Low friction is one of the reasons social media became what it is today. By virtue of just creating an account (personal or corporate), the reach was -potentially- huge. Some unknown individuals became influencers and companies could interact with millions. Nevertheless, the drawback of this situation is, every member of the social media site is beholden to whatever rules imposed to its accounts.
At the beginning was a free for all, with time, those rules became harder to please on both sides of the social media environment (site & users). Currently is very common to find horror histories from social media community managers on which, for unknown reasons, the account was suspended/canceled. Leaving that entity (frequently companies) in the limbo on that social media site, limiting or blocking any posting. Under that situation, account holders are at the mercy of the rulers of the site.
On top of that, even if posting properly, those posts are at the mercy of the site algorithm, including if that post was promoted (i.e payed).
Let’s rewind a bit …
Let’s assume a solo entrepreneur with their business just starting-up. It’s frequent for people start with their personal or specific Gmail/Outlook e-mail account for their business. That could -also- be the case for a social media page. As business grows and starts to have formal employees, it becomes cumbersome to handle a company with free emails addresses. Therefore, it’s natural to elevate those emails and migrate them to ones using the company main domain name. Same for the website, now -in addition of social media company page-, there’s a company website.
Latest social media refugee wave
Twitter is experiencing its 3rd wave of user exodus. The 1st one was toward Mastodon (Fediverse), the 2nd one was towards Threads (Meta) and the current one (as I write these words) is towards Bluesky. It can’t be denied that twitter formal traffic became fragmented between these last three sites. And here lies the issue, the waves make it even more difficult for community managers handle and deal with -the individual rules- of all those social media sites.
Enter Instances
The same way a company today has their own email addresses and web pages, some social media protocols also allows this modality. Specifically, Mastodon and Bluesky allow any entity to have their own server/instance. Under this variant, community managers are not at risk of any social media company shutting down their account, that one belongs to the company. It would be the same as saying a legit e-mail server would be shutdown. It can’t (considering a normal e-mail server and not a SPAM one). The same can be said for government social media presence, today it makes no sense for a government to continue depending -only- on third parties social media platforms, they should have their own.
At the current state, Threads and Mastodon can interact with each-other. Meta expects to have full integration by the beginning of next year, or so they say. BlueSky theoretically can interacts with these three services, in reality it doesn’t.
The previous means, posts in Threads can be read by people in Mastodon. This makes both social media entities open. As an example, the French government established their own Mastodon server. This means that whatever happens on any other social media network, the French government owns their social media presence. They can point to those accounts and not depend on any social media site for this. That situation can be reproduced for any institution or company.
Granted, establishing a social media server/instance remains a technical endeavour, more complicated than putting on-line a web server. Nevertheless it can be done, and the time is now!
Image: Alina Grubnyak