Learning to use the Fediverse and there’s one big overlooked selling point of it that I’m surprised hasn’t come up before . . .

How people talk about the Fediverse: “It’s distributed so a billionaire can’t buy it and there’s no ads and you can just leave a server whenever you want without losing your followers!”

Another pitch: “Businesses could literally cut out the social media middle-men and directly build and interact with their audiences without a 3rd party platform interfering or jacking up the price. Any company that’s capable of running/paying for its own websites is capable of running a fediverse presence.”

Like seriously, one of the things I loved about early days social media was being able to discover a company, charity, or service hyper relevant to my interests through my friends, follow it, and get updates and interesting stuff from it AND have cool interactions with them and other ppl who liked them too.
It was more engaging than an email newsletter.
It was easier than keyword searching websites.

AND I didn’t mind seeing ads for the companies that I *wanted* to hear from because I chose to follow them. I probably spent more on those brands than I would have otherwise, because staying engaged with their communities kept me thinking about them/their product.

AND one of the things I liked for my own business was being able to pay to find even more qualified people to entice.

It was great! I got cool stuff I wanted, the places I got that stuff from profited, I more easily found people who wanted my product, the social platform got paid their finder’s fee, everybody won! All the way up until social platforms figured out that they could extort brands. “Oops I’m sorry, your brand on this platform may have a million followers, but if you want any of your posts to show for them, pay up. OH but when you *do* pay up, sorry we’re not actually going to show your posts to your followers, but to a bunch of unqualified accounts who aren’t following you that aren’t even real people. Oh and also if your Brand doesn’t act a certain way we’ll suppress it from even showing up at all, we only want the content that enrages people. Thanks suckers!” Consumers aren’t the only ones who got screwed by Enshitification.

In theory having a brand build a fediverse presence on a server that they host (since they’re already hosting or paying a hosting service as it is) saves a bunch of hassle:

* No more rebuilding the brand in a new spot every time a new 3rd party tech start up gets its 5 minutes of fame for some novel way of communicating with each other
* No more paying for 3rd party aggregator tools so you can post the same message “cross platform”
* No more stretching your Marketing and Brand resources thin by trying to generate hyper specialized content and fight the algorithms on platform after platform after platform (who won’t even ultimately show it to your audience anyway)
* No more literally paying money to platforms who don’t show your content to your actual audience that you literally paid to have it shown to.
* No more being at the whims of a platform’s policy or UI choices. It’s your brand, your hosting, you decide how it looks or how it behaves or who can/can’t see it.
* No more off brand bonkers name syntax that your customers are never going to remember. You’re not @Brand@donkeykick@prpl.social, now you get to use YOUR brand domain name (that you’re already paying for anyway for your web presence).
* No more chasing down impersonators or paying to prove that it’s really you. Again, because you’re using YOUR brand domain to verify it.
* No more having to cater your content for a platform in a way that’s against your Brand.

There are a ton of solid reasons for brands to build a fediverse presence. Heck you could literally attract new customers by being a host as consumers seek out servers to call “home” in the fediverse. Like yeah sure right now they’re going to BlueSky or to Mastodon or to Threads or whatever, but at the end of the day those are just yet another middle-man between you and your audience, especially once those hosts get big enough to call the shots. So imo, just spare yourself the pain and slow expensive slide down the enshitification process and instead carve out your own space in the fediverse. You’re literally probably already paying for the things that would let you do it, and the fediverse benefits from more people being a part of it and a wider pool of servers existing in it.