According to the Washington Post, last summer, 26 year old content creator Dabney rauh decided to sign up for a twitter account. Her instagram account is dedicated to publishing content from the 2000s and has accumulated nearly 50000 instagram fans She has been posting on instagram for two years to make it more difficult for her to update her app or expand her influence
A year later, she had only 15 twitter fans. She tried various methods: forwarding instagram content on twitter, interacting with other celebrity accounts, and publishing organic content. She was a little lucky on tiktok, but she still only accumulated about 700 fans there. "For me, the most important thing for instagram is to build this community and online friends. I hope I can inspire this community elsewhere," rauh said
A new group aims to help creators like rauh do this. This new group, called my friends my data Coalition (mfmd), is a group composed of founders of start-ups. It is committed to promoting technology giants to adopt a new industry wide standard, allowing users to transfer their fans from one application to another, so as to create more competition between platforms.
"Large social media companies intend to hijack our personal contact information," said Daniel LISS, founder and CEO of the photography based social network dispo. "This limits consumers' choices, hinders competition and inhibits freedom of speech. We are committed to letting our community members control their friends' data."
The most valuable asset of a content creator is their fans, but it is also something that is not easy to transfer. They can encourage fans to find them elsewhere, but there is no way to transplant your instagram fans, for example, to tiktok.
As rauh and other creators have found, it's hard to remind their audience. On tiktok, users have started using the pseudonym "algospeak" to refer to other applications such as instagram and Youtube because they say that even saying a competitor's name will reduce the ranking of content.
The founding members of mfmd include popular social applications such as dispo, itsme, clash app, Muze, spam app and collage. These applications have received a total of more than $100 million in venture capital and accumulated tens of millions of downloads. The organization has sent letters to meta, tiktok, snap, twitter and other large social platforms calling on them to join their actions.
As startups have found, it is difficult to compete with technology giants such as meta or YouTube when the top talents on the Internet are basically locked on a specific platform because they can't get fans elsewhere.
Many creators have joined the mfmd initiative. Some people learned a profound lesson about ownership after vine closed. Many well-known vine celebrities have been over "leveraged". They put all their energy into the short video platform to build their own fans. When the app closed in 2016, those who didn't use vine to jump to other apps (such as YouTube) couldn't get the huge fan base they built.
"There's a lot of discussion about 'prioritizing' creators of these traditional platforms," said Brendon McNerney, founder and CEO of clash app and former vine creator. "If platforms really want to give priority to us, the best thing they can do is allow us to move our fans between platforms. Each platform provides its own outlet for creativity and connection with fans - this is not a zero sum game."
LISS, the leader of mfmd, has a political background. He has worked in the White House and State Department of former US President Barack Obama, mayor Mike Bloomberg's city hall and Senator Hillary Clinton's office. His former startup, Bama covered, convened hundreds of students to get thousands of people in Alabama to participate in health insurance under the affordable health care act. He said that in addition to exerting public pressure on technology giants, he hoped that mfmd could also become a political force. "I am very willing to participate in the political process on behalf of what we think is right," LISS said. "Not only for our company, but also for the next generation of consumer startups."
LISS cites the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allows consumers to migrate their phone numbers from one operator to another. This is a watershed. It promotes competition and gives consumers more choices. In this context, mfmd members want to promote legislative and voting measures to support their efforts and allow smaller social media start-ups to compete with existing enterprises rather than deregulate an industry.
At the same time, many creators rely on piecemeal services that promise to provide influential people with a more direct channel to reach their audience. Jessica naziri, creator of technology and lifestyle content in Los Angeles, said she started an email newsletter. "At the end of the day, I want ownership," she said. "This is to ensure that my audience will follow me from one channel."
Jeremy jacobowitz, an instagram celebrity with more than 434000 instagram fans in Brooklyn, said that although he widely supports the goal of mfmd, he prefers to establish an independent and unique audience on each platform. "The ideal thing for me is to grow organically on all these platforms," he said. "Although my audience on instagram is in my 20s, my audience on tiktok is much younger. Tiktok provides me with opportunities to meet young people. For me, it's more valuable than pushing all my fans on instagram to tiktok."
Eugene Park, a twitter Streaming Player with 300000 fans in Los Angeles, said what mfmd was trying to do was "idealistic", but if they succeed, "it will make the competitive environment more fair."
"This will take power away from technology companies and put it in the hands of the creators who really make up these huge platforms. Creators are why people spend all day on twitter," he said