You probably know by now all about The DMS friends feature, and that your friends can be either Facebook, LinkedIn users, and other mastering engineers.  But, did you also know that you might have followers who aren’t even your friends? In this article, chief admin Edward Vinatea discusses friends and followers, and explains how to find more of both for your DMS account.
 

 

 

 
Written by Edward Vinatea

Since the launch of The DMS, the traditional means of following someone on the site involved becoming “friends” at the Mastering Forum {also known as the back-end}.

 

Then in September 2017, The DMS launched the friends and followers with many other new features. The DMS friends feature makes the old forum friends system redundant and obsolete, and all the action now happens at the front-end.

 

Now when someone (whether a guest or another engineer) is one’s DMS friend, one’s posts show up in one’s newsfeed — and vice versa. That is, all of your status updates show up in your friend’s news feed, as well.

 

While The DMS also follows the friends Facebook model, there’s another way to follow a person’s activities on the DMS site without having your posts appear in that person’s newsfeed.

 

Friends and Followers—What’s the Difference?

The new method of following people on The DMS is called, not surprisingly, following them. That is, one signs up to follow that engineer —to become a follower, in The DMS parlance. It’s similar to being a friend, but with some important differences.

 

Becoming A Follower
First, you don’t need a mastering engineer or a studio’s approval to follow one on The DMS. That’s distinctly different from the traditional friend process, where one has to send someone a friend invitation, and one only become friends with that mastering engineer or studio if that person accepts one’s invitation. With the follow process, there are no invitations involved, and no approvals, either; one simply signs up to follow an engineer or his studio, and then whenever that engineer’s status automatically updates, it shows up in one’s newsfeed. Unless a mastering engineer has web notifications for followers checked on – he or she will never be aware that you’re following.

 

Second, unlike ‘friending’, following is a one-way street. That is, one can see posts from the engineer one follows, but this engineer doesn’t see posts from you. It’s more like the following process on Twitter than being a traditional DMS friend; it turns posting into one-way broadcasting rather than two-way communication thing.

 

Not that one can’t join in and respond to the posts one follows. Just as with traditional status updates, one can opt in to like or comment on any post from anyone you follow on The DMS. It’s just that they don’t see all the other posts that you might initiate.