Post APhUGwa0saBuf4CL5s by acousticmirror@post.lurk.org
(DIR) More posts by acousticmirror@post.lurk.org
(DIR) Post #APZucJnIo7TMHgaTD6 by sean@social.deadsuperhero.com
2022-11-14T00:54:28.364660Z
8 likes, 8 repeats
The instance is flourishing, and nearly 100 signups have happened over the last few days. Lots of people are having fun, and we're settling into new methods and strategies to make this great for everyone.One thing worth noting is that a few instances have already suspended us - Mastodon.social, one of the biggest instances, and a few others like wandering.shop. That is their perogative, and there are no hard feelings, but it is a bummer to see these efforts get misunderstood and closed off.Brands.Town is one part culture-jamming, one part satire, and one part collaborative ARG with an evolving made-up world. Every account pretends to be verified. It's a giant middle finger to corporate propaganda on social networks, and an effort to make the fediverse somewhat less hospitable to actual brands trying to colonize our space.Anyway, check us out: https://brands.town/publicAnd maybe sign up!
(DIR) Post #APZybsjRp7UqAXpcg4 by eviloatmeal@linuxrocks.online
2022-11-14T01:03:28Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean Just for the record, I immediately blocked the instance for myself personally, because it gives me... How to describe... Not like, Poe's Law, per se, because it's obvious the content is satire, but the experience of reading the content gives me the same type of almost nauseating revulsion as I get from the "real deal". But by all means, don't let me stop you guys from having your fun. I'm perfectly fine with the knowledge that it exists and just never seeing any of it.
(DIR) Post #APZycTw9UqdxYf3n7I by eddie@social.roger.family
2022-11-14T01:10:16Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean I think this is where federation is winning. I run my own instance and decide what I see. I find your content funny, so it stays. With mastodon.social being a de facto instance for most people, blocking there broad and similar to Twitter suspending you. Anyway, carry on with the satire!
(DIR) Post #APZyjXYYRE1GoJO892 by sean@social.deadsuperhero.com
2022-11-14T01:40:32.702318Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal Yeah, this is a side effect of quite a few of us having experience working in marketing, journalism, and tech startups. The brand voice stuff is eerily accurate, mainly because all of us hate it.
(DIR) Post #APZzeQMnqDIj1E12zw by sandyman@social.sndm.me
2022-11-14T01:48:51Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean I was wondering why m.s suspended brands.town. You’re right though, it is their prerogative. Don’t want to judge but I am curious about this. Although that feeling probably subsides in a day or two so even if I never find out, it’s all the same to me. 😅
(DIR) Post #APa1TYoeHrAfwizKBk by eviloatmeal@linuxrocks.online
2022-11-14T02:08:31Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean Doesn't even have to be accurate. Just the silhouette of it is disgusting to me, whether parody or not.
(DIR) Post #APaDjVZXJWBBy9I3c0 by m_a_schenk@tooting.ch
2022-11-14T03:51:54Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean small businesses will need help. Larger ones will eventually open their own instances. Hope you can quickly remove the impersonated brands.
(DIR) Post #APaX8ly7O52tBsY5HU by max@smeap.com
2022-11-14T06:48:12Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal @sean I’ve had long conversations about my ever increasing belief that the internet has pushed our species past some sort of Poe’s Law Singularity and we are in a post-satirical world where satire is just “no longer possible/funny”. 😿 It started as a gut feeling, but I keep collecting too much evidence supporting it and now I believe satire is dead and the internet killed it. Which is a shame because I loved satire. 😿
(DIR) Post #APaX95Qp1aINYP7m9w by max@smeap.com
2022-11-14T06:48:12Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal @sean I don’t mind brands.town exists and I find it encouraging in a way that that’s a space people want to LARP.I also quickly realized I didn’t want to see it because it made me nauseous in an “uncanny valley” way. The internet is a fairy space and the borders scarily thin between reality and make believe and that leaves a vague sense of dread and foreboding in my gut that is maybe an overreaction but one from a long history on the net.
(DIR) Post #APaXA5ihRDR2jnxvdI by eviloatmeal@linuxrocks.online
2022-11-14T06:55:36Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@max @sean I don't think satire has become impossible, as such. It's just that, through no fault of the satirist, when you satirize corporate culture today, corporate culture is already a caricature of itself. So necessarily your satire of it will just be repeating the exact things that it is. Which to me is both not funny, but also disturbing in a slightly traumatic way.
(DIR) Post #APaXA9BAZozVSyJCvQ by eviloatmeal@linuxrocks.online
2022-11-14T07:05:38Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@max @sean Especially when it comes to corporate social media, the corporations have already covered the entire spectrum from "so detached from real life that our automated system is going to generate promotions to 'celebrate' anniversaries of tragedies" to "we locked a gen z goblin in the basement with our social media creds and promptly forgot they existed" to whatever the hell went on with NormOfNorth.
(DIR) Post #APaXAGFKIlTXNtJ7sO by eviloatmeal@linuxrocks.online
2022-11-14T07:07:47Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@max @sean When the real life we live in right now is as strange as the insulin thing, you're going to have to come up with something very, very exceptional before I don't immediately go "yeah, that could be real, that's not outside the realm of possibility".
(DIR) Post #APaXBcO5SyOWLO3JC4 by eviloatmeal@linuxrocks.online
2022-11-14T07:09:10Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@max @sean Yes. Exactly. It makes my gut wrench in a very uncanny valley sort of way. But I wouldn't wish for it to not exist - I can simply ignore it.
(DIR) Post #APaXCyDhmM08LVqCfo by max@smeap.com
2022-11-14T07:57:24Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal @sean Like I said yeah the “Poe’s Law Singularity” thing started as a gut reaction and I still don’t expect everyone to agree with. But that everything is already a caricature of itself I think is a symptom. It’s not just “brands” that have become that on the internet. The internet has seemed to have ballooned everything into “the idea of itself” as much or more than what it ever actually was.
(DIR) Post #APaXDBiJbrD8CDGKgq by max@smeap.com
2022-11-14T07:57:24Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal @sean This is why my “Poe’s Law Singularity” theory is such a long hard weird conversation. I feel like a nut trying to explain it.None of this is complaints specific to brands.town mind you. (And I appreciate it exists and is trying.) This is more me wrestling with the modern internet in general.So I have some friends and frenemies and class professors deep into semiotics…
(DIR) Post #APaXDQuv5HCpLeH6v2 by max@smeap.com
2022-11-14T07:57:25Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal @sean I had so many problems with one class in particular that tried to teach (“Honors”) English lit with a lens of Semiotics. I grew up reading Vonnegut and that class requiring all this semiotics hogwash interpreting his books nearly ruined them for me. Some of about how Vonnegut’s use of fake brands wasn’t just silly satire but Great Signifiers of Meaning and Capital-B Brands and all this other stuff…
(DIR) Post #APaXECXW1b0P2xh66S by max@smeap.com
2022-11-14T07:57:26Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal @sean Semiotics to me still feels like a massive celebration of treating the map as the territory. The Symbols as the thing Symbolized. In several ways I didn’t find it a useful or a real science in the real world and didn’t have a lot of respect for it as a historic lens.Digital spaces I think twist that and are full of a “Dark Semiotics”. On the internet the territory IS the map. The Symbols (and Brands) are real and sometimes direct avatars of inhuman things.
(DIR) Post #APaXEYg7iGxli1tHZg by max@smeap.com
2022-11-14T07:57:26Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal @sean I loved Vonnegut as a kid, I grew up reading all sorts of satire. I apply a weird satirical lens to writers a lot of people don’t …I realized at one point a few years back that the last satire I personally enjoyed was the first few seasons of The Colbert Report. Sometimes after that the uncanny valley gut feeling started getting stronger with every further season, with everything else going on.
(DIR) Post #APaXF1REmhHquG9Itk by max@smeap.com
2022-11-14T07:57:26Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@eviloatmeal @sean Trying to describe that uncanny valley gut feeling is what lead me to theorizing and rhapsodizing about a theoretical “Poe’s Law Singularity” and weirder ideas like “Dark Semiotics”. I love satire. I truly do appreciate that people are still trying in 2022 well after the point where *I* stopped being able to engage with satire without nausea, and I love that people still enjoy it even though I think it is “dead”. I do want people to prove me wrong.
(DIR) Post #APdWPB94241pQZo812 by arachnomyrmex@eldritch.cafe
2022-11-15T18:31:18Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean @eviloatmeal tbh it might be a good idea to migrate a lot of existing actual-brand-name accounts to accounts with more obvious parody nameswith the sole potential exception of Mastodon because lol, lmao Mastootdon could be fun
(DIR) Post #APhRJ53c22BffcN0Vs by Crispius@mstdn.ca
2022-11-17T16:00:02Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@sean just an observation: I checked it out and it’s smirkable, however I read the rules of the instance which state that the instance is meant only for brand owners and that impersonation is strictly not allowed, yet the content is obviously satire and impersonation is clearly encouraged. Perhaps the instance got defederated because it appears (at first glance) that the server is overrun with trolls and the moderators are asleep at the wheel?
(DIR) Post #APhRJ5dlrb6vTlHssC by sean@social.deadsuperhero.com
2022-11-17T16:03:30.721378Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@Crispius it's definitely satire as well as role-playing, we have an "event" that's part of the narrative where all the impersonators get wiped.Best toots get screenshotted, of course.
(DIR) Post #APhRgtvX48Kc6GwuTg by volume@fr13nd5.com
2022-11-17T16:08:09.124622Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@Crispius @sean Yet it’s the competence that is most important factor. Market makers, taking the piss and then you come around to contribute, but with governments intelligence agencies, or the lack of intelligence agencies.
(DIR) Post #APhRo9pOLQnlRXXMNk by anna@witches.live
2022-11-17T16:08:24Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean yeah I understand why people react poorly to it, had some people wanting it blocked here and i posted instructions for personally muting it. i do think the whole thing is very funny however, and i think does some good in staking federated social media as not "brand safe" whatoever.
(DIR) Post #APhRsNqs97f660FF44 by volume@fr13nd5.com
2022-11-17T16:10:14.525235Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@Crispius @sean 💌
(DIR) Post #APhRxcYKuowb8d4WnI by sean@social.deadsuperhero.com
2022-11-17T16:11:02.309142Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@anna Yeah, that's a big part of why we're doing this. It's similar to Tumblr's euphemism of "the whole neighborhood firing guns in the air to keep away the real estate developers."
(DIR) Post #APhSCwB8EIr8LlWPWC by Crispius@mstdn.ca
2022-11-17T16:13:26Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@sean @volume I’m sorry, but you lost me a couple turns back.
(DIR) Post #APhSCwcQaogriQID44 by volume@fr13nd5.com
2022-11-17T16:13:56.384747Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@Crispius @sean 👏🏻https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffett-backed-electric-car-giant-byd-halts-spinoff-of-chip-unit-11668593688?mod=flipboard
(DIR) Post #APhUGwa0saBuf4CL5s by acousticmirror@post.lurk.org
2022-11-17T16:19:43Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean Brands.Town is one of the best things to happen on the #fedi (so far).Stay strong (and safe)!
(DIR) Post #APhWBJCi3BFv02jrBA by volume@fr13nd5.com
2022-11-17T16:58:27.942605Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@Crispius @sean Serves a therapeutic purpose too.
(DIR) Post #APjOEE8KwqeupEUfz6 by grillchen@brotka.st
2022-11-18T08:40:46.743586Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean overblocking idiots are always an issue. but in this case it is particular funny
(DIR) Post #APkOSSxgoA8G1iGNhQ by edmundo@sunny.garden
2022-11-19T02:03:18Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@sean Hilarious! I just spent a few minutes trying to figure out if brands.town was real or parody.
(DIR) Post #APkOa8VoisfSv6sqLA by volume@fr13nd5.com
2022-11-19T02:17:27.418249Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@edmundo @sean 💌https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfrV_6yWbEg