Before you start throwing 💩 , hear me out…
I’m a huge fan of the fediverse…it’s returning to the original design of the Internet…where everyone can communicate freely and openly and corporations have a very difficult time pulling anything creepy that LinkedIn/Twitter (yes, I’ll still call it Twitter)/Facebook does.
But I sense a huge frustration with businesses that want to network with others but feel their hands are tied by these walled gardens.
I figure, why not make the fediverse business friendly?
Right now most people on Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. seem to be more of the anarchist/weekend hacker types. So part of my concern with this is that it would taint the fediverse with a bunch of spam. But by the same token it would also help grow the job market and provide opportunities for people that they may not have had on LinkedIn. Of course, I’d stress for anyone on the site to operate in a community-first mindset.
So, some question…
-
Would this type of instance be met with disgust? I mean, obviously the great thing about the fediverse is that you can block servers you don’t want on the network, but having the instance blocked would kind of defeat the purpose. 😅
-
If you’re excited by the idea, what things would you like to see? In my own armchair brainstorming, I thought joint accounts would be a good idea, as well as analytics.
-
Suggestion for already-existing platform? Can’t find a good one that would be ready-to-go to build off of. There’s friendica, but I’m not much of a fan of PHP, and it seems to not have great adoption, either.
I don’t personally use Linkedin so I can’t really comment on how a federated alternative would work or be useful for professionals and networking.
What I will say is that paid/business-related and the general fediverse culture/design seems like oil and water. Especially the paid part. It simply won’t take off unless there is a mass exodus of people from Linkedin (very unlikely). And even then, having multiple instances for something as focused on Linkedin doesn’t seem viable. It’s probably better off centralized and disconnected from a large network like the Fediverse, in my opinion.
The closest the fediverse can get to this is professionals using Mastodon or something in the same way they used Twitter before it imploded. Interesting idea though.
