Mastodon isn't perfect.
But the fact a social network exists that is completely free to use
has no venture capital investors
has no shareholders to answer to
has no growth targets
with a web interface with zero tracking cookies
and mobile apps with zero trackers at all
with ten thousand server administrators who donate their time for user safety
is - in my opinion - mindbogglingly cool, given the state of the world we live in. Not everything has to be shit. People make things better.
@GossiTheDog
with no ads, even without ad blockers!
With no engagement-reinforcing force-feeding of content
with no arbitrary rules that only exist to keep the platform "advertisable" (there are still arbitrary rules, though 😅)
just wanted to extend your list by some additional noteworthy selling points
@DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog It would be nice if we could come up with language that captures the difference between ads and “posts that someone paid to place on timeline”.
There are ads on Mastodon, such as the artists who post to promote their work or services for sale. They are generally a good thing because you only see them under the same circumstances that you see any post.
But there are no posts that are forced onto your timeline.
@macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog
I call it self promotion. I engage in a bit of self promotion here, although the things I promote don't involve money changing hands. Fedi accounts that only exist to promote a substack account are a bit of a pet pet peeve, and I tend not to boost, but I coexist without complaint with advertising that is not of a "pay to play" nature.
Even in the commercial web, I don't ad block, but I do tracker block (with Privacy Badge) and of course I get accused of ad blocking by the ad blocker blockers. THAT business model makes me vomit.
@n8chz @macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog The first post is self promotional but boosts are just advertising. I think the main difference currently is that there’s no money (or other tangible incentive) changing hands.
That’s not guaranteed though. If someone collects a hundred thousand followers on Mastodon, companies are likely to start asking them to boost posts in exchange for enticements. The only differences between that and something like LinkedIn are that the reach is limited to people who follow the big account and the money goes to the person who did the boost (who is, at least, explicitly linking their reputation to it) and not the platform.
Nothing in the Fediverse is intrinsically immune to advertising, though being able to flag accounts as spam and have them blocked (and possibly their instances if they fill up with marketing drones) may help.
@david_chisnall @n8chz @macberg @MartyFouts @GossiTheDog
> Nothing in the Fediverse is intrinsically immune to advertising
Well, I can always simply unfollow/mute/block that guy if he starts pushing garbage, and since there is no algorithm, as long as you don't use the global feed that's all I will ever have seen from that dude.
@david_chisnall @macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog
Boosts are indeed advertising, which is why when stuff is seriously morally reprehensible such as Nazi shit we go out of our way to avoid signal boosting it.
In less sinister cases I think most of us are constantly amplifying (boosting) signal and attenuating (muting) noise, and the effects are synergistic, and more effective as a "relevance" filter than any "algorithm."
@david_chisnall @macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog
I have a pet theory that ALL business models (at least all online business models, I'm still undecided re. meatspace) are based on signal degradation as a way to enforce information asymmetry and value subtraction to enforce paywalls.
https://astoundingteam.com/wordpress/2014/11/02/monetization-value-subtraction/
@david_chisnall @macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog
I wonder out loud sometimes how many fedizens getting recruited as influencers it would take to turn the whole thing into a gray goo of pure enshittification.
@n8chz @GossiTheDog @david_chisnall @MartyFouts @macberg @DJGummikuh everyone is an influencer, is just degrees of efficacy
i personally believe 
fediverse needs to replace the legacy indoctrination networks.. this ultimately means we should embrace with a BIG CAVEAT business accounts, but with a pathway to extinguish mega corpos.
what do i mean by that, corpos need to DEFINE themselves.... @sun made a list of five different types of companies, the biggest is a 'Publicly traded entity or brand thereof'....
....and fedi servers by default mute publicly traded companies, so that people can only see them if they search directly for them. this is how we solve the issue, in my mind. we must have a culture on fedi that scorns any instance that doesnt hide posts by, or tagging, publicly-traded corporations, by default.
(EDIT) and ONLY individual users, NOT instances, can make a particular PTC visible and only to them. If they boost nintendo, ppl will not see it unless they follow, say nintendo too. (/EDIT)
that is how we balance the various interests. small business should be embraced by fedizens because small businesses are a backbone of societies. The #stockmarket (glorified gambling and ponzi system backstopped by central banks) is totally at odds with the decentralized, people-orientated virtues of fediverse.
*(see the recent thread on this at tag #stockmarket)
@n8chz @GossiTheDog @david_chisnall @MartyFouts @macberg @DJGummikuh
>This seems like a mirror image type strategy
mirror the best parts of society while sheilding fedizens from the extractive ponzis, but giving them access to said poisons if they REALLLY want it.
>This is why I have a pet theory that commercial attracts commercial and noncommercial attracts noncommercial
content that appeals to ppl, attracts ppl.... ppl are generally attracted to ppl.... corpos want to attract ppl willing and able to buy. There are tension here, and its not a BAD tension, but wanting to stick head in sand and say all mention of money is BAD, actually hurts us as human ppl, not just as fedizens.
>influencers (....) dipped [into] Fediverse, [left for #blusty] I'd rather see noncommercial [succeed] than to try to win back the influencers
good to know influencers know they are less effective on fediverse. it means our trash antenna is well tuned, i didn't notice too many shills.... they mayve been prevalent on CAGEMAFIA servers, which i block and dont even bother talking to 95% of the time. a few years ago I saw a trashy tabloid-ish, corporate-friendly instance with posts in its wall about hollywood, smoking subliminals, and lego (wierdly a LOT of lego), it was intoxicatingly corporate and pity any fool who ends up on one of those. But we risk losing ppl to places like that if we build an echo-chamber of strictly "non-commercial" as you put it. We have really no business yucking others yums, if a normie comes here and seeks out, say xbox, or a sugar/fructose/glyphosate/alcohol/gambling/poisoning corporation, just let them have that poison, but yeah the corpo-influencers are not too difficult to spot and i'm pretty sure we would be able to label them fairly easily, then an instance admin can add a "{Reasonably considered} an {advertiser} for a {publicly traded company or brand thereof}" label and that entity will only be visible in searches.
* ^^^ noting new alternate category to a business, 'advertiser'. Also qualitators like 'Confirmed/Admitted' (in bio, no extra output needed, eg. just say "Advertiser for blah"), and 'Reasonably considered' (posts from such entities are only shown in feeds of those who subscribe.... for everyone else their posts are visible when ppl use search). #advertiser
Again, the #smallBusiness or (#)marketplace hashtag, is where this was discussed a week ago. I suggested setting up fedi instances for locales and small business industries (eg. coloradowest.zone, organicfarmers.ca etc), that way there is a nice suitable instance ready for small businesses to use.
If there exists a local business you like setup an account for them and use #seo techniques to help them find it. Why not duck into the store and congratulate them on joining fedi, 
haha.... once they verify that theyre the business, hand them the account. :)
Seriously thats how fbook got big in the first place.... problem is fedi isnt ready for the big time.... still too much reliance on CDNs, when what we need are (#)DCN (Decentralized Content Nodes) for maximum resilience.
Once we have DCN....
Embrace #smallBusiness,
Extend them their fediverse account to continue using (or close),
Extinguish the extractivist pratforms and publicly-traded, central-bank-gerrymandered ponzis.
@frogzone @GossiTheDog @david_chisnall @MartyFouts @macberg @DJGummikuh
Commercial services (e.g. search engines) seem to systematically 'demote' noncommercial content, perhaps (?) without literally censoring it. Perhaps it's a side effect of promoting promotional content, so in such an environment, anything that's not part of that ecosystem naturally sinks to the bottom.
I imagine alternative search engines that rank pages by ratio of length(textContent) divided by total 'payload' (including so-called assets), with lowest first. Filter for high signal to noise ratio.
@frogzone @GossiTheDog @david_chisnall @MartyFouts @macberg @DJGummikuh
Another thought experiment I'm preoccupied with (and have no idea how to implement, or how realistic) is a search engine whose first search result is any page (perhaps randomly selected, as randomization is perhaps the best defense against bias) that matches the search terms. nth search result is that indexed page which (1) matches the search terms and (2) is most "different" from (perhaps a concatenation of) the first thru n-1th results, according to some distance metric for text.
@n8chz @GossiTheDog @david_chisnall @MartyFouts @macberg @DJGummikuh when i talk about search i'm talking about fediverse search which is very basic, yes and mostly operates with good old hashtags.
Some ppl dislike that hashtags dont cover the entire fediverse but only the servers of people that subscribe. i think it could be a bit improved, yes. but there are bigger fish to fry first imo, ie. the DCN thing.
i think the best way to move forward with search on fedi is that we have a search tab/category, #Marketplace, #FediMarket or #Busiverse and that might be able to search known business servers so that even if noone likes Jolly Joe's Pizza, or Mars Corporation on your instance you might still be able to find it in the fedimarket tab because that tab is designed ONLY to search for registered businesses. Small and large? BUT again they have to be REGISTERED as businesses for that tab to display them, and then by registering as businesses people can filter them out of their feed too obviously.
Win. Win.
@frogzone @GossiTheDog @david_chisnall @MartyFouts @macberg @DJGummikuh @n8chz i agree with embracing small buisness, we need fedi to grow and i still want fedi to have a legitimate place in the mainstream, if we embrace small buisness while rejecting large corporate interests i think that would help fedi grow more and make fedi more appealing for normies
Something ive always believed is that small buisnesses are allies of the working class, i dont see a reason to mindlessly reject them purely based on the fact they are buisnesses because they are materially different to large corporate monopoly
@v0idness @frogzone @GossiTheDog @david_chisnall @MartyFouts @macberg @DJGummikuh I'm inclined to agree with Jack Crow:
"Doing business, even small business, requires mystification. Business is unfair. Always. Doing business means separating a person from the product of her labor, to her repeated disadvantage. Grocery chains, gas stations, restaurants, amusement companies, counseling practices, engineering firms - they all develop media relations departments once they pass a critical mass of wealth, market presence and accumulation."
@n8chz @frogzone @GossiTheDog @david_chisnall @MartyFouts @macberg @DJGummikuh i lean more anarchist myself, specifically anarcho-communist, but i believe that small buisness (petite-bourgeoisie) are allies of the working class in the revolution and accepting them in the fediverse works to our benefit, not detriment
Obviously, small buisnesses are still buisnesses, and still exploitative (they usually have at least a couple workers, which is labor exploitation via the system of capitalism), but they are usually not nearly the same level of exploitation as large corporations, and small buisnesses and large corporations are at odds with each other the vast majority of the time and large corporations do oppress small buisnesses, there is significant material difference between small buisnesses and large corporations to the extent that small buisnesses can be allies of the working class
the end goal in my eyes is to abolish capitalism in general, including all buisnesses, but until we achieve anarchism i dont see an issue with allowing small buisnesses in spaces like these.
@macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog
In the long lost days of the #cluetrain we called these "having a conversation“ — unlike 'advertising', you can reply, share or block, and if the OP doesn't grasp that "business is conversation" it's not because we didn't give them the chance ☺️
@macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog
I think a big part of the difference is that the admins that run fedi instances aren't paid by advertisers.
This means that any advertising is just like any other post. It's not done by the social network itself, only by its users.
So maybe sth like "not ad-funded" would be a good short-hand way to describe it.
@macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog
I call them posters, just like the ones we put up around town, advertising our punk concerts or book cafes, back in the day.
@macberg @MartyFouts @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog
If I'm in a room full of people, and tell everyone I talk to about a gig I've got coming up, am I advertising? Is that an ad?
@siobhansarelle @macberg @DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog Yes, you would be advertising, if you were talking in a way meant to encourage people to attend. There’s nothing wrong with that and self promotion is a necessity.
“An ad” implies that there is a record of what you said that you meant to publish more widely, possibly repeatedly, but broadly speaking such encouragement is an ad.
This is something I noticed after reading the original post.
I roll ublock and mastodon instances are of a very select handful of sites I use that doesn't have a number on the icon.
Wild.
@ravirockks Because they are made and programmed by humans, an inherently flawed species.
@finlaydag33k @GossiTheDog Humans are not flawed. The people viewing humans as flawed are flawed.
Those people need to be shown the mirror.
@ravirockks Ah yes... Because all those times kings, dictators and other types of "rulers" sent people to die in wars, just so they themselves can obtain more power and riches sure is an indicator of a "perfect species"...
And 1001 more jokes to tell yourself.
@ravirockks It's hard to pick up jokes over text.
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