@parataxis I do think that a lot of admins might be unwilling to federate with a brand's instance. For me, it depends on the brand. I have certain brands that I actually want the content from. IDK to each their own.

Yet another reason to run my own instance.

@chris_martin @parataxis I could be wrong, but I think you only pull content from users that your users follow. So if I run my own instance and I follow a single user on mastodon.brandname, then I would only pull that user. Actually now I really want to know if this is true or not. Maybe I'm making a bad assumption here.

@maradydd @parataxis Hey, come on, some brands are really great at the end of the day. I love Hak5, defcon, blackhat, kat von d, etc. Like, I don't think it's weird that I want to see their content.
Let's build a future where people opt into content from brands they want and sending spam and junkmail is a bad value prop as a result.

@Savagejen @parataxis Right. We're violently agreeing with one another. I have a lot more love for Defcon or STMicro than I do for, say, Cheetos, but if there are people who are really super into Cheetos content then by God let them have all of it they want. I hear Subway comes up with some pretty dank memes, after all.

@Savagejen @maradydd I like getting announcements from services I rely on to know when they're having downtime

@Savagejen
> I love Hak5, defcon, blackhat, kat von d

hello, are you a fellow makeup enthusiast???? please tell me about your favorite palettes, lipstick formulas, etc :D

@Savagejen can confirm, @sonya does really lovely eyeshadow just as an everyday thing :)

@maradydd @Savagejen someday we're going to sit down together and play with makeup, mlp

@sonya @Savagejen yay!

@sonya A bit yeah, lol. I used to be sort of anti-makeup, but lately I've gone headlong into it and I do it every day now. I don't use a ton of kat von d's actual makeup because I've had some reactions to the formulas, but I love her artistry so I like to look at their ads and stuff.

@Savagejen her aesthetic is not my personal aesthetic, but I still find it very visually appealing.

what products / brands have you been enjoying lately?

@sonya Where do I begin? Most of my shadows are Urban Decay or Too Faced. My favorite lipsticks are Bite Beauty. I use Hourglass ethereal for my powder. I prefer cream blush sticks because they blend better. I wing it out a lot so I use a lot of different ink liners. Foundation is struggle because I'm pale and neutral, but I'm somewhere in between CoverFX n0 and n10 most of the time, and mac nw10 works ok on me. My new fave thing are the coverfx custom cover drops in halo. How about you?

@Savagejen oooooh you have great taste! every time I go into Sephora I longingly stroke the Hourglass powders. Gonna buy when they have their sale. Also a huge fan of the Bite Beauty formula — I wanna do their custom lipstick thing since they have a location relatively near me! For my birthday, I suppose :)

@Savagejen I've been really enjoying the ABH Modern Renaissance palette (cliche I know) and the BH Cosmetics Foil Eyes palette. Laura Mercier eyeshadow sticks are to die for. Big fan of the Wet n Wild Photofocus foundation also, and that comes pretty pale!

@sonya Oh yeah I love those eyeshadow sticks too! For days when I don't feel like putting real work into my makeup, one swipe of an eyeshadow stick is way faster than spending time doing a halo or whatever.

@sonya Mostly what I like about Bite is that it's all edible. I know from experience that I eat a bit of whatever lipstick I wear, so I'd rather wear a lipstick made from edible ingredients. I have tons of lipsticks, but I don't wear them much as a result of reading the FDA report about lead in lipstick.
I do still wear liquid lipsticks from other brands since I'm unlikely to accidentally eat something that has dried in place.

@sonya And for Hourglass stuff I usually wait for the Barneys GWP event that happens twice a year. Also keep in mind that their ambient lighting powders last a loooong time and you probably only need one. I have palettes from them with powders I've never touched because they're the wrong color for me. I think their strobe powders are worth skipping because other brands have better highlighters. Of course their blushes are a different story. Tell me your foundation matches?

@Savagejen totally, I'm very tempted by their blushes but tbh I have enough blush. I'm probably just gonna get Dim Light to use as a setting powder, since mattifying isn't what I want. I'm a spot-on match for the lightest shade of Maybelline cushion foundation, fwiw (not so easy to cross-reference unfortunately)

@sonya So I'm far too pale for Dim and based on your foundation shade I think you might be as well. Pictures online make it hard to tell, but basically pale cool = ethereal, pale warm = diffused.

@Savagejen that's good to know! the reason I gravitated toward Dim Light is that it doesn't have overt sparkles — do you find that the ones in Ethereal show up on your face?

@sonya So I have Dim in one of the palettes and it totally has sparkles! I can see them just as well as with any of the other ambient powders. The sparkles are teeny tiny, not at all like the sparkles in other products, but if you don't like sparkles at all then you probably don't want the ambient powders at all. I don't really notice them when it's on my face, but the powders do make you glow. I just happen to like that. Maybe you should wait and try them out in a store.

@Savagejen maybe I'll get that beautiful plummy blush instead, then — I just want to touch their powders every day, it's so soooofffffftttt

@sonya Just go to sephora and get a mini makeover and request they use the powder. You'll know by the end of the day whether you like it.

@Savagejen @sonya seeing all of the best people from my Twitter converge like this is the best part of tooting so far. Like the good old days of Twitter, pre-Oprah.

@maradydd

Personally, I can't wait to see what Taco Bell does with Mastadon.

@Phancypants are they legit here?

@maradydd @parataxis @Savagejen Trying to imagine what, say, a Coke-run instance would look like.

CokeFiend99: COKE IS AMAZING. I LOVE COKE SO MUCH
RedSwooshGal6: omg cant wait for the classic sugar recipe to hit stores again coke=awesome
coke_god_88: heres an animated gif i did of a talking Coke bottle can i get some feedback on this

I have a feeling I probably wouldn't get any more from Coke on Mastodon than I get from them on Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else.

@csilverman @maradydd @Savagejen it wouldn't have a UI, they'd just have a "follow us on the fediverse" button on their websites and in QR codes and shti

@parataxis @csilverman @maradydd @Savagejen It could probably be not-entirely-terrible if the brand in question was cultural -- musical acts & tv shows spawn really vibrant communities. But being on a general purpose node you wouldn't even see it in the federated feed probably.

@enkiv2 @Savagejen @csilverman @parataxis The social connectivity flow goes something like: person starts on (let's say) band fansite, encounters person with account on different federated site, follows them, cross-pollination occurs through retoots or whatever they're called

@maradydd @parataxis @csilverman @Savagejen Yeah, that seems to be basically the only vector for discoverability. Small nodes really need shoutouts & possibly publically-accessible local timelines and/or user lists if anybody is going to remote follow.

(Not that lack of discoverability can't be a feature in a federated system)

@enkiv2 @Savagejen @maradydd @parataxis I wonder. Mastodon, right now, feels kind of hacker-y—I can't really see a non-technical person who just wants to follow bands preferring it over Facebook/Twitter.

My sense is that a lot of people here came because of stuff that "normal" people don't experience: activity/activism that drew unwanted attention. Not saying cultural brands have no place here—more that right now, Mastodon serves a purpose specific to a fairly limited group.

@csilverman @enkiv2 @Savagejen @maradydd furry twitter was using mastodon dot social as their private slack channel for a while

@csilverman @parataxis @maradydd @Savagejen

There are definitely 'culture brands' that get off on technical difficulty, with the embrace of that difficulty being a part of the costly signalling for group membership. They're fringe, but that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't monetized -- only that they're going for a dedicated core audience rather than a wide one. (Consider some parts of the maker community, & brands that cater to them.)

@enkiv2 @Savagejen @maradydd @parataxis That's a good point. I could totally see Raspberry Pi, or some gamer brand like Razer or Valve, having a presence on here.

People say "brands" and I think of something like Kleenex or Pepsi—mainstream, largely character-less monoliths who appeal to nice "normal" people. But you're absolutely correct that some brands are specifically targeted at tech freaks, and do quite well for it.

@csilverman @parataxis @maradydd @enkiv2 Razer has been trying to make their brand into an esports social experience for a while now. They have a site set up for organizing comps and stuff.

@csilverman @parataxis @Savagejen @enkiv2 Element14 comes to mind, even. At least a couple years ago they were aiming in the direction of being more of a community than just a parts vendor.

Also, free idea: when is someone going to build a wedding registry service on top of Octopart

@csilverman @parataxis @maradydd Maybe Coca Cola isn't your thing, but I've met people so into it that they fill their homes with memorabilia and even have a Coca Cola fridge. Those people might want an account on the coke instance.

@Savagejen @maradydd @parataxis That's true. I keep forgetting that Coke is one of these companies that people genuinely feel an emotional bond with. (I don't, because my parents never let me drink it—I have no memories of nostalgic all-American summers spent drinking a Coke and watching a baseball game.)

If somebody set up an Apple instance, with a focus on classic Mac hardware, 90s software, product rumors, etc, I'd probably join it.

@csilverman @parataxis @maradydd I mean in theory apple could set up an instance for people that work for their company. Or, once mastodon is well enough along: for everyone that uses icloud. Now that would be crazy.

@Savagejen @maradydd @parataxis That would be sweet, but my guess is that Apple being Apple, they'd come up with some proprietary iEcosystem-specific version that relied largely on their own technology. Maybe some weird fusion of Messages and iCloud or something?

(Apple actually *did* have their own social network, called Ping. It was integrated into iTunes, and was intended to let users follow musicians, their friends, etc. Nobody used it and it's gone now.)

@csilverman @parataxis @maradydd Oh yeah, I remember Ping. I first learned about it because they notified me that they were closing it down. Like, I use iTunes all the time and didn't even know Ping existed.

@Savagejen @maradydd @parataxis Exactly. Same here. I think one major reason was that iTunes is such a tangled horror of features that most people didn't bother messing around with it after they got it to play music.

I dunno. Maybe it could have worked. The basic idea seems sensible enough, but as with most successful designs, it has to be easy to use and come with a pressing reason to use it. If it had worked more like Rdio, I might actually have paid attention to it.

@csilverman @parataxis @Savagejen Back in 2006 I made the mistake of doubling down on trying to programmatically drive iTunes, because reasons. Can confirm.

@csilverman @parataxis @maradydd I don't know, a lot of the people I like to be social with don't like the same music as me, or the people that like the music I like aren't that interesting to me. I don't really see music as something to socialize over, but I might feel differently if I was a Coachella person or something.

@Savagejen @maradydd @parataxis I would have said the same thing, but I followed a few friends on Rdio whose musical tastes were very different. I wasn't an Rdio addict like some people were, but I discovered some cool stuff that way.

Kind of surprised that Facebook hasn't made music a more prominent aspect of its service. If I was going to share what I was listening to, or liked, I'm not sure how I'd do that short of posting about it, which I don't really want to do.

@csilverman @Savagejen @maradydd a certain person is on the board of both facebook and spotify

@parataxis @Savagejen @maradydd Who, Thiel?

@csilverman @Savagejen @maradydd no, Sean Parker

@parataxis @Savagejen @maradydd Napster bro! That's interesting. I didn't know that.

So now I *really* wonder why Facebook doesn't have some killer "social music" feature.

@csilverman Re: facebook -- maybe it's an age thing? The teen years are, for most people, the pinnacle of connecting to communities based on musical taste; facebook started with college students and then moved on to older people, never directly targeting that demo, so they could be expected to lean more heavily on other connections.

@Savagejen @parataxis @csilverman I'm just thinking about things like the proliferation of phpBB forums way back in the day -- it was pretty easy for any indie band to set one up, for example

@maradydd @csilverman @parataxis Oh heck yeah. I set one up for my little college social group just because. Those were fun times.

@maradydd @parataxis @Savagejen Heh. Reminds me of when there was this whole schism on the college forum I ran—they removed anonymity because of a death threat aimed at the college president—and somebody set up a Yahoo mailing list with the intention of somehow building a community around it. (It failed within days. I still get spam mail from it.)

Crazy to think how many options we'd have now if we wanted to set up an ad-hoc social network: Slack, Imzy, BuddyPress, etc etc.

@csilverman @Savagejen @parataxis @maradydd I got married in a nofear hoodie, so I can appreciate how brands can become part of fond memories and shared experiences.

Brand ran instances - win access to the domain by buying tons of product and entering keycodes? :thinking: :disappointed_relieved: