Eileen Brown ☑️Apr 17, 2017

I wrote about Mastodon the other day. Here's the piece I wrote on ZDNet :
http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-mastodon-the-new-social-media-star-or-imploding-black-hole/

I'm impressed with its growth and stability so far. I'll be watching closely as brands try to work out how to monetize this new audience

Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ❌​Apr 18, 2017

@eileenb As @woozle noted, when epistemic (media) systems gain significance, the attract attention:

"Because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place."

Or more accurately: as there are /returns/ to influencing an audience, those influencers will appear: direct & brand marketing, propagandists, polemicists.

So yes, the brands ... will come, like it or not.

https://redd.it/5wg0hp

Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ❌​Apr 18, 2017

@woozle @eileenb I see a fairly common progression of interests within a new media channel. Not necessarily in the following order, but close:

1. Technicians -- "shop talk"
2. Artistics and creatives, avant garde.
3. Organisations for internal use: business, government, academia, religion, etc.
4. External comms, management, monitoring, discussion.
5. Direct marketing.
6. Mass entertainment.
7. Mass marketing.
8. Propaganda and polemicists.

Merely changing platforms changes nothing.

Show threadwillApr 18, 2017
@dredmorbius @woozle @eileenb unless the medium itself has functions which combat or repel certain elements. For example the avant garde can't stand Nazis. And an instance full of brands may be regarded as spam. Corporations have very little say in open-source spaces.
Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ❌​Apr 18, 2017

@will Sure, but it also depends on those elements' capacities to change the rules themselves.

Bob Dylan: "Money doesn't shout, it swears."

Informational activities which are subsidised by, or reward, financial interests, or political interests, have a capacity to dominate pretty much anything else. Epistemic systems whose incentivisation is /anything but/ seeking deeper truth ... will return that, and /not/ truth.

RAW: Celine's 2nd law.

@woozle @eileenb

Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ❌​Apr 18, 2017

@will Wilson wrote "Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."

That's only half right.

You also get inaccurate communication where you reward anything /other/ than accurate, informational comms.

* "Publish or perish."
* Social status
* "Honest signalling" (honest or otherwise)
* #brands

Etc.

You might be able to scare off brands be creating a space that's not brand-friendly. Say, YouTube. Or 4chan or /b/.

@eileenb @woozle

Show threadwillApr 18, 2017
@dredmorbius @eileenb @woozle exactly. masto.social is explicitly anti-Nazi and I plan to either ban instances that host such content or at least block/report users who do. Scream "safe space" all ya want, this is my living room not my front porch, I'll filter out what I damn well please.
Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ❌​

@will I'm pretty down with Instances setting their own game rules, though you have a bit of a mismatch with the granularity of rules vs. user counts.

Social is 50k users, Cloud is 31k, JP is pushing 65k, Pawoo 70k. That's a lot of personal preferences to comport with a single Instance-wide policy.

Smaller servers manage better -- 100s to a few 1000s of users. But transparency here ... needs work.

There's also account portability/migration, in process, but Not Here Yet.

Apr 18, 2017 at 8:54amWeb
Show threadDoc Edward Morbius ❌​Apr 18, 2017

@will NB: I've /no/ problem generally with instances setting rules on who or what they talk to, and I've seen enough crap out of a few places that I wouldn't mind seeing a lot less from them. Your instance /is/ your FreezePeach zone, mine is not.

There's the question of what FS is and what its limits are. I've already linked earlier essays of mine touching on that, but going back to Mill, earlier, and discussions since, is enlightening.