The possibility of a TikTok ban is inching closer to becoming a reality at this point. On Tuesday, the Senate passed the bill that would bar the social media platform from operating in the U.S. unless ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, sells its stake.
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t begs the question: In today’s social landscape, do brands ever own their audiences?
The answer is no, according to three agency executives who say it’s time to start exploring contingency plans that don’t hinge on any of the walled gardens of social media titans like Meta, X or TikTok. Looking for the next frontier, some are pointing toward the fediverse.
We need more people on here, not brands and marketing shills
I can supply a maximum of one people. Doing my part.
I’m 3 people
I am 0.4.
I’m -3.4 people as I’m the Zero-Sum Man, here to restore balance to the universe. I’m also a big purple dude with a funny-looking chin.
Do you have an odd fascination with balancing knives?
Gabe?
The IRS wants to know your location.
With more people will come brands and marketing shills.
I can deal with that if it’s in that order
The brands and marketing shills won’t bother if there aren’t enough people to fleece.
While I agree with the sentiment, I feel like activitypub/fediverse would be unsustainable if it ever went mainstream without some form of capitalist investment to keep things running.
Marketing huh? One second.
goes into back room, loads shotgun
Yes. Here comes the enshittification.
Unless these businesses choose to make their own servers, then they can still be banned and lose their audience. And I don’t think a lot of them are going to realize that. However, going into the fediverse in any capacity is a step in the right direction, since you can just export a CSV file of the people you follow and import it somewhere else. Getting the people who follow you moved is a trickier thing, but some services like Mastodon do have that capability. So even if they start out on something like mastodon social and then realize they need their own server, they can set it up and then migrate.
While I’m not a fan of advertising or marketing in general, brands having a presence on the Fediverse would be great for Fediverse adoption, and sometimes complaining about a brand on social media is needed to get proper customer service in this world of AI and bot controlled customer service channels. I can see this being a good thing, and there are some brands/companies I would likely follow. I already do follow a few who are on Mastodon, such as Framework, Pine64, and Raspberry Pi.
I think the Fediverse is an ideal platform on which to experiment with things like this. There will always be a difference here between those who want to see the Fediverse grow into a dominant platform and those who prefer things more quiet. Fortunately, the nature of it means that in this case we can actually have our cake and eat it too. Instances of Fediverse platforms such as Mastodon, Lemmy and FreeTube (likely the three that have potential to grow into a significant market share), especially the larger general audience ones, can attract and bring in the high profile users/accounts, such as brands, that can bring in a larger general audience that some current users are looking for, while those who want to keep away from that can move to smaller or more niche instances, or create their own, that can then defederate from the larger instances they don’t want to interact with. People who like aspects of both types of environments can have accounts on multiple different instances, even if those accounts or instances can’t interact with each other due to defederation. Seems like a win-win to me, and part of the beauty of the Fediverse. Don’t like something where you are? It’s easier than anywhere else to move to a different part of it and maintain a presence on the platform overall.
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