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Following up on “How to federate like our business ecosystem” I went ahead and created a Mastodon-instance for my company. It’s at m.tgl.eu. Next to me and a generic ‘team’, three colleagues have created an account, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll be active or not.

Some observations:

  • The distinction between separate accounts can cause confusion. On Twitter one is conditioned to see one account as ‘all of me’. On e-mail however we have different mail addresses for different contexts, of which work and private mail addresses are the most common two. To make the distinction visible between my personal and company account I used different avatars.
  • Some of our team have been hesitant about the context collapse between work and private life. E.g. sharing phone numbers, or posting work related material on your personal social media accounts. This is completely understandable (even if for me personally all work has come from personal interests so there’s an almost complete overlap between work and private, even if not the other way around: almost all of my work would fit in my private context, not all of my private context would fit in my work context.)

Having company accounts could help, as having different accounts for different contexts works as a sort-of category filter for the types of content that are being shared. I notice that from my work account I now do follow organisational accounts, whereas from private accounts I usually avoid doing that.

That’s all on the individual level.

The actual experiment here is to see a) what occurs if everyone in the team has an individual voice in their professional context and b) how that works out across organisations in our ecosystem. Does it lead to different types of interaction, more low threshold casual interaction, between people from organisations we regard as part of our ‘scene’? It’s a type of collectiveness that is impossible on global platforms like Twitter. It’s based on a locally more dense network between specific groups of people. As yet, this is still entirely theoretical, as it depends on other organisations also having such instances, from which people connect to us. Having at least our instance makes it possible to start the experiment if there’s at least one other. Maybe having ours helps that second one to start.

23 reactions on “Our Company Mastodon Instance M.tgl.eu”

  2. @roel yes, I’m curious too. I think group instances (company, neighbourhood, sportsclub etc.) may well make sense. And what that will do for interaction between groups through those group instances.

  3. @ton I’m wondering if you made any changes or configured it differently.Registrations closed, seems obvious. But maybe something like “making the ‘local’ tab the home tab” would be usefull too.

  4. @berkes not yet no (except for closed registrations). The instance isn’t for internal stuff (we have our rocket.chat instance for that), so the local timeline would be mostly to see what colleagues are sharing. But as I follow them (we’re just 9), I see that in my home timelines anyway. I expect more from the global timeline, where the interaction between colleagues and their peers from elsewhere becomes more visible? (Local timeline in general for group instances I can see as key, yes)

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