Posting this on the off chance that a Meta engineer reads it.

I've had my account falsely flagged by an automated review system. I cannot follow any public user without getting a modal that says:

"Some accounts prefer to manually review followers even when they're public. Let us know if you think that we've made a mistake."

Then my profile goes to "Flagged" in the follower list. The user is not notified. The only workaround is to ask users to follow me, but then they get scary warnings when doing so.

My account status page shows no problems. I actually paid for verification and I'm still "flagged"? Support also said they couldn't remove the flag because it was set by an "automated review system".

This is all despite me being a normal user of the app for 3+ years, I've never engaged in any spammer-like behaviour (I've never even had links in my bio). All I do is post occasional updates and like comments and posts from others.

It's a serious impediment because insta is the go-to IM app here, especially for making personal connections. It's costing me trust and social connections. I can't be the only one affected, so I think it's worth investigating.

My handle is in the blog post.

The real recourse is breaking up the tech giants.

I'm looking to do a bit of CRUD on top of PostgreSQL as well. Currently mid-way through learning the language.

Would you mind sharing some of your experiences? Do you find the 'stubbornness' of the compiler frustrating at all? How do you find the tooling?

Also, I've considered Diesel for ORM, so was wondering if you've been using that too.

> Do you find the 'stubbornness' of the compiler frustrating at all?

I actually love it. The more work I can offload to compiler the better. One simple example that frustrated me in Go was adding a field to a struct. You add the field the the whole thing still compiles even though the zero-initialized value probably broke your app logic. In Rust if I add a field to a struct, the compiler warns me about all the places that I need to double check.

> Would you mind sharing some of your experiences?

I highly recommend zero2prod book which is well-written, practical, but still teaches the essential principles (https://www.zero2prod.com/). You basically deploy a CRUD app to DigitalOcean from scratch. The best way to ramp up IMHO.

> How do you find the tooling?

Cargo is sweet. rust-analyzer is all I need. I need less extraneous tooling to be effective. For example, in Go I might use a task runner to watch the repo and run tests when I change a file. But in Rust I can just follow the rust-analyzer highlights and manually compile less-frequently.

> Also, I've considered Diesel for ORM, so was wondering if you've been using that too.

I was not happy with GORM (https://gorm.io/index.html) and never had a satisfactory experience with any ORM. I'm a fan of writing plain SQL, even in Go. It's just that with Rust sqlx I can get compile-time checks against the schema. It's not anything new (see Haskell), but it tightens the feedback loop and I have full control of the performance.

Thanks for getting back. I'll take a look at those resources you recommended. Certainly, working with Rust, a lot just 'feels right', it brings together elements I liked from other programming languages like Perl, Erlang, C. Those being: expressiveness, efficiency, a reasonably sane standard library, and functional goodies like immutability and closures.

> You add the field the the whole thing still compiles even though the zero-initialized value probably broke your app logic.

Ah, I found Python notorious for the same reason.

I've found ASP.Net's ORM to be quite good, though this is only with a year's experience, so perhaps I'm missing some cracks that might emerge later.

Thanks for sharing this advice. I'm exploring external funding but there's a lot of good points here too.

Good to see that the cashflow is going the way you want, best of wishes for your future! May I ask, would you mind sharing what your startup is?