on their site.

There is another twist. Facebook's terms of service say:

> [..] you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content [..] when you share, post, or upload content on or in connection with our Products [sic] [..]

Emphasis mine.

So if you post a link, do you grant them a license to the link itself or to the content the link points to, because it is content posted "in connection" with their product?

Out of interest: Do you have a link to that Stallman quote. I'm interested to read more about it and about the context in which he said it.

[ksangeelee]

The advice comes from Stallman's article 'If you feel your organization needs a "presence" in Facebook'

https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html

It was linked to in his article 'Reasons not to be used by Facebook'

https://stallman.org/facebook.html

[crankylinuxuser]

Thank you for responding on my behalf, ksangeelee. That is indeed the source from Stallman that I was thinking of.

Ideally, we need to stay off these platforms. But I believe these are a good middle-ground to retain a presence when we have a need to be there. But we need to corral these useds so they end up getting away from the para-sites :)