The possibility of a TikTok ban is inching closer to becoming a reality at this point. On Tuesday, the Senate passed the bill that would bar the social media platform from operating in the U.S. unless ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, sells its stake.
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t begs the question: In today’s social landscape, do brands ever own their audiences?
The answer is no, according to three agency executives who say it’s time to start exploring contingency plans that don’t hinge on any of the walled gardens of social media titans like Meta, X or TikTok. Looking for the next frontier, some are pointing toward the fediverse.
I think the Fediverse is an ideal platform on which to experiment with things like this. There will always be a difference here between those who want to see the Fediverse grow into a dominant platform and those who prefer things more quiet. Fortunately, the nature of it means that in this case we can actually have our cake and eat it too. Instances of Fediverse platforms such as Mastodon, Lemmy and PeerTube (likely the three that have potential to grow into a significant market share), especially the larger general audience ones, can attract and bring in the high profile users/accounts, such as brands, that can bring in a larger general audience that some current users are looking for, while those who want to keep away from that can move to smaller or more niche instances, or create their own, that can then defederate from the larger instances they don’t want to interact with. People who like aspects of both types of environments can have accounts on multiple different instances, even if those accounts or instances can’t interact with each other due to defederation. Seems like a win-win to me, and part of the beauty of the Fediverse. Don’t like something where you are? It’s easier than anywhere else to move to a different part of it and maintain a presence on the platform overall.