Something weird is going on right now, and I’m not sure I like it.
Certain social media managers are asking me questions about the Fediverse. That means they’re preparing for the moment an exodus from Twitter becomes real.
BTW, I saw this 15 years ago when Facebook and Twitter started making waves. Agencies sprung up. Self-declared experts started work shops. There were meet-ups with keynotes and panels.
So I want to be clear.
Just because social media managers are asking questions doesn’t mean they’re planning a mass migration of brands.
What it means is that they want to establish expertise should the Fediverse be a Thing™
This definitely is a real conversation amongst social media managers and agencies because the collapse of Facebook and Twitter could be real—and they don’t want to be caught with their pants down.
Livelihoods are at stake.
A lot of social media managers still remember MySpace.
There’s stigma about remaining on whatever is the equivalent of MySpace while everyone else moves over to the Next Big Thing.
No one wants to be That Guy on MySpace.
Social media managers are very adept at crossing over to centralized social networks.
They understand that there’s a business model, an algorithm, and a game they need to play.
What most don’t know is what decentralization entails.
Decentralization means if social media managers migrate over here with guns a-blazing, the brands they manage will be crushed.
Twitter works for brands because they have a captive audience.
Over here? Everyone flies wherever they like.
I’m no idealist. People are already making money off the Fediverse.
How do I know this? Well, they’re clearly making money from *me*. I’m now paying $35/month to run my two instances.
So of course capitalism is already here.
I don’t think there will be any money from a Fediverse ad network.
What will more likely happen is that 80% of all people will pay to either self-host or compensate whoever maintains their instance.
Some folks are under the impression that influencers don’t exist on the Fediverse. Except they do: instance admins.
Now to be fair, these influencers have a big incentive to behave nice. Nevertheless, this is an influence.
At some point, social media managers will figure out how influence works on the Fediverse. They will try to monetize that influence. They will probably attempt to do this by running their own instances.
Will they succeed?
Oh my, this does look like a plausible hostile takeover scenario:
first, commercial actors use their money to set up lots of *big* instances in the manner of "embrace, extinguish, extend", then they marginalize (ad-)free instances by de-federating them or making interactions with them more difficult once the network effect has kicked in
@quincy @atomicpoet
Yeah, the issue is that human psychology is often the weakest link in a system. People often rely on technical solutions that provide *options* for people to avoid such takeovers, but most people follow the path of least resistance and end up in catch-22 lock-ins (no dig on them though, life is hard and you can't be watchful in every system you interact with).
The best things we can do is keep a look out for such measures and sound alarm bells early, intercept the lock-ins before they set in, when there starts to be a potential for it.
For eg., I'm glad to see that everyone's spreading around messages about the diversity of insances, and successfully getting people to join an array of different instances, in this migration. We need to keep that up, even if we're outnumbered by people who just want a birdsite clone and don't understand the importance of federation and openness. This is the time to keep spreading education and awareness.
@digital_carver @atomicpoet Absolutely!