The fediverse is growing, with millions of users sprawling across the network. But with user growth also comes an increase in non-profits, brands, public figures, and analytics products.
When reviewing this new landscape, we found that there are no fewer than 8 products for Mastodon.
The bigger concern I have, if anything, is that these tools may give incentive to influencers and corporate brands to optimize their content engagement. It could lead to an increase in performative interaction, and encourage corporate entities to gobble up data about everything happening in the fediverse. There’s a potential for surveillance capitalism to become more normalized on the network.
I think these tools can be a real benefit in legitimizing the fediverse, but they need to be developed carefully, with concern for user privacy.
So is it bad things ?