Brands, businesses, influencers and power users will eventually join the fediverse. Why not embrace them? Its in our best interest to grow the fediverse.
I started a new suite of tools in June to support them. It was created with privacy in mind, you will only see public data insights and stats. Any user will be able to use this feature. After federation support is finished I will focus on this again! #pixelfed
@MightyPork Yeah, i took your advice and changed all the menus.
@mmn The fediverse is meant for everyone, not just for people or entities you like. BTW, Diogo only has 2 weeks to finish the GS AP plugin so you might want to start helping him since you've done almost nothing as a "mentor".
cc @up201705417
@mmn I would prefer if you maintain GNU/Social and actually respond to issues/merge requests instead of reacting to my statuses.
@mmn @dansup I mostly agree with your sentiment, but let me offer one possible explanation.
When contacting a company via any private channel (e-mail, phone, whatever), they can just ignore you or do whatever they please, and rarely they get burnt.
Companies/brands use social media to promote themselves. The more followers they have, the better the promotion. But also, the bigger the burn if somebody calls them out publicly on their bullshit.
So in a way they are making themselves vulnerable.
@mmn makes sense!
@mmn It would be helpful for any social org's outreach. Seeing what people like to interact with is good knowledge. Especially as many social org's have limited resources. This is also something any big corp would have no issue to handle themselves. Making it available to everyone would be a more democratically way.
If you where tasked to do this. How would you do it?
cc: @dansup
@GardenOfForkingPaths @mmn @dansup No, wouldn't think so... FB, Google, Github e.t.c.. probably scores a lot higher. Also Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. With a bit more resources invested one would be able to find that out though. Right now I only know of https://mastodon-tags-explorer.hcxp.co/tags/broad which could hint on that kind of questions.
@Michcioperz The main difference is visibility. There are no ads on the fediverse. Your timeline is yours, based on the people you follow and in chronological order.
@Michcioperz There is no federated timeline on pixelfed. Just your personal timeline and the local timeline.
@Michcioperz How? You willingly follow the users whose content appear in your timeline. You can unfollow them or report them too.
@Michcioperz By using public data like a discover page based on hashtags you've used as well as content relevant to accounts you follow.
>but ads can be brought into the federated timelines through spammy accounts
Which already happens if one takes a look at the federated timelines.
Also, "influencers" are mostly enterprises, aka they sell products (mainly themselves, but not only). Some of them don't, but most of them function like that.
They won't come here any time soon because there's not enough people (nor mainstream consumerist background) to "influence" (sell) profitably. My guess.
@dansup I came here to escape brands. Well, to escape from the mindset that brands and celebrities and breaking news are all-important. I can get news elsewhere, and I just buy things when I need them to use instead of "engaging with brands", I'm not interested in celebrities unless they're doing something I care about (like write books; but then it's the books I'm interested in, not the fact that they're famous).
In short, if Mastodon turns into Twitter I'm not at home here any more either.
@irina You will never see brands unless you follow them or someone you follow shares them.
@Michcioperz @dansup I don't think so. But other people might.
@nipos @dansup Strong opinion!
But isnt this the real advantage of the #fediverse? You can just block commercial accounts / make your own instance / whatever. Good luck blocking ads on #facebook, right? 👎
@dansup Gotta say, without any context this looks pretty worrying. What kind of "insights" and "tools" would be offered?
@dansup what images would a brand share that would *not* be an ad? How long until you offer timeline ad placement for a fee, turning pixelfed into just another Instagram?
@dansup This sounds like it's going to be a good argument for me when I start attempting to convert influential instagrammers.
Blobpats from here
> Its in our best interest to grow the fediverse.
This is not automatically a truism. (But it's also not a point I'm looking to discuss, either.)
> public data insights
I'd be quite interested to know how to opt out of that dataset if possible. (With the understanding that "make your profile private" is my assumed only option, and the hope that there is something more elegant and considerate that this suite of privacy-minded tools provides.)
@sydneyfalk The fediverse was created for everyone, that being said I believe you can strike a balance by offering tools to give users more power over what content they see, privacy and reporting tools.
The public data insights is stuff like graphs of new followers over a period of time, most recent mentions and other features that are already present. Its meant to make it easy to organize interactions compared to a single notification feed.
@bob While not required by the AP spec, have you ever seen an AP social media implementation without follower counts? Statistics is just plotting information already available via an API and notifications. You can perform exactly what Deck does via a 3rd party client.
@mmn @dansup @bob I think there's a difference between letting 3rd parties build tools vs. building them yourself and packaging them in by default.
For example. some vain Instagram users download apps that show graphs of follows, unfollows, etc. But users have to seek those out and developers have to build those. Should the pixelfed project's official stance be to enable or encourage that use case? Implementation and design will matter.
@dansup aha bold in the menu is back. bless