@lmichet I'm super excited to talk to new randos coming over from game dev twitter. I can watch captain kirk in reruns

@lmichet Basically the only "famous" people I follow are the ones who got famous through their work, not through nationwide ads. They're the ones who actually respond when you talk to them and are still confused that tens/hundreds of thousands of people follow them.

@lmichet i feel like the issue is that the more mainstream you get in terms of public appeal, the more likely it is that they have a PR person managing their social media "brand"

game dev is niche enough that everyone has personal twitter accounts so they're not just advertising

@lmichet Hi! I do sound design for games and ocassionally make my own little things, so game dev Twitter is my favorite Twitter.
*toot*

@lmichet I always found the idea of following super-famous people on Twitter to be so weird. So many of them aren't actually active on their own feeds, but rather their "social media team," so you're just getting their marketing brand messaging.

You don't get anything substantive from following most of them. They aren't sharing what they think. You're not getting to know them better.

@lmichet Just noticed you're already having this exact convo with someone else haha

@BrodyBr Yeah I dunno I think some people really want to Engage With The Famous Social Media Feeds and that just leaves me super cold, so I'm glad federation makes it hard to establish a real brand identity here

I mean bank of america could make their own instance but I own their name on this server and I can fuck em up here haha

@lmichet I follow Chrissy Teigen on Instagram and anytime she posts her baby I'm like "which of my friends had this gorgeous kid?!?! —oh yeah, I keep forgetting, I'm not best friends with Chrissy Teigen"

@lmichet before I deleted my "real" birdsite account I also enjoyed following Vera Farmiga and Lin Shaye and, on and off, Ellen Barkin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@jennatar @lmichet yeah I mean some actors definitely use their twitters themselves-- the kind of thing where someone has a social media team running the twitter is the shit I dislike

@lmichet oh yeah I was just horning in with a whole lot of nothing

@jennatar @lmichet one of the things I like best about the way mastodon/gnusocial is set up is that it's so hard for someone really concerned with Being An Official Brand to really control that brand here. If they make their own instance they have the most believability and control, but then servers can block them! Ad-less servers are ACTUALLY POSSIBLE, it's THE DREAM

@lmichet —did something new happen with that tech column to bring it to the fore of conversation again? Or are more people reading it for the first time and reacting?

@jennatar @lmichet which one, the "six reasons why mastodon will die" one, or the motherboard one?

@lmichet the—snicker snicker!—the first one

@jennatar ahh! yeah I just saw that one yesterday, and I think gargron subtooted-responded to it yesterday, so I think a lot of people read it all about the same time

@lmichet oh, ok! It's just simultaneity then—i just now saw such funny delicious burns On the federated timeline and I was like "oh no NOW what."

—and THAT kind of catastrophic thinking is why I'm HERE, trying to achieve mellow

@lmichet If that dude wants to be a social climber he should stay on Twitter. Being here feels a bit more like Livejournal: a cute lil personal space

@uglymachine yeah it's for human interaction not b r a n d s, personal or otherwise

@cassolotl prior this user explosion, mastodon.social's community was extremely anti-brand, and I am too. The reason I want this to take off is because it is so hard for brands to control identity on a system like this one, and I enjoy that it would give them trouble and challenge their ability to intrude into human spaces.

actors usually treat social media like a brand tool and I don't like that and neither did almost anyone else who used this service before like a week ago

@cassolotl like... I am camping several brand accounts on this server, lol

@lmichet Could they not just make an instance on their domain to post from? XD

@lmichet Hmmmm, yeah, I can understand that. I guess as it gets busy it gets more diverse and you have to really curate what you see or allow on your instance, stuff like that? And people-who-are-brands will probably not stick around very long, which is pretty cool.

@cassolotl yeah I can see people-who-are-brands either having to start their own instance to make sure they can establish their real identity-- like BofA making a bofa@bankofamerica.com account, etc-- but then an instance can refuse to federate with that one. in our case I have better access to this entire server with my fake bofa account that I never post on than they would with their own standalone one-account instance

@lmichet Ohhhhh I see, very interesting! Yeah, so if you didn't like brands (and people-as-brands), you could join an instance that blocks them so you don't have to. I like that. :)

@lolkat @Gargron well I know the limited search options were deliberate, to prevent hunting people down or harassing people who say certain words, etc. imagine if twitter only let you search hashtags and not usernames or tweet content! so much harassment would be harder

@lolkat @lmichet Not for me to judge myself but I'm doing my best!