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…

  1. 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. 😅

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  • hauiAEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    This is a wild comment section.

    Thanks for coming up with the idea. I‘ve thought about this a couple of times but that was it so far.

    I think only people who have actually used linkedin for an extended amount of time will get its up and downsides (and no, I‘m not a fan).

    To approach this problem bottom up, I ask myself, what is linkedin?

    Job-site for some, facebook for business contacts for most I guess. So something like friendica comes to mind so the general user can switch easily while mastodon and lemmy dont fit the bill in my opinion. Making a whole new thing (using AP) would be possible but I‘m not sure its such a great idea. Companies dont care if its a different app, they care about marketing which can be done by changing the frontend.

    Disclaimer

    As someone with a wide variety of jobs on their cv I have also been an employer, both employed in HR exec and an entrepreneur for nearly 20 yrs. i have paid for job ads and have hired people at higher wages as the competition because even back then I didnt care how low I can go but how people earn a living.

    Payment

    In opposition to popular belief, small companies happily(?) pay for job ads if that is the cost of doing business. If its legal work and not lazy searching for victims, paying a small amount (100-500 €$ depending on the outcome) is no problem imo. Maybe it should depend on the revenue the company posts on their profile btw. Also in my experience, people seem to think corpos are the best way to make money. Short term that may be correct but it is a stupid idea. I made a living with my company to limit business to a maximum of 10% to one customer (also businesses). That way no corporation could threaten to ruin me. The same should go here. I would not give higher power to those able to pay more. Make fair, transparent prices that pay for hardware, software, electricity and work, not a ferrari. The idea of getting rich is toxic and against the nature of the fediverse imo.

    Federation

    Other fediverse services will defederate the instance as they do with each other as well but thats a risk I would take. The important question imo is why?. I defederate because the spam, hate of an instance outweighs its benefits. So one goal would be to keep as many as possible from defederating. So a non-violent approach would be great. The instance cant accept bigotry, corporate lies (big factor), migoynism, ableism, etc. Europe is kind of progressive in job legislature which is how I‘d do it since companies would miss out a lot of viewers otherwise.

    The idea

    I would probably go forth with some pretty idealistic goals and unique proposals. Something like give visibility to small companies, to ethically trying companies, maybe design some kind of code of conduct for fediverse-acceptable-companies or something. The range of ideas is wide imo.

    Privacy

    The worst part of this imo is the fact that people are with their personal info on linkedin. I dont know if they have scrape prevention measures but the amount of personal data you can get from there seems scary. The risk doing this in the fedi seems high. I‘d probably try to transition to nicknames like the rest does. People can post personal info which is anonymited in the open and once the company and person have made contact and the person says ok, that one company can view their job info.

    Summary

    So after writing this, I think its worth trying. Lemmy and mastodon are very much places to discuss stuff but obviously, lemmy is very critical of this and I get that. Mastodon will probably be more open but less technically adept imo. Good luck and lmk if you need help. I‘m experienced in process design, am an admin and know some code.