Hear me out… I’ve lurked on reddit for 14 years.
At the beginning, many companies were aware of unofficial communities about their products, but didn’t touch reddit with a ten foot pole, but as reddit became more mainstream and some companies started monitoring unofficial reddit communities to provide customer support and interact with the community, some even embraced reddit and declared the subreddits “official”.
I imagine that some of the early reluctance derived from them having to rely on reddit to host their community. (and now we see how much reddit is trustworthy, also at the time reddit was on the “news” only for the worst reasons)
But now they have the chance, given that lemmy and other reddit alternatives have captured some internet buzz, to adhere to Lemmy and spin their own instances and host their communities.
This would help bring more instances into the fediverse by companies who can bill it to their marketing and community budgets.
I would love to see:
We have looped around and we are back to vBulleting and phpBB times. But this time it’s federated.
I always thought one of the benefits of having the community hosted by a third party was the ability of the users to be honest.
Several subreddits went through significant drama when the negative posts were suppressed by the companies that held mod positions. This leads to less community engagement and less trust.
A WoW community hosted by Blizzard, particularly on Lemmy, might be seen as less open and honest.
To be fair, nothing stops an unofficial community unrelated to those companies to be created as well, lemmy just gives companies the option of creating their own official one.
I find this a very interesting idea! This could also be done by large NGOs and orgs such as UNESCO, Doctors without borders, WWF etc., which would be more in the spirit of the Fediverse.
EU already have created their own instance for Mastodon.
https://social.network.europa.eu/
EDIT: Here’s an example of EU space pragram Mastodon
I’d rather not have giant corporations run instances. I like the Fediverse because it feels independent and user controlled.
But, it’s all decentralized so I can easily just block it and never have to deal with it.
Think of it this way, a company creates an instance (kbin or lemmy). Then they create a community for each of their products (someone mentioned blizzard creating a community for wow). Now, they have this official place for people to talk and the company can monitor it. This means if someone has problems, they can jump in and help them resolve it.
It also means that a company could delete the same posts they don’t like, but it’s the fediverse, so Blizzard’s WOW community isn’t the only WOW community. Once they start pulling this shit, their reputation will be pulled down on the other communities.
So, they can delete the spam posts that pollute the community (good), and work with people to take care of problems (good). They could also delete the posts of people who are having problems (bad), but once this happens it would be noticed and posted about elsewhere.
They also don’t need to allow account creation (if they choose to go that route). They could create accounts for employees, but customers would use their existing fediverse account.
It would be cool for official game forums to adopt the fediverse, it would open them up to a bigger social media world.
Such a good idea then it would be easy to avoid them ;)
I mean not all advertising is bad in general, intrusive and annoying advertising is.
If a company (say a company making a new vegetarian food product) makes a post in a community like “hey, we made this new product, here is a code if you want to try it go to our website and you get 30% off from the first order and Price Back Guarantee” that wouldn’t be damaging and a win win in my eyes, they could do very specific advertising and the communities are more likely interested.
It shouldn’t be a daily thing or spamming of course, but its only natural for companys to want their products being seen. And if they misbehave, you can just block them completely, like their entire instance if necessary.
Back in the day, gamers joined official forums to talk but they were censored there. That’s why they came to Reddit and why companies didn’t want to deal with the malcontents who dwelt there.
I can definitely see why companies would be interested in this. Near total control of content and the resources behind them? Don’t have to worry about being tied to bad publicity of a specific platform?
Of course this is wide open for them to abuse this by restricting content to only what they want, but the nice thing about the fediverse is that it would likely just be one of many resources for content on that topic.
I don’t see many people wanting to create their accounts with such an instance, but definitely could be nice as an “official” source of news. Could one day likely replace official forums on company sites as it essentially fills the same use case but is federated so its content reaches larger audiences.
I’d love this if only to stop the current move to Discord. Moving from forums to a centralized, closed, unsearchable chat system is the worst that’s happened to online communities in a long time.
I think this is closer to federated Discourse rather than phpBB. Not sure if federation is worth it for forums though.
