I could be wrong, but I think that one of the main benefits a brand could get from hosting a Mastodon instance is having your brand name tied to accounts all over the place. I notice this in the context of Vivaldi and the upcoming Mozilla servers. The domain would work as a subtle, muted ad. The more users you can host, the more users you can acquire, and thus your brand permeates the Fediverse. More and more people will see @users@yourbrand.social. The instance itself could also advertise the brand back to the users of the instance. Certain spaces on the web app can be changed to display the name of the company or service instead of the Mastodon logo. Vivaldi.social seems to do this already. I can imagine Mozilla could take it a step further not only with their logo but also with unique themeing, and thus differentiate their landing page from other servers. Caption: Screenshot of Vivaldi.social local timeline with Vivaldi Social logo in the top right corner. My question is, how valuable will that constant repetition be even if Mastodon becomes big time competitive?

There has been a recent development regarding the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency having an account on one of the most popular Mastodon instances, Infosec.exchange. Jerry Bell, the admin of Infosec.exchange, summarized the conflict, basically saying that it's alright if folks want to defederate from his instance if they want to over this government account despite it not being inline with what he thinks the Fediverse should be. For what it's worth, I think he's taken the pushback as well as one could while leaning on the other strength the Fediverse provides: an option to leave or separate if you want to. I don't think this is the first time lots of servers have chosen to defederate from another and I don't think it will be the last. It does, however, present a new dynamic of how we do social media that wasn't available before. In a world where a social media platform is owned in pieces by the different communities that make it up, how do we choose the way we will stick together and how do we choose to unstick? How I would like things to be My preference is that I would like to have the most access to instances while guarding against hate and harassment. I don't want my instance to artificially create an echo chamber for me. Of course I'm not going out of my way to follow accounts that will aggravate me, but I don't want to see just a stream of posts that I like. So when I heard that people are blocking a whole instance that I consider to be reasonable with lots of people I follow and which is one of the largest in the network over one account they disagree with, it felt a little weird. Golly, that's a lot of people to effectively mute over something I think is relatively small. I hope my instance doesn't take a step like this. Or have they and I just never realized? The big social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have all had to deal with the idea of algorithmically created echo chambers that can keep us from hearing new perspectives that help to humanize the other and get along more generally. But what I haven't really thought about until now is the extent to which we ourselves are biased toward echo chambers in different ways, like with the communities we choose to engage in.