Subcultures and “communities” are both annoyingly claustrophobic and fundamentally limited in how interesting they can get. If you want to make things actually interesting, level up and aim to catalyze a public.
Conversation
One reason I like mastodon is that it’s only the second social media product, after twitter, to even attempt to enable the creation of publics. Unlike communities, publics exist in the interstices of walled compounds rather than within them.
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But publics are so much harder to control! This makes them less attractive to many of the people in the position to make such a choice
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That’s like choosing a video game car over a real one because it’s safer to drive. Unfortunately it doesn’t get you anywhere.
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AWebFactory believes in communities cuz we reject a fundamentalist marketing vision of groups of human beings. We embrace communities that work together and actually get things done. Long live communities! And long live the public that is more than cannon fodder for marketeers.


