As the TikTok ban threatens the social media ecosystem, agency execs debate investing in the fediverse.

The possibility of a TikTok ban is inching closer to becoming a reality at this point. On Tuesday, the Senate passed the bill that would bar the social media platform from operating in the U.S. unless ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, sells its stake.

. . .

It begs the question: In today’s social landscape, do brands ever own their audiences?

The answer is no, according to three agency executives who say it’s time to start exploring contingency plans that don’t hinge on any of the walled gardens of social media titans like Meta, X or TikTok. Looking for the next frontier, some are pointing toward the fediverse.

Archive

  • @[email protected]English
    24•15 days ago

    If every news agency’s website supported activitypub, and every brand’s website’s blog were a fediverse blog, and their notifcation platform mastodon, their forums federated, and so on and so forth, I think that would make a very chatty, but very rich web.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

  • @[email protected]English
    8•15 days ago

    I despise tiktok but banning it entirely through law sets an extremely scary precedent. What happens when the big N tries to go after emulators this way, or if corpos go after third party apps under some guise of business stability or something, scary stuff

  • CaitEnglish
    1•15 days ago

    Oh fuck no, we aren’t safe anywhere are we?

  • алсааас [she/they]English
    -8•12 days ago

    capitalism corrupts everything it touches with enough time

    can’t wait for the fediverse to die 🙂

    EDIT: I thought it was obvious that my illogical phrase, in combination with the emoji, would be recognized as sarcasm, but apparently y’all need a big “/s”

    • recursive_recursion [they/them]English
      10•15 days ago

      By chance the fediverse might’ve developed a resilient antibody and regeneration system:

      due to allowing federated communities with transparent moderation logging it means that users are free to choose from a plethora of instances to set up camp and create

      back on reddit it wasn’t possible as there was only one without connections so it acted like a walled garden but now with the spread of Activitypub, it might be difficult for a singular company to have full control unless they’re able to offer better services than what’s currently available

      just a guess but I’d reckon that at minimum 51% of users that care about privacy and security would choose a FOSS instance rather than a closed-source proprietary one

      and as time passes I’d imagine that capitalistic instances would decay over time due to insufficient funding and/or user retention as their primary goal would be to squeeze their users which isn’t a sustainable model