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!

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https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/brands-town-is-where-the-brands-are/

MNNH News English :verified:

2022-11-11 04:45:06

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.