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Bonjour.
Marre des #fachos sur #Diaspora et des copains de fachos, genre #Souverainistes et autres #Trolls #troll soit-disant à gauche !!
Je cherche un #RéseauSocial avec une réelle #Modération du #racisme ainsi que tout ce qui dédiabolise le racisme. Par exemple, à exclure les gens qui se font passer pour être de de #gauche, mais qui sont en fait de #droite (les fameux trolls à gauche) et potes avec les fachos, vu leur délire #Souverainiste.
Je ne veux pas juste une #instance qui dit vouloir lutter contre le #racisme, je veux une #instance qui BLOQUE les #Puants.
J'ai des pistes (des #instances), mais je ne veux pas me fixer à la légère, vos avis comptent.
J'avoue, une personne ici, en particulier (que je ne nomme pas), j'attends son avis... 😀
(précision : une instance avec les inscriptions ouvertes, + dans le #Fediverse !)
A pluche. 😀
https://jointhefediverse.net/join
From the vantage point of the average Mastodon user, Brands Town looks like a bizarro world version of what could happen to the network: an instance dedicated only to corporate brand accounts, seemingly built under the assumption that people would want to seek out brands and talk to them.
But when you start looking at the accounts, you might notice something very odd: this place features fast food chains with names like Wanda’s, Uncle Chicken, and Nebraska Glazed Ham. Their technology brands are ghettotech, Lard VPN, headless Corps, Spurtly and of course, Nyetscape. And then there are the news outlets like MNNH News English, Victory News, and newcomer Ctrl Shift Media.
There’s just something a bit wrong with this place…
I started Brands Town back in late 2022 as a culture-jamming satire project. An increasing amount of corporate brand accounts were registering on mastodon.social at the time, and I cracked a joke that I couldn’t wait to federate with an official Wendy’s account. Dustin from Liner Notes Club popped into my replies, and said “This is why Brands Town should exist!”
I sat on the idea, looked into the cost of managed Mastodon instance hosting, and took the plunge. I explained to a handful of friends and acquaintances that we were doing a big obnoxious satire project where everybody larped as made-up brands, trying as hard as possible to force fake engagement with people who couldn’t tell if we were real or not.
The early people who joined absolutely got it, and had a lot of fun. We all tried to come up with the weirdest, most ridiculous brands ever, and people still constantly fell for it.
I’m sorry, Infosec.exchange people, but we laughed at you a lot.
As time went on, we started holding various World Events. We had a fake war between countries, a fake supernatural reality-breaking event, and even a fake violent AI revolution that happened during a fake trade convention. Brands would react to events accordingly, participating in a bizarre roleplay that was happening on people’s timelines.
Attack of the Clones
But something else on the other side of the Internet was brewing – the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. A fundamental change of the rules led to an advent of impostor accounts to wreak havoc on Twitter, break out, discover Brands Town, and migrate over. Originally, Brands Town was doing its own weird thing of larping as made-up silly brands, but the combination of both groups led to a real “You got peanut butter in my chocolate!” moment.
What resulted is some of the most incredible shitposting I’ve ever seen, and I’m overjoyed to share a gallery of some absolute bangers with you today.
What’s funny about many of these, jokes aside, is the fact that many of the people who made accounts had experience working in marketing. Brands Town’s chatroom quickly became a place for people burnt out on being social media marketers to mercilessly imitate everything they despised about their day jobs.
Even now, months later, more than a few people have come forward to praise the project. Some of the accounts, like Coca-Cola, actually had a hilarious an nuanced take on marketing for the Fediverse, and could easily pass for the real deal.
[Brands Town] was the absolute most fun I’d had on the interwebs in years being one of [the brand account pages]Former impersonator account owner
Sadly, this kind of fun wasn’t meant to last forever. Although it was really funny, and a good chunk of the network happened to be really enjoying it, I was soon contacted by multiple legal teams representing large corporations: Nestlé, Google, Coca-Cola, and Deutsche Bahn all reached out with Cease & Desist orders for tarnishing their otherwise stellar reputations.
- Nestle
- Google Takedown Notice
- Coca-Cola domain takedown
- Deutsche Bahn Takedown notice
Internally, we wore these emails as a badge of honor and pride. But, running on a managed instance, I knew that we could probably only handle so many more reports like this before the service owners washed their hands of us. So, I played dumb, acted incompetent, apologized profusely, and the silenced the accounts and deleted their contents.
This was from the morning after. The push queue kicked up to 200,000 objects multiple times the day prior.
This then choked the server for an entire day as hundreds of thousands of objects were sent deletion requests from a never-ending queue. Pro tip for admins: don’t do that.
Extended Lore
Another aspect of Brands Town that’s underappreciated is that there is a lore wiki, describing the background to some of the brands on the site. Brands Town itself has a fictional background as a tech startup founded by someone who initially had meant well, but was absolutely terrible at picking platforms: the founder bet big on a partnership with Ask.com, and then put everything on the line to run brand pages on Orkut before pivoting to Mastodon.
There was just something about it. I could hang out with Coca-Cola, swap celebrity gossip with E! Hollywood Reporter, or cry about my feelings with The View. We could remove the barrier between product and consumer, and instead have a harmonious symbiotic relationship where people would be happy to talk to companies, instead of being annoyed by pop-ups.Kevin Hanneman, Brands Town founder.
Of course, things go off the deep end, and eventually the company gets acquired by an interdimensional corporation that steals technology from one dimension, rebrands it, and sells it to another dimension.
Off-wiki, there’s tons of other bizarre things happening. The fast food chain dedicated to ham products developed a ham-powered game console! Sterling Hotels are haunted, and frequently employ a crusty old sailor to deal with supernatural enemies. MNNH News English has become something of a celebrity on the Fediverse due to intense genre-awareness.
Conclusion
Brands Town has been one of the goofiest, weirdest, and funniest projects I’ve ever been a part of. I’ve met some truly brilliant people who love nothing more than to joke around all day and pursue ridiculous ideas together. I’m constantly blown away by the biting satire, ingenuity, and deep knowledge of our target audience
The project has slowed down someone since its major explosion of creativity, but it still exists. We have an active chatroom full of people brainstorming together, a pile of free ideas that not enough people have claimed, and a truly ridiculous amount of shitposts.
Please join us, help us keep the fediverse weird, and help make the network unpalatable to actual brand marketing. 🥺
You can join in on the silliness over at https://brands.town!
Share this:
https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/brands-town-is-where-the-brands-are/
MNNH previously reported on a supposed war between Monaco and Andorra. While war was declared, and a ceasefire was concluded, further information suggests evidence of fighting was inaccurate. MNNH News regrets the error.
Brands Town is Where the Brands Are
From the vantage point of the average Mastodon user, Brands Town looks like a bizarro world version of what could happen to the network: an instance dedicated only to corporate brand accounts, seemingSean Tilley (We Distribute)
Fe-Diversity, no, thanks?
So you want quote-tweets? Stop pestering Eugen Rochko for including something in Mastodon which he firmly rejects. Go join e.g. #Akkoma instead, and you've got your quote-tweets. And you can always reconnect with all your Mastodon friends just the same as on Mastodon.
Many are positively surprised when they learn that. They've spent some four months in the Fediverse, thinking Mastodon is all there is to the Fediverse. It feels like a whole new world to be explored.
But I've come to the realisation that millions of Mastodon users don't want any of that. They don't want to know about other projects in the Fediverse. It confuses them. They've spent their entire online lives in monolithic, centralised, corporate data silos like #Facebook, #Instagram and #Twitter. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon's decentralised architecture with lots of independent #instances, now called #servers.
All they wanted was a Twitter clone without #ElonMusk, but otherwise identical to Twitter. When someone showed them mastodon.social (which isn't even the official Mastodon website; this is), they expected to find just that. And then they first had to learn what instances are and afterwards choose one because mastodon.social didn't let them in. They're still shell-shocked from that. In fact, many of them still wish there were no instances, and Mastodon was a centralised silo like Twitter, for that'd make things easier.
Worse yet, there isn't that one fully-featured mobile app on Apple App Store and Google Play Store that bears the same name as the whole project. There is one, but it sucks, and everyone urges them to use a third-party app that isn't even named Mastodon. So they have to pick something again, and then they have to remember the name of their Mastodon app because it doesn't have "Mastodon" written under the icon.
And then folks like me come along and tell these people that the Fediverse is #NotOnlyMastodon. That some of the instances out there aren't on Mastodon, but parts of wholly different projects. Now, they've just gotten used to the Fediverse being decentral and made up of lots of independent instances of Mastodon. But then someone overthrows this hard-to-grasp world view once again by mentioning that it is, in fact, not only Mastodon that the Fediverse is made of. Worse yet, that someone starts rattling down name after name of other Fediverse projects.
Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. That's too much. Too much information for someone who came to Mastodon expecting an iPhone app for another black-box internet platform.
Mastodon had just started feeling cosy to them. Well, except for too much #Linux and #FLOSS technobabble. And except for still being hard to use with all these instances and a lack-lustre official mobile app. In fact, except for this lack-lustre official mobile app being the only available iPhone app for Mastodon until recently because everyone only made apps for Android for reasons that don't belong here. They feel like they finally know the Fediverse, that they don't have to learn anything about it anymore, and they've come to love what they know.
But all of a sudden, all these other Fediverse projects burst into their lives. All at once. More nerdy tech information is being shoved down their throats. And the Fediverse doesn't feel the same anymore, now that they know that not everything is Mastodon.
Again, yes, some may look at me in curiosity, their chin resting on their palms, and say, "That's intriguing, tell me more!"
But many others reject this entirely. They cover their ears and go, "La la la la la, I don't want to hear it!" They're those people who speak of the Fediverse as if it's only Mastodon, whom you tell that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon, and who then continue speaking of the Fediverse as if it's only Mastodon. They want it to only be Mastodon because that's easier to understand, and they ignore everyone and everything that says otherwise.
Truth be told, they may have an additional justification. And that's the kind of people who are in the Fediverse, but not on Mastodon, and whose posts come "flooding" into Mastodon. Weeaboos, furries and other weirdos on #Pleroma. Worse tech geeks on #Akkoma and #CalcKey than even those on Mastodon. On top of that, even worse tech geeks in the shape of the "supremacist" old guard from #Friendica, #Hubzilla and #Streams who play key roles in all rallys against centralised services that'd make Mastodon easier to use for former Twitter users.
A closer look may reveal that all their projects are "unusable" for someone who is used to Mastodon, even more so for someone who freshly comes over from Twitter or Facebook. And yet, all of them even claim that what they use is better than Mastodon. Another reason to not like a not-only-Mastodon Fediverse.
Another reason, in fact, to want the Mastodon-only Fediverse "back" that never even existed in the first place.
However, you can't really protect these people from the parts of the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, even if you want to. For a user of something that isn't Mastodon, this is even more difficult. In particular, you can't pretend to them that you're on Mastodon when what comes out of your instance clearly doesn't look like it came from Mastodon. And I'm not necessarily only talking about character counts. You can't help but go on confusing them. That is, unless you want to sacrifice all the extra features of the project you use and move to Mastodon itself.
In all honesty, I expect a campaign for fediblocking everything that isn't Mastodon to emerge before the end of the year. And no, the campaigners won't want to hear that this is nigh-impossible. They'll want it to happen, no matter how.
Mastodon - Decentralized social media
Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.joinmastodon.org