When was the last time you got a business offer from a sender with the e-mail address [email protected] and accepted it? Probably never. It seems sketchy AF. You’d expect that person to reach you through an e-mail address of their business.

On Twitter, however, you might have gotten in touch with that person.

Because on Twitter, most people just have one account, and they use it for everything: their business stuff, their private stuff, and occasionally even their very private stuff (although most people try to draw a line there and avoid being horny on main).

We constantly have different roles and functions that we fulfil based on the context. When writing from my company’s e-mail address, I represent my employer, and will have to act accordingly. While having dinner with my friends at home, I can act differently – even though all my friends know where I work. Yet, they don’t expect me to act as a representative of that company.

On Twitter, these different contexts collapsed. People usually have one account, one handle. It is impossible to parse what is said in what context, and – predictably – it causes chaos.

People made off-the-cuff remarks that would have been fine as jokes among a group of friends, and lost their jobs in the time it takes a plane to fly from America to Africa. Others announced their intention to sell their company’s stocks, and got accused of market manipulation.

After a few of these occurrences we had the phase were everyone added a «here as a private person» to their Twitter bios, as a magical incantation that would surely drive away all ill will.

Meanwhile, companies were quick to implement social media guidelines for their employees, most of the time claiming that everyone was always a representative of the company while on Twitter, effectively anti-mageing that «I’m just a private person here» incantation.

The incantations didn’t help. Because the context is still missing, and even blue checkmarks aren’t much of a help.

Now with the big exodus I see people reverting the Twitter model on Mastodon: they create an account on one instance, then move to another and then another, always in the hopes that once they’ll find one that fits all the roles and functions they have in real life. With all the hats we wear as part of our life, this might get difficult.

I would argue: embrace the signifiers of context that a specific instance gives you instead.

I can be @[email protected] in my role as a practitioner of data visualisation. I can be @[email protected] in my role as a graphic designer for the NZZ (a Swiss newspaper – this instance doesn’t exist yet, but I hope it will one day). And maybe I could make a third account on a Swiss instance to muse about Swiss politics in Swiss German.

Not only does it give your followers an indication in what capacity you’re posting, it also allows them to filter based on these capacities. You don’t know Swiss German? Then don’t follow me on the Swiss instance. You’re mostly interested in the news? Then only follow my @NZZ.ch account.

Having these role-based accounts also solves the perceived problem of «losing» your account once you change employer. Yes, you won’t be able to post from that instance anymore. But a good employer will allow you to migrate your account to your next workplace, and since your followers follow you based on your job, they will likely be interested in reading you from your new position. Meanwhile, your old posts can be preserved on the old server. And the people that are not interested in you in your professional capacity just follow your private account anyway.

And don’t forget: the fediverse is bigger than just Mastodon. It has further, more specialised tools, like Pixelfed or Peertube or BookWyrm, allowing you to create even more context.

So there: Create as many accounts as the hats that you wear. I think it could help the discourse – because it gives context. With no algorithm streamlining the feed, it helps everyone in the Fediverse to follow everyone based on the topic or capacity they’re interested in. There is always the possibility to boost stuff in case it’s relevant on more than one account.

<aside> ℹ️ I’m Kaspar Manz, and I’m currently posting on Notion because my own website over at xeophin.net/worlds is in dire need of an update, but it feels like such a huge amount of work to actually create a new one that isn’t based on that old CMS the current one runs on?

You can find me on vis.social/@xeophin in the meantime.

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