We had a great first week with lots of sarcasm and humor, and some absolutely amazing ideas from those who participated. Together, we learned a lot, and made some friends along the way.
On November 20th @ 5pm GMT, we will be purging most of our impersonator accounts, save for a few very brilliant ones worth keeping around (namely, @CocaCola and @goldenflake and one or two others ). Moving forward, Brands Town will be 99% fictional brands to better embrace the ARG elements we hope to develop. Don’t worry - the made-up brands will still stick around.
A few things we’re thinking about cooking up:
Lore wiki
Neocities pages
Audio / Video stuff
Brand Teams - multiple people running accounts
Disasters and Lore Villains
Brand Swaps - tired of doing a brand? Want to do a different one? Swap out.
In the course of a week, this project evolved from an anticapitalist culture-jamming initiative into something weirder and funnier and more creative. It’s satire. It’s performance art. It’s a game! But it’s also a community doing some insane creative work, while giving the corporate tech world a huge middle finger.
Who's your favorite brands.town brandsona and why?
Mine is probably @MNNHNewsEnglish because of the way most of their posts are written, and the incredible level of genre-saavy that comes with acknowledging our shared space.
@annewalk It's a culture-jamming thing I started like a week ago, where people roleplay as brands in an effort to mock Twitter brands. It's part performance art, part ARG, and all very sarcastic and silly.
Despite this, several of the brands that signed up are actually real. We won't tell you which ones!
* Disclaimer, I follow an absolutely vast amount of people, it's always hard for me to come up with a quick list. If you feel passed over, I'm sorry. ?
One thing worth noting is that a few instances have already suspended us - Mastodon.social, one of the biggest instances, and a few others like wandering.shop. That is their perogative, and there are no hard feelings, but it is a bummer to see these efforts get misunderstood and closed off.
Brands.Town is one part culture-jamming, one part satire, and one part collaborative ARG with an evolving made-up world. Every account pretends to be verified. It's a giant middle finger to corporate propaganda on social networks, and an effort to make the fediverse somewhat less hospitable to actual brands trying to colonize our space.
@sixohsix Honestly, only a handful of those are like that. A lot of them go in a way weirder and more funny direction.
I'm trying to shift the focus more to purely fictional stuff, as it feels less cynical. But, a lot of the accounts all simulate their own shared world events, which make it more like a game.
I wear my heart on my sleeve. Queer as a 3-dollar bill. For my job, I maintain avionics systems on super old F-16 fighter jets. In my spare time, I try to make crappy 320x200 retro adventure games, and also run a few public services for the fediverse. You may have heard of WeDistribute or VidCommons, or maybe Spectra Video?I've been on the Fediverse for nearly 15 years. Been using some kind of Linux as a daily driver for even longer.