uastronomer

uastronomer, 7 months ago

@kaasbaas @nixCraft Okay I'm gonna have to read that law just to verify that they remembered to define "egress charges". Surely it doesn't boil down to "This is an illegal word on invoices"?

Edit: By "I", of course, I mean "Somebody else" because I don't actually care enough to get personally involved.

uastronomer, 8 months ago

@futurebird I once had a vision of allowing smaller businesses to market themselves using the Fediverse. Part of the offering was providing them with their own branded instance, where they could control messaging, have intrinsically verified accounts, and integrate the whole thing into their existing websites. But it turned out that advertisers want tracking - they've gotten used to knowing very precisely who will see which advert, partly because it lets them target ads ever-more specifically (struggling to keep a straight face here, because in practice that promise is very seldom kept), but also because it allows them to do something that ATL ads never could: Track the effectiveness of the ad itself. Real data as to how many people actually saw each ad, and when they saw it, and whether they actually engaged with it, as opposed to statistical projections of how many people might see it, and professional intuition (ie. random guesswork from somebody who knows what the client wants to hear) about whether the ad actually worked.

So I tried to figure out ways of tracking ad performance, in a way that would work on Fediverse but would also respect individual privacy (This last not only because it's the right thing to do, but because decentralized moderation would absolutely murder any instance trying to do this the traditional unethical way).

Anyway. I'm not an expert in any of these topics, and I couldn't figure out how to make it work. Not technically, not ethically. And from the deafening silence of marketing specialists on this network, I'm guessing nobody else has figured it out either. So I gave up on the whole idea. This is not a marketing platform. The only thing you can ever hope for is small-scale personal endorsements. Those are the most effective, powerful tools in the marketing arsenal, but they tend to scale poorly :)

uastronomer, 11 months ago

@semnosao @deurman @fediversenews @atomicpoet
Historically, the objection was always one of safety. Mastodon was something of a safe haven for marginalized and victimized people. People who would suffer organized harassment campaigns on traditional social media, people whose privacy is a matter of personal safety, etc, could come here and form communities in relative safety.

Their fear is that if you can be searched, then their harassers can find them and resume their attacks.

Personally, I think the solution is to have searchability be an extension of the visibility settings. As a user you have a switch that makes you visible or not to search engines etc, and the instance admin has a similar control for the whole instance. Then if you want safety, you go to a safe instance and turn on all the privacy settings. And if you want massive wide participation, you do the opposite. But that's just the opinion of a guy who is neither victimised nor marginalized.

Until that happens, people who want searchability have to settle for 3rd party services like announced above.