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
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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/.
@will @dredmorbius @eileenb For what it's worth, people arguing against "safe space" and "trigger warnings" are not being honest; they'll demand their own forms of safe space and trigger warning, but call them something different.
Removing "controversial" books from libraries, for example, or demanding various forms of warning (e.g. "parental advisory") on CDs and games.
Everyone needs safe space, but some of us have to fight for it. :-/
@woozle One of the calls for limitations was that politics not be discussed openly, without CW. I addressed that on my FAQ (see my profile Bio link), particularly:
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/236207
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/532278
And especially: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/532406
@dredmorbius @will @eileenb For Harena's sake, if nothing else, I tend to agree.
Meta-politics don't seem to be a problem, but getting into specific causes and people tends to bring in a lot of negativity that can make a place less fun to be around.
Maybe I should set up a Mastodon instance on issuepedia.org or cwre.org?
@woozle I think that would be a fantastic idea.
There's also the experiment of running a quiet space where a known set of people who can discuss difficult sets of topics intelligently might do so. The MKaTS model.
@dredmorbius The universe has decided that I will become familiar with Ruby on Rails, it seems...
Perhaps this time around I'll be able to scare up some help when things break. (I've still got a Redmine instance I tried to upgrade several years ago and was never able to revive. Blank screen, unhelpful error messages in log -- apparently a common symptom with borken RoR apps.)
@dredmorbius What are your preferred domains for this? Some obvious options associated with political-ish sites: issuepedia.org, iseeamess.com, instagov.com, cwre.org
I also have scicrit.com (for science criticism) and errorists.us (for criticism of the anti-reality movement) -- probly too specific.
coagitate.com was always going to be for the first instance of InstaGov... I could do Mastodon as a subdomain there even though the main site isn't started.
Thots?
@woozle Make it happen.
Tell people where it is.
/Where/ matters vastly less than /that/, though of the set, iseeamess is probably a better general fit.
My model of this will be "Woozle's Mastodon instance".
(Also: classic instance of overbranding, IMO.)
@dredmorbius I have registered icmstdn.com
I'm kind of shocked it was available.
@woozle OK.
Though I'm not sure how this solves the overbranding problem....
@woozle You have ... many domains.
It's a little confusing, from the outside looking in.
@dredmorbius They're each intended to be separately memorable, with the possibility of being managed by different individuals. Also, shorter URLs than tying to package everything in folders. (Been there, done that.)
I'm open to eventual discussion on how better to manage that, domain-name-wise and in other respects.
(This domain is my 30th. But I don't have a problem. Really.)
@woozle I can guess as to the intent.
As I've already said: "From the outside, looking in..."
If you're trying to create some sort of unified presence, or make it easier for others to find a single spot to locate your stuff, speaking as someone who I suspect is among those more generally interested in your work, this makes it harder, not easier.
If you'll go upstream, I suggested ISeeAMess. Not the best branding, but prolly where I'd go.
/Not/ Yet Another Domain.
Eileen Brown ☑️
Doc Edward Morbius ❌
will
Woozle Hypertwin