Volkswagen Joins Mastodon as Concerns over Twitter Mount | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen Joins Mastodon as Concerns over Twitter Mount

bloomberg.com

36 pointsdoener21 comments

I don’t know if it’s that surprising that a massive corporation like Volkswagen has set up an account on a Mastodon server.

Which is more likely (not to imply these are the only two options) :

1) They are going to close their Twitter account and move away from their 700,000 followers (@VW only, VW UK have another 175k for ex.) because of some ideological view.

2) Some high up has seen Mastodon mentioned in the press, and instructed their team “we should get registered on that” without understanding at all what it is, because if it is actually the next best thing, spending 5 minutes to register costs nothing.

Advertisers are not taking a wait and see approach to Twitter because of some ideological issue, they are taking a pause because they don't like wasting money on ads that don't perform (and generally tightening their budgets, which means culling the lowest performers - like Twitter).

http://archive.today/QNMje

Aside from that horrific fortune standard article (probably syndicated it's on others too) - if they have legit joined "mastodon" they've already done it wrong:

- own instance at own domain provides authentication and verification that you are who you say you are, thus avoiding the most predictable problem.

- scum corporations [1] freeloading on someone else's infrastructure is going to be death of the ecosystem.

[1] they are already scum anyway, see emissions - kill the people, kill the environment, kill the fediverse

The real question is if/how marketing budget will shift for these major brands and advertisers. Even Twitter shutdown tomorrow, Mastodon ecosystems has no tech or interest to take in any ads. Some may consider this a good thing, but I'm a bit skeptical as this society has been addictive to ads based biz models for so long.

IMO Mastodon is unlikely to become the "new Twitter". It's just a different platform and will lead to different behavior, which is fine. Twitter will likely keep it's cultural cachet until it collapses (unlikely), or Musk encourages the douchebags enough that it becomes a social disaster (much more likely).

Mastodon seems to have a lot of mind-share in the German-speaking world, so I'm not going to be surprised if a lot of the early adopters end up being German companies.

Because Bloomberg is paywalled and the tiny sliver of text you can see doesn't mention a server I asked a chat agent on volkswagen.co.uk

> Thank you for the information. If this is not on our official website we at Customer Services would not be able to confirm this.

> Currently there is no information on our presence on Mastodon.

Interesting. I thought it was this one:

https://mastodon.social/@VWGroup

Yes, that looks likely. AIUI, there's no such as thing on "on mastodon", it has to be on a given server? So I didn't want to assume.

I searched for "Volkswagen" on mastodon.xyz and found a Volkswagen with a blue tick.

https://mastodon.xyz/@Volkswagen@shrike.club/109365824056368...

You can decide if that's genuine or not.

On a separate note, mastodon.social seems to be over capacity, I've tried signing up for a few days and it's always said "creating an account is not possible".

Looks like @VWGroup@mastodon.social was created on Nov 17th. Wonder if they got preferential treatment.

>You can decide if that's genuine or not.

"Drive our Nazi cars!"

https://shrike.club/@Volkswagen/109365824052772978

I would guess ... no.

> and found a Volkswagen with a blue tick.

It's just an emoji. You can verify yourself much harder than that, see e.g. https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf

Mastodon profiles are instead verified by <a rel="me" ...> backlinks in order to avoid relying on a central authority. See e.g. https://opensource.com/article/22/11/verified-mastodon-websi...

Don't tell someone on HN, tell a disoriented member of the public looking for a blue tick!

The public should know that you can grab one for free rather than for $8 like on the current mainstream proprietary microblogging service.

The full article doesn't mention it, either, there is and will remain a lot of confusion about federated networks and that there isn't a single "Mastodon" to join a la Twitter. Part of the confusion may be that there is a non-profit Mastodon gGmbH which supports the software as well as running mastodon.social.

I wouldn't read too much into this, it's relatively low-commitment to copy Twitter posts to fediverse, it's not like they are solely going to make social media posts on Mastodon. I would assume VW has a presence on Facebook, LINE, Weibo, etc. like any large multinational.

Will this be like CBS leaving twitter only to "rejoin" a day later?

We’re gonna see a lot of companies and celebrities impulsively evading Musk’s takeover. Then they’ll all come back either because it’s not as bad as they thought or all the alternatives are worse.

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