The Future of Brand Marketing in Web3's Fediverse
A Guide for Marketing, PR, and Small Business Pros
The Fediverse is the new Internet's vibrant digital public square—a network of interconnected social platforms, communities, and content spaces built on open, decentralized protocols. This is where people and organizations will gather, build relationships, and share content across independent technology networks that can “talk” to each other. Counterpoints to what we have now, the Fediverse and Web3 are designed to serve people, not just algorithms or advertisers. Working on-chain grants new rights that reduce your distance from power, like going anywhere in the Fediverse without having to start over.
You can engage directly with Web3's domains of blockchains, blockchain-like services, Artificial Intelligence, and autonomous Agents, which work without direct human intervention. However, most of the things you'll want to do in Web3 will combine several domains. The Fediverse is where we will interact with hybrid services. Marketing and PR pros care because this is where audiences will hear about your brand organically, for interactions that follow.
Why the Fediverse Matters
Working in the Fediverse gives you greater message control and new forms of customer interaction to build awareness, engagement, and community—beyond the limits of centralized platforms. If you have ever sent an email that saw an em dash convert into a hyphen, changing the nuance of your sentence. Or, had the wrong photo and language picked up from a web link, then you have experience with what the Fediverse corrects.
More Power. Less Findability.
The Web3 movement shifts power by restoring control to users—reclaiming agency from Big Tech's corporate-driven tools. The Fediverse counters Web2's algorithmic manipulation and ad-driven visibility models. This marks a fundamental change in how digital spaces are structured and how brands engage with audiences. So, how will marketers respond when people have more choice, voice, and control over their digital lives? When algorithmic manipulation and advertising stop working?
Marketing and PR pros will need to find new ways to engage audiences that prioritize stakeholder value over corporate shareholders. There will still be advertisements. And, there will be countless Agentic operations that optimize for something. However, the only way I see to overcome fragmentation is to earn your place in communities and create things people will want to share.
A Shaggy Dog Story
Did you hear the one about a Casino, a Commons, and a Curator who met on a Concourse? The Casino took bets. The Commons wanted everyone to work together. The Curator created new experiences. And the Concourse just wanted to keep traffic moving.
What this lacks in humor, it gains in explaining the new Internet's unique, collaborative spaces.
The Casino, Commons, Curator and Fediverse
Back in the day, centralized databases made sense for delivering consistent, efficient Internet services and easy data management. As these platforms grew, however, centralization enabled corporate capture. Big Tech amassed troves of user data, created walled gardens that locked in users, and monetized attention through targeted ads and engagement-optimizing algorithms. The Internet's incentives and ethos shifted from openness to extraction. Technology responded with people-and-community-first alternatives.
Technology Responds
Picture the Web3 Internet as a three-legged table, where each (Casino, Commons, Curator) leg is its own tech ecosystem. The legs sub-divide into infrastructure and Agent zones; these connect to a Fediverse tabletop that coordinates identity, data, and value. Some campaigns and services exist only in the Casino, Commons, and Curator. Hybrid services meet audiences in the decentralized Fediverse Concourse.
The Casino
I call the speculative, high-volatility world of crypto and NFTs, The Casino. This is where Web3's built-in transaction trust and direct control let people bet on new forms of value. The Casino runs on blockchains, smart contracts and on-chain agents that settle transactions—without human intervention. Though often tied to higher risk, The Casino gives marketers powerful new tools like loyalty NFTs, token transfers, programmable payments, automated promotions and micro incentives to reward specific audience behaviors.
The Commons
The Commons table leg is a blockchained shared-brain for communities and the public good. The Commons works on shared infrastructure (Digital Public Goods), shared knowledge, and other pro-social services. Commons communities self-determine their group's values, standards and governance. The challenge for marketing and PR pros will be how to build brand affinity within communities that manage their own digital ethos. Brand success here means opportunities for deeper trust and truly authentic brand relationships based on shared values.
The Curator
I call AI and algorithmic systems The Curator because these services filter, personalize, and optimize digital experiences. The Curator is our table diagram's intelligence and discovery layer, designed to help users find relevant content, connect with others, and enable sophisticated automated tasks. The Curator can use autonomous, multi agent AI systems to help audiences discover, connect communicate and acquire. For marketing and PR pros, the Curator spots trends, filters your brand's content to receptive audiences and powers conversational agents for real time engagement.
The Functional Fediverse
JSON-LD is an open standard that preserves consistent meaning across the Internet. JSON is a widely used programming code that organizes information and uses interoperability to glue together collective efforts. The "LD" in JSON-LD stands for "Linked Data," which means the data connects to universal, standard definitions that help apps and websites understand context and details. JSON-LD can be directly converted into RDF (Resource Description Framework), the universal web standard for structured data and the lingua franca of Internet communications. This allows things like posts, likes, events, smart contract actions, or AI messages to use the same fields and meanings across the Fediverse, ensuring clear and consistent communication everywhere. These standards live on Schema.org.
What this means specifically for marketing and PR pros
Reliable Information Spread
When you share information (like a press release, an event, a product announcement), JSON-LD ensures the key data (headline, date, links, location, price, etc.) are consistently identified and understood anywhere in the Fediverse. In other words, JSON-LD encures your messages maintain integrity as they spread.
Seamless Automation
Fediverse standards underpin automated message sharing, for consistency everywhere.
Better Measurement and Analytics
Consistent measurement in the Fediverse means gathering data from many different servers (places), not just one centralized dashboard. Thanks to JSON-LD's open standards, performance, engagement, and mention data are structured the same way everywhere.
This means you can get faster, more reliable insights, spot trends earlier, and measure campaign success more effectively. Standardized, structured data doesn't just speed up analytics, it makes your marketing tools more flexible, your insights more actionable, and your team more efficient. Consistent, clean data is impossible across today's separate, proprietary platforms. The Fediverse should be a big boost to measurement and analytics.
Universal Standards and Why They Matter
ActivityPub uses JSON-LD to create the Web3 Consortium's standardized communication protocols. These standards determine how messages and activities are delivered, subscribed to, replied to, and acted upon. The problem with the old Internet was not enough good information. The problem today is too much good information. The only way to manage massive amounts of information and ensure consistent meaning everywhere is to use tructured data pervasively. Consistent, structured data unlocks powerful collaborations and network effects.
Standards create a robust, interoperable, and intelligently connected environment in which people and brands build genuine connections. Creating connections and value is how your message travels further and can engage audiences without the limitations of centralized platforms.
By treating the Fediverse as both a meeting place—and a strategic channel, you replace fragmented services with a unified protocol that automates business, sales, and operations. You'll maintain consistent messaging, unlock network effects across Web3, and wield a powerful lever for the new goals of brand authenticity, community-driven growth, and privacy-first marketing.
What This Means to Marketing, PR, and Brands
Recent history explains why the old attention playbook is losing relevance. Centralized databases used to make sense. They made the Internet consistent, efficient, and easy to manage. That worked until Big Tech used centralization to capture the Internet. The corporate Internet built walled gardens, harvested user data, and locked us into closed ecosystems. They monetized attention through algorithmic churn, interruption and advertising burn. For marketers and PR professionals, the old playbook meant learning to play by the platforms' rules: Buy ads. Optimize content for algorithms. Compete for attention even if it weakens your brand in other ways. Personally, I hate what the Intenet has become.
The Fediverse and the broader Web3 movement are direct responses to the messed-up incentives and excesses of Web2. Web3 offers a vision of the Internet where users own their data, communities set the rules that govern them, and open protocols enable real interoperability. Fediverse engagement means brands have to earn your attention and regard. Nothing is captive. No shortcuts.
The New Playbook: From Churn and Burn to Earn
Where does visibility come from, if not from advertising and pleasing algorithms? If businesses need sales to thrive, how will customers find and buy branded goods? The Internet is moving from closed, corporate-controlled platforms to open, user-governed networks. Marketers and PR professionals will want to shift from algorithm-chasing and ad-buying to authentic engagement, community participation, and transparent value creation.
The Web2>Web3 transition starts with showing up, contributing, and listening—grassroots engagement, open collaboration, and trust-building—so new forms of marketing and PR can emerge. The Fediverse isn't just a new set of tools—it's a new philosophy for digital interaction.
The new reality is this: the most successful brands will embed themselves in communities authentically, contribute real value, and adapt to transparent, participatory digital ecosystems. That means creating interactions that earn your audience's attention and regard.
Examples
What can brands do? Cleaning up the past is a good start. Dior addressed vulnerabilities from Web3's transparency and 2-way customer communications by celebrating the design and making skills of Mumbai's Chanakya atelier, that had gone unrecognized previously.
The Aura Blockchain Consortium is taking a different strategic approach. Their system meets new disclosure regulations by opening up just enough, while keeping strategic closedness that preserves legacy brand advantages as long as possible.
As always, these posts elide technical detail in favor of storytelling. if you have helpful corrections please write me: scott@weave3.org.
Up Next: The Story of Churn, Burn and Earn