Hard Fork - Jonathan Haidt Strikes Again + What You Vibecoded + An Update on the Forkiverse

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

This week, Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Anxious Generation,” returns to the show to discuss new research about how social media is harming teens and what it’s been like to become the face of a global movement against the platforms. Then, we asked what you were building with Claude Code, and you blew us away. We’ll share some of our favorite projects that you sent us. And finally, we’re joined by PJ Vogt, the host of “Search Engine,” to talk about our early adventures in the Forkiverse and what we’ve learned so far about running a social media network. Guests:Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation"PJ Vogt, host of “Search Engine” Additional Reading: Mountains of Evidence Meta’s Internal ResearchAn NYT Event in LA - Trump: The First Year of His Second Term We want to hear from you. Email us at [e-mail]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Casey, did you hear about the new vehicle that stole the show at CES this year? What vehicle was that? It was from our good friend Will I am of the Black Eyed Peas, who we interviewed once in a very, I would describe as a psychedelic experience. Absolute fever dream of a day. Well, he is out with a new electric, AI-powered brain on wheels. It is essentially an electric tricycle. It's called Trinity, and it looks insane.

Can I show you this? see this. Okay. Oh my goodness. This looks like the head of the xenomorph in alien has been decapitated and has had wheels attached to it. Yes. Yes, it looks insane. It's like a three-wheeled electric sort of scooter with a top over it. Very sleek, very aerodynamic. I personally would love to die in one of these. Yeah. I would love to just be absolutely demolished by an 18-wheeler in one of these. This actually does, like just looking at this, this does seem to me like it would be Will I.m.'s favored mode of transportation. I can just imagine him.

It's like time to take the kids to school, and he's like, get in this thing, guys. We're going to be 2000 late. That's a black eyed piece joke. Let's get this party started. I'm Kevin Rusett, Tech Commons at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week.

Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt returns to the show with new research on how social media is harming teens. Then, we asked you for your Claude Cote experiments, and you blew us away, we'll share some of our favorites. And finally, it's a trip to the Fordiverse. Thousands of you have now joined our Fediverse experiment, and search engine host, PJ Vote is here to talk about what we've learned so far, such as Vladimir Putin. He's a problem. Not a good guy. Well, Keyes, we got a big show this week, lots to talk about, but let's start with

social media, because there's been a lot happening in that world. Yeah, you know, last week we talked about the nudification scandal over at GROC, and there's been a bunch more news about that this week. The U.S. Senate managed to pass a bill on Tuesday that would allow victims of these sorts of non-consensual, sexually explicit images to sue over, you know, the creation of those images. Yeah, and GROC also rolled back its image generation feature for free users. You now have to be a paid user to GROC to notify people against their consent.

If you want to commit a crime, that's a premium feature now, okay? That's going to be behind the paywall. Yes. So they are not rolling that back fully, of course, because it is generating a huge amount of engagement for them, but they do seem to acknowledge that some people were taking it too far. That's right, Kevin. And it is really this exact sort of phenomenon that is happening on social media that has led our guest this week to really lead a charge and say, when it comes to younger people, we actually just need to keep them away from this stuff altogether. Yes, this name of our guest today, Jonathan Haidt, will be familiar to longtime hardfork listeners. he came on the show back in March 24 when his book The Anxious Generation came out since that time. That book has become a mega bestseller. Jonathan has become a leading advocate for things like phone bans in schools and these social media restrictions like the one we talked about in Australia that just went into effect.

And there's been a lot of discussion about Heights thesis that social media and widespread smartphone use is harming mental health for kids and teens. and a lot of arguments about the science in that book, whether the studies that Haidt and others have cited as proof that social media is harming children are actually holding up under scrutiny. And as a matter of fact, Kevin, Jonathan Haidt and his fellow researcher, Zachary Rauch, have new research out this week,

which gave us an excuse to bring him back on the show. Yes, and this new research by Jonathan and Zachary is designed to address one of the, the primary criticisms that his book got, which was about the difference between correlation and causation. So we're going to talk about that research, and we're also going to talk about what's been happening since his book came out. Yeah, as he has become the world's hater-in-chief of social media. So let's bring in Jonathan Haidt. Welcome back to Hard Fork. Thank you, guys. Great to be back. You've been a busy man. You joined us originally,

just as your anxious generation book was going out into the world. The book has now spent 88 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That's a lot of weeks. It sold a bunch of copies, led to discussions all around the world and follow-on projects like a book you and my friend, Catherine Price, just wrote called The Amazing Generation, which is aimed at kids and teens. And now you are back with a new paper or papers about this issue of social media and mental health. You have a new post on your substack called Mountains of Evidence, and you're here to talk about that today. So just give us the TLDR here, Jonathan. What is the most important new finding in your research since your book came out?

So when my book came out, I thought that the main problem was mental health. And there's a big debate in the academic world. Well, okay, people who use social media more are more depressed, but is that correlation or is it causation? And that has kind of defined the scope of the debate, and that's gone on for a couple of years now. And it's what Mark Zuckerberg says to defend himself. Oh, there's no evidence of causation. Well, guess what? There are tons and tons of evidence of causation, and meta did some of the best studies to show it.

There's so many different kinds of evidence, including what the kids themselves say, what the parents say, what the teachers say. Like, everybody sees it. That's evidence. And then there are experiments with random assignment that show that when you get off social media for at least a week, depression gets less. So I was collecting all that evidence for this big review paper. That's one of the two projects. And while we were working on that, there was additional dumps of studies from meta that come out. in the Attorney General's lawsuits against them. And they post them online and there's all kinds

of information in the briefs. So we cataloged them at a new website we put up called metasinternal research.org. And that includes a couple of true experiments. So the evidence for causality is now overwhelming. People have to stop saying, oh, it's just correlational. So when you say the evidence for a causality is overwhelming, break that down for us a little bit. Like what is your understanding of the mechanisms by which social media is harmful to children? Yes. So Arturo Behar, a whistleblower, brought out this survey that Meta did, the bad experiences and encounters framework. So meta itself, they've done tons of research. They collected, you know, what are kids saying? What's happening to them? What they found is,

let's see, they get very high rates of sexual harassment around 15 percent each week, each week. They have some person approaching you sexually. So they get a lot of that. Let's see, what else do they have here? They get bullying. They see violence. They see hardcore porn. Oh, the biggest, clearest one, I think, actually, is sex distortion.

That's the one that just stands out like a sore thumb. You know, kids, if you're on social media, you can get sex stored. If you're not, you can't, really. And the kids who get sex storted are deeply shamed. You know, they shared a picture of themselves, these teenage boys usually. And then their lives are ruined, and some of them commit suicide. So anyway, I'm just saying there's so many different mechanisms by which kids are getting harmed. And depression and anxiety is just that those are just two of the pathways.

So you're saying it's not any one thing. You're saying that the overall environment is so dangerous that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to use a social network like Instagram over an extended period of time and not have one or likely multiple of these harms hit you in some way. That answer somewhat surprises me because I feel like the usual answers we hear is like, Well, it's negative social comparison, right? Like, it seems like my friends are living a more exciting life than I am and now I'm upset. Or, like, the algorithm has driven me into a rabbit hole.

And, like, I started out a little curious about losing weight. And now I have an eating disorder. Yeah. So, like, how has your understanding of, like, the mechanisms of harm changed if it has at all since you wrote your book? Mm-hmm. Sure. So when I started the book, I thought that the story was going to be girls using social media, get depressed in part by social comparison. That's what everyone was talking about, you know,

five years ago. And that's definitely one of the mechanisms. And I didn't know what the story was for boys when I started. And by the end of the book, and especially since the book came out, what I realized is it's the whole goddamn environment. It's all the fish hooks dangled in front of boys. You want porn, gambling, vaping, sports betting, you know, even crypto investing is gamified. In this paper, you've tried to sort of decouple two questions. One of them is what you call the historical population question, basically like the sort of restatement of the thesis of the anxious generation, which is like an entire generation raised on social media is showing all these effects on their mental health from this technology. And the other is just the sort of product

safety question. Are these products as currently constituted safe for children and teens? What are you trying to do by sort decoupling these questions? I'll tell you how I read that. I read that as like, oh, hey, Haida's getting a little wobbly on one of the two prongs of his argument there, basically saying, you know, we may or may not be able to solve this historical population question, but when it comes to the question of product safety, we can answer that one now. So am I reading that correctly? Well, yes, you are, except I wouldn't use the word wobbly. So let me explain that. My interest in separating the two questions came about because there was this report issued by the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine in late

23, and the report comes out, and it has a chapter showing all these harms, all these ways that it's harming kids. But yet, in the summary of the report, there was this sentence. It says, our review, quote, did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level. So I read this, I'm like, what the hell, guys? You have a whole chapter showing how it's hurting kids. What does it mean the population level? And what I realized by reading further, what they mean is, we're in there. We're in a whole chapter. We're not confident that this is what caused those big increases after 2012. And okay, he's right. Because how do you prove something happened in history? It's very hard. You can't run experiments.

So I will grant that we can't be 100% certain that what I said in the anxious generation is right. Can't be 100% certain. I'd love to hear another hypothesis. But the historical question is very hard to settle. But that's not what people want to know. What parents want to know and what legislators want to know is, is this consumer which all kids are consuming massive quantities of, is this consumer product hurting kids? That's what they want to know. And guess what? We have seven different lines of evidence saying, yes, it's hurting kids. The kids say it, the teachers say it, the experiments say it, the correlate.

And meta, I mean, my God, the data they have on harm is astonishing. So that's why I think it's important to separate the two questions. In science and social science, we're very careful about causality. We have to be certain about causality before we say X caused Y. And so I can't say that I'm certain that social media caused the big increase in 2012, but I can say I'm 99.9% confident at this point that social media is hurting kids by the millions. You're understandably and I think appropriately very critical of the tech executives here. But I'd also note that parents gave kids these phones and schools allowed them and regulators did nothing for a decade. So if we're assigning blame for this situation, how much falls on everyone else involved?

I would say close to zero for this reason. The whole key to solving this problem, the reason we didn't solve it for so long, is that it's a series of collective action traps. And I'm a social psychologist. What we do for a living is we look at the ways that we influence each other. And there are certain situations where, you know, yeah, I don't want to give my 10-year-old a phone. But, you know, everyone else has one. She's being left out. So the phones and social media, all these things, they put us in a trap.

and so we feel we have to give in. And so since that's the situation, I can't blame the people. My rule is a social psychologist. If one person does something really bad, that might be a bad person. If everybody in a situation is doing something bad, that's guaranteed to be a bad situation. So, no, I don't plan. I mean, look, of course, parents should stand up in parents. But let, so many of us are trying, and it's really, really hard.

It's really, really, everybody's fighting all the time with their kids over this tech. We didn't ask for these fights. So I don't blame the parents. I don't blame the teachers. I blame the companies. John, your life has changed quite a bit since we last talk to you. Your career has shifted from just being sort of more of a pure research and public intellectual to really being an activist on this issue.

And I'm curious what that's been like for you and what you've learned about advocacy in this new role of yours. What actually seems to change people's minds who may be reluctant when they first encounter some of the ideas you're pushing? No, well, thank you for that. Yeah, it's true. my life has changed a lot. You know, I've been a scholar and a researcher for a very long time. And I've started multiple organizations that try to translate findings from behavioral sciences to help important institutions work better. That's kind of my mission statement as an academic. So I've done some of that throughout my career. And when the anxious generation came out in March of

2024, I thought I was going to promote it for a few months, take the summer off, recover, and then get back to work on the big book I'm supposed to write on democracy. But because this whole thing blew up. And because mothers around the world stood up and started saying, where do we sign up? Let's go. Let's change. We got to save our kids. So many people are coming to be saying, how can I help? What can we do? Legislators were calling me. Governors were calling me. Because here's the thing. If you're a parent, you've seen it. Everybody has seen the problem and nobody really knew what to do about it because it's a collective action trap. And so since the book proposed four norms to get out of the trap, no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone free schools, more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world.

propose these four norms and people are adopting them all around in other countries that I haven't even been to. So I realized I'm 62. God knows how many years I have left with a brain that's still functioning. You know, I can't count on more than 10. And so how am I going to spend those remaining good years? I could write another book on democracy, which would be out of date by the time it comes out because my God, things are changing fast. Or I could devote myself to pushing for phone free schools and raising the age. Yeah, I'm curious. I know you probably can't tell us about all of the, you know, private meetings you're having with lawmakers and heads of state and, you know, tech executives, but just give us the flavor of like one meeting with someone important or influential

as you've been schlepping all over, you know, hawking your book and talking about this message. Yeah, sure. So, you know, the surprise for me has been how easy this has been that everywhere I go on pushing on open doors because everyone who's a parent has seen it, it's very popular among voters. And so the, I think the best example of an answer to question is this. I did a quick trip to Paris, Amsterdam, and London back in April of last year. And I worked with more in common, a wonderful group that does all kinds of pro-democracy stuff. And they set up a dinner party for me to talk to members of French society and psychiatrists. It was really interesting. And one of the people there was in the French parliament. And he said, oh, you should talk to Macron.

Oh, you know, I'd love to, but, you know, I'm leaving two days. He said, I'll call him. And the next day, I get a call from Macron's office. Can you come in tomorrow? So I had a half-hour meeting with Macron in which I showed him the data because I was told in advance he loves data. You know, you can show him evidence. So I went through it with him. I said, look, here's what's happening. You know, here's what we know. And he thought about it.

And he said, as he was saying goodbye to me, he said, we will act. And he sure did. He's, you know, he's really been pushing. What he said to me then was, I'm going to push it. This should be an EU thing. And if we can't get it through the EU, then I'll do it in France. So that's just, I mean, that was the most spectacular. one. I was really surprised by that. But that's what I'm getting at, that everyone sees it.

Everyone cares about this. John, there's now this group of plaintiffs lawyers and law firms. I'm sure you know many of them and have worked with them before who go around the country who are looking for evidence of social media harms, especially against children. They bring these big lawsuits, these class action suits. They sue the tech companies. They try to get these huge settlements out of them. I'm curious what your thoughts on that system are. It's largely grown up since you published your book, and a lot of them cite your work as evidence that these companies should be held liable through the courts and should be forced to pay out huge settlements to the families of the victims here. Are you comfortable with that as sort of

a makeshift solution until regulators get their act together? Does that feel like an optimal way of addressing these harms? Well, I think it seems to be the only way that we have. Let's imagine that there was a new consumer product introduced, you know, some new toy or a new kind of candy bar with some new ingredient. And if we knew from internal reports from the companies that they deliberately designed it to be addictive, they put something addictive in it. And then a couple of years after introduction, 90% of kids are eating 10 candy bars a day and diabetes is going up. They're not eating healthy food. And we see rates rising around the world. At some point, there might be someone who says, maybe this is not a safe consumer product. Maybe this company should be held

liable for the harm. It's conflicting on literally hundreds of millions of kids, literally hundreds of millions, because social media is used by almost all kids. I mean, there are some countries where it's not, but in the medium to high-income countries, it's almost universal. This is, we all know someone who has a kid who's been hospitalized, eating disorder, suicide. We all know people. It is everywhere. And these companies have never faced a jury ever. ever, no one has succeeded in holding responsible what they did to their kids. So this is an outrage. And so these lawyers who are taking these cases, yeah, they're heroes. You know, there's this other dimension to it, too, Jonathan, which is that, you know, your book understandably focuses on the

crisis with children, but adults are very much living their own version of this, right? Like, I was having coffee with some friends at the New Year. Two of them are product managers in tech, and I asked them, yeah, you know, what do you want your 2026 to be about? And they said, I need to change my relationship with my phone. And they have implemented so many different tricks. They're putting it in black and white. They're setting screen time limits. They're leaving it in another room an hour before they go to bed.

Like the systems that people are having to devise just to try to reclaim their own time and attention are getting ever more sophisticated. And this is among the people who are building the things on the phones, right? So I'm curious how you think about sort of bringing some of these same arguments out of childhood and into adulthood. Because it seems to me like this goes. sort of well beyond what is happening to kids under 18. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And I think that's why we're winning. That's why it's so easy to get laws to protect kids all over the world, because we all see it. We adults, we're all overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed. I can't read a book anymore. There's too much other stuff coming in. I haven't focused on adults only because I don't

want to legislate for adults. I don't want to tell adults what to do. But damn it, I don't want the companies, you know, sucking my children into toxic spaces without my knowledge or permission. to speak a little bit about Australia this week, meta shut down about 550,000 accounts belonging to teens under this new Australian law that just went into effect banning social media for kids under 16. Jonathan, I'm so curious if you have a prediction about what is about to happen in Australia, because it seems like we have this great natural experiment now. What are you looking for? And how confident are you that Europe, view that if you just simply remove phones and social media from schools that kids mental health will improve? Well, removing phones from schools, we know, I will know soon. Removing the whole deal from schools seems to greatly improve attention, friendship, discipline problems go down. So on the phone-free schools, the data is pouring in. I've never heard of a school that was unhappy about it or that reversed it. So I'm sure we're going to see that learning improves, friendship improves,

fun in school improves, which means that truancy will go down. And I think that we'll have a measurable impact on mental health. That's in the schools. Now, what Australia did is even Boulder, which is they said, we're going to put it on the companies. We're going to say that you have to be 16 to open an account where you sign a contract to give away your data, your rights, without your parents' knowledge or permission. You can't do that until you're 16. At 16, you can do whatever you want. But before 16, you can't do that. And so here's the question. What percentage of Australia's kids will actually be off of social media? And we don't know. If the Australia bill is a at getting social media used down below, say, 20%.

Then I think we will see, over time, kids have to sort of remember how to do other things other than scroll. I think we will see benefits, especially if the Australians do the full program, which is, hey, go out and play. That's what the prime minister keeps saying. Go out on the footy field, he says.

So if we can succeed in restoring a play-based childhood, then we're going to see, I think, big benefits to mental health. And, like, how long should we let that natural experiment run? Like if five years from now, there's been no significant improvement in mental health among young people in Australia, would you conclude that this was a wrong hypothesis of yours, that we just didn't let it run for long enough? Like, when should we sort of judge the success or failure of this intervention? Yeah. First of all, tell me when we get to, say, 60 or 70% of kids actually being off. And so the effectiveness matters.

And this is a cat and mouse game, so the companies are going to have to up their game. So we'll see. But once we get to say 70% of kids are actually off, now we've broken the collective action trap. Now kids can be off. Now parents can say no more easily. And once we get there, I think within a year we're going to start seeing lots of reports of different behavior. Will that show up in the national statistics? Not for a couple of years.

It takes a couple years before it'll sort of show up in these big national surveys we have. But five years, if we don't see anything budge in five years, I would then have to conclude that I was wrong in thinking that reducing social media use would improve mental health. But here's the thing. This whole debate has been framed around mental health. And so if it doesn't improve mental health, does that mean we should undo it? I would say no. I would say, tell me how many kids have been sex started.

Tell me how many kids have died from drug overdose deaths. Let's look at all the other ancillary harms. And then we can decide whether it was a good policy. You know, Jonathan, overtime, I have to say I have become more sympathetic. to your point of view. Like, I started this debate very much coming from the viewpoint of free expression, wanting to let kids communicate themselves online, wanting them to be able to explore their interests, connect with people like them. Over time, I have just become more persuaded by the product safety argument. I have read the internal documents. I have talked to the

people who work at these companies. I do not believe that they care or are investing in protecting kids the way they should be. And to me, that argument is just sort of starting to carry the day. But I was having a conversation with my sister-in-law about the stuff over Thanksgiving. We were talking about some of these issues. And she let me know that she kind of took issue with a comment I'd made on a previous episode where I said, you know, the one argument that you never hear anybody making is that Instagram is really good for kids. Which I haven't heard it.

I haven't heard it. And you've heard it from some. And my sister-in-law made a version of this argument to me, which is that, you know, for my nephew, he has an Instagram account. He's 13. and he is able to explore his interests, which include gymnastics and cooking. And so when she looks at his own usage of Instagram, she says, this, like, basically seems okay to me. My question is, what avenues do you hope that children use to explore their interests in a world where we do just yank that away from them?

Yeah. So I think last time I was on, we talked about a related topic, and I said, you've got to separate the Internet from social media. Social media is a part of the Internet. It's one of the worst parts. It's the one that's hurting kids the most. But look, all of us on this call, we're all old enough to remember the 90s when we first got to look at the Internet. It was amazing. And, you know, if you're LGBTQ in rural areas, suddenly, like, you can find information.

You can find people. I mean, it was amazing the way it brought people together. So I would never take that away. I would never say kids shouldn't be on the Internet. So do they also need platforms that use algorithms to force feed them whatever content? was most upvoted by people based on the extremity of its emotions or expressions. Does your nephew benefit from having Instagram pick what he sees as opposed to having him type in what he's looking for? If you take away social media from kids, I don't see any loss.

Yeah, I'm curious, because like Casey, I am also pretty hype-pilled at this moment in time. I am pretty convinced of the arguments you're making. But I would say the one criticism I might have is, like, to me, it feels a little. bit like you are fighting the last war. Because when I go to schools, high schools now, and meet high school students, they tell me, like, we are talking with AI companions now. That is the thing that we are doing. And I have this sort of fear in the back of my mind that, like, you will succeed at getting social media banned for under 16s all over the world. And then it will be like, there's this new threat that we weren't even paying attention to. And we will pine for the days

when teens were using social media to at least, at least they were communicating with other people and not these like AI companions. So do you worry at all that you have sort of not kept pace with the state of the technology? No, this is a strategic move for this reason. AI is so new and it's morphing so fast. And in the research community,

it takes us 5, 10, 20 years to figure anything out. So we've been arguing about social media for a long time. I think we've got it. I think I'm going to win on this issue. Now, it's a normal academic debate. There are researchers who look at the data, and they see something different. But here's the way I'm thinking about it.

If we can't win on social media, if we can't get consensus that this is bad and that governments should do something, if we can't win on that, then just give up on AI. Just say it's a game over. Our kids are gone. We're never going to see them again.

The boys are going to have sexy chatbots their whole lives. They're never going to reproduce. So if we can't win on social media, then we definitely can't win on AI. And since we are winning on social media, and since governments around the world are waking up to the fact that they have an obligation to protect kids.

A lot of them have never done anything, especially our federal government, has never done a single thing, never, ever to protect kids on the internet. So governments are waking up. And so the faster we can win on social media and delaying phones and more play and phone-free schools, then we have a chance, a chance. At least we can try to make the case, just get it out of elementary school. Just don't let kids be talking with chatbots when they're little. Mm-hmm. Do you miss your obscure academic life at all? Does it bother you to be a public, intellectual, an advocate, a man of mystery, a man on a mission?

Yes, in that I'm working all the time now, and I really want to just take the summer off. I want to try reading books. I think if I read physical books, maybe I'll be able to finish one. But I have had a feeling of efficacy, a feeling that, you know, I've been working on this for a long time, and I feel like now I've been gifted the chance to actually make a difference in the world. And it's a kind of satisfaction beyond anything I've known in my life. So I do miss a lot, but I'm actually really. really energized and I'm actually pretty happy these days. That's great. You know, I'll tell you this story. When I was pitching my book early last year, I was going around to different publishers and you know you've made it when they, the only pitch they wanted was like the anxious generation,

but for AI. It was like, every publisher was like, I was like, no, it's not really what I'm working. It's going to be more of a history thing. And they're like, are you sure? Are you sure you don't want to write the anxious generation, but for AI? I was like, yes, I'm sure.

I'm pretty sure John's going to do that. But anyway, you have made a splash. And yeah, if you have any tips on selling a book, I'll use them this fall. Okay. I'd be happy to read your book if you want someone to read a copy. Please. Because I am moving. That's my next question.

But you just told me you can't read a book anymore. So, you know, I don't trust you. Next summer, I'll try to read, send it to me electronically. And I'll then I'll feed it into chat GPT and it'll give me a chapter of a chapter summary. Good, good. That's great. That's what I'm going for. Change charts at home

I have to say It's actually very comforting to me That even Jonathan Hyde is having Chat Chippy T read books for him Because obviously I do that as well But I feel bad about it But I would feel bad This is the thing

No one has read a book since 2021 And they're just lying about it People are reading one kind of book Which is Romantasy So if I ever wrote like a social science treatise I would try to put it in a world Where like dark fairies We're having sex with each other

Have you thought about that John? Something to consider Actually actually that is actually the way we open up our children's book. Okay, it's not sex, but it is. It actually is. It actually does open, it does open with a story about dark fairies. Look at that.

Okay. By the way, I love the pandering of the adults. It's the anxious generation. But when you want to talk directly to the kids, all of a sudden, they're amazing. Yeah, for the kids better hold out some hope. That's true. That's true. Yeah.

All right, John. Thanks so much. All right, guys. Thanks so much for having me back. Take care. When we come back, is close. Claude, a new chat GPT moment. We'll talk about what you all have been vibe coding,

including a website, her door handles. How are we going to handle that? Well, Casey, it's been another big week for Claude and Claude which I think seems to be having kind of a chat GPT moment. You know, I texted you earlier this week, and I said, is it crazy to say that Claude feels like the most important thing that has happened in AI since ChatGPT? I realize that may sound crazy to some of our listeners,

but I feel like we can make the case. I think so, too. I think this is a big, big moment, especially for people who are sort of code-inclined or code-curious. We've continued to see many, many posts on social media about people's experiments with cloud code. It seems like it is actually creating something

of an infrastructure crisis for Anthropic, which is also something that happened to OpenAI during their original chat GPT moment. They just, like, could not keep up with the demand and the site kept going down. But I would say, like, the larger thing that has been going on is that non-coders are starting to experiment with this tool.

Anthropic also released a version of Cloud Code for non-coders this week called Co-work, which sort of sits in the Cloud Desktop app and allows you to sort of attempt various tasks using the same sort of agent-like framework that Cloud Code uses, but in a way that's slightly less intimidating than opening up a terminal app. Yeah, and if you think about what the Chat-GPT moment was, it was a time when millions and millions of people realized simultaneously that you can, and ask questions and get pretty good answers, and you can generate text for many useful purposes.

The Claude Code moment, I feel like, is the next evolution where people are saying, I can now build something that is useful to me, even though I don't really know what I'm doing. And whereas maybe six months ago, the results I would have gotten were pretty bad or would have required a lot of technical know-how, I can now come in and I can type in a box

and I can get basically exactly what I want. And that is actually huge. It's huge. And I had a version of that experience myself too in the past week because the Read It Later app that I built Stash. We talked about my vibe coding experiment last week. I got so many responses from people who are saying, hey, can I use this thing? Are you going to distribute this and put it in the app store that I just decided, you know what? I'm going to do it. I'm going to release Stash to the world. And so I had Claude Code go in and like prepare a version of this for the public, build me a little

landing page. You can now download it and try it for yourself at Kevin Ruth.com. Stash, and it is working better than I ever expected, and it remains sort of incredible to me that I did all of this as me, an idiot who does not know how to code. I was able to, in a matter of hours, build and release a working software product. You know, first of all, congratulations for the launch of Stash. People have been really excited about this. My absolute favorite was you posted about this on X, and somebody responded, will it parse my X bookmark graveyard? And you responded, I have honestly no idea what it will do. And I laughed so hard when I wrote that.

I thought, finally an honest software developer who just admits that we don't know how any of this stuff works. I have no idea how any of this works. I have no idea if it works. It works for me. But I am very delighted that I was just able to sort of vibe launch this software product into the world with like honestly not that much work. It was not that hard.

I did not use any special prompting tricks. I'm not even that good at using cloud code. and yet I was able to conduct an active software engineering that now other people are downloading and using for themselves. I did have one incident that I want to tell you about, which is that I accidentally had what I believe is my first AI security breach, which was that when I launched the version of this public stash app that I was open sourcing, it did inadvertently reveal my credentials on several of the sites that I used. So I had to go back to Cloud and be like, hey, could you scrub my personal information out of there? I didn't know you had any credentials to do what you do.

But, you know, we wanted to talk about a few different things with Claude this week. And we want to begin with listener responses because last week we asked you, hey, what are you building? And we were absolutely delighted with the response. We have gotten so many messages from you all over the past few days to our email, of course, but also in the Forkiverse, the Fedaverse server that we set up that we're going to be talking about a little bit later in the show.

But we just wanted to highlight a few of our. our favorites because I think they speak to the breadth of what people are able to build and also how little experience folks had before they started trying these things. Yes, and I think this is like more than just a kind of show and tell segment because for me, like there is something different about trying to do this stuff yourself versus just listening to us talk about on our podcast. I really think that our listeners who listened to our episode last week and then went out and tried to vibe code things for themselves, were a lot of them shocked by how easy it was,

by how good the results were. And I think it, you know, for you, I was joking with you over text this week, that it seemed like you were feeling the AGI in a way that maybe you hadn't before. So I think for our listeners, maybe this past week has been an experience of starting to feel that,

feel the progress, feel the capabilities improving, feel that things that were impossible even a few months ago are now becoming possible. Absolutely. as we get in to what we heard from listeners, it is important that I make the following disclosure. My boyfriend works at Anthropic, and I would go a step further and say, if you are feeling like this is edging into Schill territory, I really do think you could probably do a lot of similar things

with Codex, which is OpenAI sort of Claude Code equivalent. I'm told Google has one as well, but due to the ongoing disaster of Google Marketing, I truly cannot remember what it's called. Maybe you could Google it. It's called Intagravity. Perfect. So maybe try that. The point is, these tools, are now available and they're really good, and we want to get into it and talk about what you all are building. And that's a good chance to make my disclosure too, which is that I work for the New York Times, which is suing Open AI, Microsoft, and perplexity over alleged copyright violations related to the training of AI models. Okay, so first up, we got some great examples from our listeners

of websites that they have been building. We talked on the show last week about how we had each redesigned our own websites using these tools. One of those came from our listener, Gina, who had never vibe-coded before, but after last week's episode, told us that she had gone out and designed her own website. She says it took her about two and a half to three hours, and I'm going to look at it right now.

Looks great, Gina. It's got some nice animations. She even told us that it has an Easter egg on it. If you hit Control M, it pulls up what looks like a MySpace profile from the 90s. Very cool. Congrats on your new website, Gina. Yeah.

Super, super fun. Love the Easter egg there. You know, another website that we got came in from Sarah Haggard. She built a book site for book recommendations. It turns out that over the winter break, she wanted to catalog her book so that she could give her husband a list of books she already has read so that he doesn't accidentally buy her a duplicate. And she was able to do that, but then went a lot further. And now has a website where you, the listener, can go on to Sarah's books,

com, S-A-R-A-H-S-Books.com. And she will make a book recommendation, depending on what your mood you're in, if you want a beach read, if you want a story about women's empowerment, many other categories in there. You can create your own account. It is a full-featured web app,

and I guess after she put it up, she got in touch with the founder of Goodreads, and now they're going to get together and have a fun conversation. So this is someone else who does not have a lot of technical experience, built something to scratch, her own itch, and it is super cool.

And I'll just say, there's something very romantic about vibe coding for your partner. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of alpha there. Absolutely. Go to your partner today and say, what would you like me to build you, sweetheart, and then just see if you can whip it up. All right, one more website.

We heard from a listener who turned his family's Christmas letter into an 80s text adventure inspired by the video game, Zork. This is from listener David Phillips. He asked us not to read out the name of the website since it's got information about his kids on it. But I'm looking at it right now. It looks very cool, very good idea for the annual holiday letter. It's got like green text on a black screen. It's like very much conjuring like an 80s like CRT monitor.

And a really fun detail that he puts on the website is that his stepfather actually worked on the original Zork game. And so this is actually kind of like a family tribute as much as. as it is a vibe coding project, and I just, I love that aspect of it. Yes. We also heard from several small business owners who told us that Claude Code and other agentic coding tools were allowing them to build tools that they otherwise would have had to pay a lot of money to someone else to build for them. My favor of these was from Joe.

He is a welder, great AI-proof job of the future, by the way. And he said that he has no experience programming, but over the past few months, Joe told us that he has been teaching himself to build tools for his business. He said, quote, I built an MCP server that has turned my Claude chat window into a personal assistant. He said it's able to track jobs, help him create estimates,

organize PDFs and contracts. He said he's even connected Claude to the 3D modeling program that he uses, which has helped him build complex programs for CNC, which is sort of the computerized cutting and etching technology that many builders use. He says he's used, Claude to make agents to search for potential work in his area and write a weekly lead generator

for him. So I just thought this was a really interesting example of what might seem like a low technology business, but that is actually able to go out there and build some software that helps him get some more business. Yeah. And he added his email in a way that really affected me. He said, I really want people in my demographic to understand that this isn't I asked Chat TB to write an email or can you generate an image that has the correct spelling. This is to me, I built my own business infrastructure from scratch with an AI pair programmer despite having zero formal training and a high school education. Totally.

Pretty cool. Another example we got was from Fay Bell, a listener who runs her own business selling wallpaper to interior designers. She told us about a special tool that she has been creating called the wallpaper calculator, which we can look at over here. It is at her website. And this is a tool that basically allows a potential client, an interior designer maybe to calculate exactly how much wallpaper they need to cover a particular wall.

This tool, she said, also generates a layout diagram so that clients can sort of visualize what the wallpaper will look like in their space. She said this is something that she's always been doing by hand in tools like Photoshop or in design, but now the clients could just do it themselves and save themselves the time. Yeah, and Faye wanted to let us know that she had no previous coding experience, and she loves that she can do this without having to like pay any like hosting costs. Like she doesn't have to like buy this software from some third party provider. Those can be really expensive services and she just did it for her damn self.

Yes. One more that caught our attention came from a dad who made a web app to track a hilariously specific chore he had asked his kids to complete. Simon wrote that it was the week before Christmas and his wife and he decided that their kitchen needed a tune up. So they ordered new handles for the doors and drawers. in their kitchen, and it was 70 handles in all. And to motivate their children to help them with this project, Kevin, they offered the kids a dollar per handle changed. And he had noticed that in the past,

they had quickly lost interest, believe it or not, when given the handle replacement task. So this time he spun up a web app to log their efforts. And we pulled up this web app. And the first thing it tells you when you open it is that the project is now complete. And all 70 handles were replaced. So this was a success. But basically there's a leaderboard for his four children.

You can see who made the most money. They were able to cash out their winnings via Apple Cash to the bank or via chocolates, which I love. And it was Ben who came in number one with 44 handles replaced. Vic came in at zero. So I guess Vic was holding out for a higher wage to get involved in the knob replacement business. But just again, this is so like wacky. And was this necessary? Absolutely not. But what I love about this project is it speaks to a theme that I felt in so many of the things that listeners sent us, which is the joy of creation. It is fun to make things. It is fun to have a dream and to be able to quickly realize it. And so, yeah, I just love this one. What excites me is less the products themselves. It is that people, I think, are starting to understand the pace and trajectory of AI progress through using these tools. A year ago, you could,

could not type into a box, make me a website for my family's handle replacement project, or make me a tool for my small business that allows people to estimate the wallpaper needs of their project. And now you can. And I think unless you have really spent time, even a couple minutes, using one of these tools, you really do not understand the state of the art. And so I think a lot of people, unfortunately, are in the same position that we were in back when chat GPT came out in 2022, which is like they are opining on a technology that they do not actually understand because they have not experienced it for themselves. And so for the listeners out there who are listening to this and saying, okay, well, these projects sound great,

but what does this have to do with me or my life? I would just say there is no better way right now in 2026 to get a handle on what the frontier of AI progress looks like than to come up with a project, no matter how silly or trivial seeming, give it to one of these AI coding agents and watch what it does. I agree with that. You know, what I would say, Kevin, is to me, this stuff is the flip side of slop. This is anti-slop, right? If slop is about a world where every surface online seems like it's being taken over by these digital creations that you didn't ask for that you find confusing, they blur the line between reality and fiction, and they just sort of make you feel hypnotized and gross, this is the reverse of that. This is real people saying, I have a need in my life, and I'm going to go make it with my own hands. And we've always talked about AI as a dual-use technology. We do spend a lot of time on the show talking about its many downsides, which are huge and real and scary. But there is also upside here, which is at least in this moment, this can be an empowering tool.

And so to me, I think one reason why I was so delighted to see all these listener responses was they spoke to the way that technology tools can still empower us. Yes. And it also gave me an experience that I had not had before, which is that I now understand how annoying it is to build and release software products in the world, only to have users tell you everything that is wrong with them. Like five minutes after I made my Stash app public and put it up on GitHub so that people could download it and use it themselves, I started getting feature requests. It was like, are you not impressed by the app that I have made and released

to you for free? Already, I understand in a more visceral and embodied way the pain of our listeners who are product managers at big tech companies. Yes, but you also now just have a perfect thing you can say back to them, which is just fork it and make the version yourself, right? Go vibe code your own feature. Take it up with Claude. Yeah. So, Casey, when you were texting me and talking about how amazed and impressed you were by this technology

and how this felt like a chat, GPT moment, what has been the most surprising thing for you since our segment last week about your experience with these tools? Well, I just keep having new ideas for stuff to build. Like, I assume that I would run out after coming up with one or two things, but every time I have an idea and I could just make it, it just gives me the confidence to go out and build like three or four new things. So I'm moving away from thinking like, this is a fun little like proof of concept demo

and thinking of it more as like, this is just a tool that I have now. And if I have some sort of like itch when it comes to software, my default assumption now is I can probably quickly build some version of it. Yeah, I'm finding that I'm having to sort of retrain myself or we rewire my brain a little bit because my impulse, when I like encounter something annoying or a problem that I'm having, in my life is not to like go build a piece of software to address that. It's just like not part of

how I live my life. But now I'm finding that like more and more times a day, like that sort of bell is going off in my head. They're like, oh, I could probably build something or Claude could probably build something to help me with this. So we are actually going to be doing a demo of how we vibe code with Claude code. We're going to be doing that on our YouTube channel. You'll be able to see that next week. But if you are someone who has been maybe curious about this, maybe we've piqued your curiosity a little bit, but you're still a little bit intimidated by it. Hopefully that will give you the tools you need to get started. When we come back, we're forking around in the fork of us with our friend PJ Vote, our co-founder, PJ Vote. Get it right. Well, Casey, listeners to

the Hard Fork podcast will know that we released an extra episode this week detailing our experiment with PJ Vote of the great search engine podcast. And the new social network that we started, the Fork averse. That's right. The Forkiverse has been up and running for just about a week now, as you will hear this podcast episode. And I have to say, Kevin, the response has been overwhelming. Truly wild. One of the wildest things I've ever experienced in my career. When you had this idea to run this experiment, the maximum amount of people that you can imagine wanting to join with us in this federated server that we set up was about 2,000 people. And today we can report here on the hard fork show that more than 4,000 souls have now joined us within the Forkiverse, threatening to overwhelm

and perhaps destroy it. Yes. And we've already had our first content moderation scandal, some of our first technical hiccups. We were sort of speed running the life of a social media company in the year 2026. And so today we wanted to give some updates on how the Fork ofverse is going. So we've invited back our third co-founder with us, PJ Vote, from Search Engine, is here virtually. Thank you for having I've been called a lot of things, but never found her. How does it feel? Honestly, I'm surprised at how much I'm already learning about the Internet by being a person who cares about even maintaining a very small community on it.

I've only ever been a community member, not a community architect. It's strange. It's very strange. So let's talk about the flavor of the Forkaverse so far. You know, it can be, I think, a mistake to start any kind of social. product and not give people an idea of what to do. And I think one of the smart things that PJ did as we were setting up the Forkiverse was to give people a prompt. He said, hey, something you could do if you want is just post a picture of where you're listening to this podcast episode from.

And so when I logged on to the Forkiverse, a lot of what I saw was just people posting really fun photos. And I think it contributed to this sense of, hey, we are not here to be super serious. We are not here to solve the great issues of the world. We just kind of want to hang out and meet each other. And so I have actually been delighted at the flavor of the Forkiverse because it really has seemed like a bunch of people who like the same podcast coming together and saying hello to each other. Yes.

And I think because PJ you posted your version of the episode a couple days before we did, at first the people who were trickling in were mostly like search engine fans. So I got to observe some things about your audience, which is that many of your listeners live these like bucala. lives on farms in British Columbia where they're just like listening to podcasts while they work in their like woodworking studios. Your listeners really seem to be having a good time out there. I learned the same thing about my listeners. It was so cool. The amount of people who are like, I'm in a cabin somewhere far away working in my ceramics. And I was like, oh, it's so cool. I had no

idea. And it solved for me one of the things that I don't like about podcasting, which is that it's so one way. I don't know. I'm someone who's sometimes suspicious of online community that it actually can feel like community. And I will say that in week one of the fork verse, meeting both search engine listeners and hard fork listeners, to me it does feel like community. It feels like a bunch of strangers politely, friendly, jokily, kind of just being like, here's who I am. Here's who I am. I've really liked it. I noticed over the past week that people were using it to talk to Kevin and I about the most recent episode of the show. We heard a lot about people's vibes. codeing projects, which is something we had talked about in last week's episode. And so that was something

else that was fun for me was when I got to visit the site. I just got to see a lot of people saying, hey, check out this website that I made. And it was really nice. Yeah. I think for a lot of people, like those sort of prompts or at least like sort of collective topics that can serve the function that like alcohol serves at a party, which is just kind of like the social lubricant that like makes everyone more likely to hang out and have a good time. So we should do more of that. Yeah. So that's kind the fun stuff. Let's talk about the tedious sweaty behind the scenes work that goes into making the Fediverse possible. So Kevin, in the first few days of people joining the network, you were getting a notification every single time somebody requested to join. Have you figured out

how to turn that off? No, I still get them, but now I've just filtered them out of my inbox because they were arriving at a rate of like several per minute. And I was just like, you know, One thing that I like about the Forkiverse and the way that it was sort of set up, I cannot claim any credit for this because this is just part of the hosting service that we use, but it makes people write a little blurb about why they want to join. And so it was actually kind of delightful to have those blurbs. I accepted every single request, even when they didn't write anything in that box, but I did like it when they did.

Well, give us some flavor of what sort of things were people saying? Why did they say they wanted to join the Forkerverse? And how disappointed do you think they've been with what they found waiting there? So some people just said, you know, I'm a fan of the show, and I heard about it on the podcast, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A lot of people were expressing how burnt out and exhausted they were by other social media experiences. A sort of typical comment that I got just 11 minutes ago, someone said, just wanted to thank you for this platform because I'm one day in and already having a civil discussion about Gen.

art, whereas on Reddit, Blue Sky, and even Hacker News, I would probably be immediately shouted down. So it does seem like people are grateful for just a new place to type that has a slightly different vibe to it. Yeah. As you say, Kevin, we have had just, you know,

many hundreds, probably thousands of people logging on to have a good time. But the server is federated, which means that people can interact with us, even if they have not joined the Forkiverse, right? People can follow us in the Fork, like I'm Casey at theforcercercercom. If you have an count on Mastodon or some other, you know, spot in the Fediverse, you can just follow me.

And so we can hear from other people. And I would say that that has resulted in some content moderation issues. I was just surprised how quickly, like, the bad guys showed up. I was looking at the moderation reports. I think I took a screenshot of this one. There's a user who showed up from another server. This person wasn't a Fork aversion, but they were causing trouble here, who sent the following messages in quick succession, all to accounts that seem like they are held by women. Hello, how are you doing today? Hello, my beautiful lady.

How are you doing today? Hello, my beautiful lady. How are you doing? Hello, my beautiful lady. How are you doing? And it nice meeting you on here? Wow. So somebody who really kind of wanted to connect

and meet new people in the Fed was. A real sort of Don Juan. He was bothering users. There was also like a virulently racist person. He was using all of the slurs right away. And I was just like, how did you find us? Like, we're a community for sweet people. Yeah, it is amazing.

I got, I received the reports as well, and I saw one. And I thought, yeah, I have a moment. Let me see if I can take care of this. And it was somebody who had used just one slur. But I'd say it was one of the bad ones. So I had to block them. But I had sort of like the same reaction that you did, PJ, which is like, truly, why would you spend any time on this?

is like the idea that you would use part of your one wild and precious life to come to the Forkiverse and say these things to our users? Like, what's going on with you? Now, I am curious whether either of you felt the sort of power of the so-called ban hammer. Like, did, do you feel like you became drunk with authority banning these users with no, no process for appeals? Honestly, yes. Like, I think there are certain places where you want to have a very, like, rigid principles-based content moderation system, like most of the big platforms that we would use, I would say, you know, Instagram, TikTok,

Reddit, you want them to have those kinds of systems. When it comes to, like, a fun experiment that some friends put together to see what would happen, I feel no attachment to that idea whatsoever. So it's like, if I don't like the vibe of your post and it bothered somebody else, like by default, you are just going to be gone and there are not going to be appeals.

Is that bad? I mean, I agree with you, so I don't think it's bad. Like, I just feel like this clubhouse is small enough that we can be arbitrary, as long as we're arbitrarily following some non-arbitrary rules. I had a moment where someone showed up from another instance, like another part of the Fediverse, a different Mastodon server. Do I have the technical nomenclature right? Yeah. Yeah, sure. And they were like, they were like, no one should go to the fork of verse because PJ is problematic.

He's bad. This isn't even real Federer, whatever. And it was a real moment where I was like, oh, my God, this person's not being very nice to me. I could ban them from the entire internet we've created. And I was proud. All I did was block them from my account. I was like, you know what? There's nothing in the rules that says that you can't be mean to me.

You can be mean to me. But I felt the little whisper of the demon that has driven Elon Musk into like planets unknown. Well, that's very principled of you to not ban him. I don't know that I would have been so kind. Now, listen, we've been avoiding the elephant in the room for too long. Kevin, tell us about the Russian disinformation campaign that the Forcaverse has been a part of. Yes. Our one-week-old social network has already become entangled with a Russian disinformation campaign.

This was an email I got from the Fediverse Trust and Safety Team, which is sort of a group of people who sort of oversee trust and safety in a decentralized way for the entire Fediverse, not just our server. They're doing the Lord's work over there. They truly are. And the executive director of IfTAS, whose name is Jazz, wanted to alert us to the fact that the Forcaverse is what's called an open registration service, one where anyone can sign up and register. And they said that open registration services, especially on the Fedever's, are being targeted by a pro-Russia propaganda network that they are calling, and this is the most delightful part, portal combat. Portal combat? Yes. Portal combat. So this is what they have called a Russian network that is creating hundreds of accounts on servers, including Blue Sky and Mastodon. And according to IFTAS and the French government, this network's main aim seems to be to get onto these open registration platforms and to start spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine, along with criticism of Western governments.

They were just kind of flagging this to us as a courtesy because our Mastodon server was growing very quickly, and they just wanted to say, hey, just FYI, this is happening to a bunch of other servers. But have you guys noticed, in your moderation, any posts or users that seem suspiciously pro-Kremlin? So I haven't, but like I don't follow all 4,000 people in the Forkiverse. And this is a challenge of running a big server like this, is that you typically are, are not seeing even a fraction of the content that is on the server. You're relying on user reports. And so unless a bunch of users said,

hey, we're seeing a bunch of like suspiciously pro-Russian propaganda in our feeds, we might be unaware of a problem like this. So that's a legitimate problem. I have a question for you guys. Yeah, yeah, let's hear it. I'm just curious, like, to me, the place where this has exceeded my, I guess, modest expectations,

is it is just a website that I'm surprised to find how much I'm enjoying checking, which I honestly did not. think we would clear that bar. I'm curious if it clears that bar for you guys, like if you're just as a user liking it. It has, and for this reason. So I spend most of my time on social networks these days on blue sky and threads. Blue sky is a very politics dominant network. So whatever the political story of the day is there, it feels like everyone I follow only wants to talk about that. And that's despite the fact that I've sought out people who are mostly posting about tech news. Threads, which some people call the gas leak social network,

is a series of completely disconnected posts from people who, you know, they just lost their husband, or they put on a dress for the first time in 30 years and wanted to take a picture of it, and then occasionally post from TechCrunch. I happen to enjoy the insanity of threads, but I can't always say I know what to do when I show up there.

When I go to the Forkiverse, I truly feel like I'm just interacting with people who like podcasts, And so I feel freer to just share like silly little jokes that might not feel welcome in some of the other places I'm online. You know, so the other day, I think it was this weekend and I was taking a look at how many people had signed up. And so I posted, Good Morning the Fargerverse. Another 200 people or so joined us overnight. And now the fire marshal is here.

He's doing a sexy little dance. Wait a minute. Does this guy even work at the fire department? And here's my point. I couldn't have posted that on Blue Sky. No one would have even understood what that meant. But it felt really good to post in the Forkiverse. I love that we've progressed to the phase where our podcast is just us reading a series of Forcaverse posts out loud.

I got news for you. Most content is just people reading the equivalent of tweets. Yeah. PJ, did you post anything on the Forkiverse this week that you're especially proud of? Oh, you posted the dress? I posted the dress. I'm trying to choose engagement. So I posted the viral dress from what was it, 2014, that was either blue and black or white and gold.

And I pretended like I just discovered it and I asked people to tell me what color it was. Wow. So you, I thought I was going to be our resident growth goblin. But it turns out that you are actually our growth goblin. Oh, absolutely. It turns out like I want, I also got in trouble because I had a post where I said, make this go viral, which I was like kind of joking. But then people were jokingly boosting it. And a Fedaversian showed up to tell me that the point of the Fediverse is not virality and it's not attention.

And if I'm trying to go viral, I'm misunderstanding the entire reason for being in the place right now myself. And honestly, it was fun to be scolded. That brings us to an important part of the conversation today, which is people who have been on the Fediverse for a long time who have opinions about how we should be doing the Fedverse. So I got us embroiled in a bit of a controversy over the past day because one of these folks who's been in the Fediverse for a long time sent a post to me that I didn't appreciate that was basically saying, you know, you guys are being very irresponsible with the server. You have now brought on 4,000 people onto the Fediverse, but you have said that you are just basically doing this as an experiment. And someday, you know, there might not be funding for the Forkiverse. and it might go away. And these 4,000 people

are going to be left high and dry. And so you need to lay out your plan to fund the fork averse until the heat death of the universe or shame on you was like basically the vibe that I was getting. And I'm reading this and I'm losing my mind.

I'm saying, the thing is four days old. Also, do you know what's really easy to do? Create a new freaking account on the Fedaverse. It'll take you five minutes. Like, worst case scenario is really not that bad. Yeah.

Now, I'm sure some people are going to wonder. You know, we just spoke to Jonathan Haidt about the dangers of social media. Now, here we are promoting, you know, this social media platform for other people to use. So I guess Kevin, PJ, like, what is our feeling if you are 16 and younger, should you be allowed to access the Forkiverse? No. And in fact, when we were setting up the server, there was a thing in there that says, what is the minimum age for people on your server? And I set it to 18 because I'm a responsible person. Now, am I doing anything to verify that?

Absolutely not. Have we installed any of these like Australian-style sort of AI-powered age determination tools? No, I have not. We are working on the honor system. But if I see you posting about your Lubbuboos and your Minecraft server and your middle school math homework, I'm kicking you off, Jr. So you heard it here first. You do not access the Fork averse if you're under 18. Do not access it from school.

Do your homework. Listen to your parents. Yeah. No phones till you're 30. No phones here 30. You already here first. You have to have a 401K before you can have a phone. If you don't have lower back pain when you wake up in the morning,

stay the hell off the fork of verse. All right. So let's move right along here. We've had our first content moderation scandal. There's, of course, the Russian influence campaign. And the dress is generating a lot of discourse. I think the question now is like, what next fellas? Like we accidentally got 4,000 people in a room.

What do we want to do with them? You can tell they've thought a lot about it from the Blake expression on their faces. I really hope you're watching this on YouTube just so that you can see the dull stare. I was waiting for PJ to respond. PJ's our chief... PJ's our growth goblin.

PJ, what next? Okay, so I'm looking for... Are you guys familiar with the concept of a scissor statement? Yes, sort of a statement and that sort of like neatly separates one group from another. Yeah, yeah. It's like it's a divisive piece of content that immediately everyone has to take aside.

There's obviously we live in a country that's constantly producing things that are like, sister statements. What I am looking for this week, myself personally, are things like the dress, like benign is a hot dog a sandwich, like almost like corny millennial era. I'm just trying to generate conversation that people, want to participate in that goes beyond, hey, I'm here, who are you? Like, I'm trying to get people in discussion, but not discussion about, like, the vast

and intractable problems of the Republic. Like, I'm just trying to get past small talk to fun talk. I think we should do a thing that's sort of like, search engine listeners are like this and hard fork listeners are like that, you know? You think we need beef between the shows? I don't even know if it has to be a beef. It just has to be like stereotypes about the listeners. You know, it's like what kind of clothes do they wear

and what kind of cars do they drive and that sort of thing. Yeah, I like that. Well, we've already learned that search engine listeners categorically live in the woods and on farms, whereas I think the hard-ford listeners have a little bit more of an urban flavor to them. Part of the laptop class. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Here's a question. Have we achieved our goals with the Fediverse, or is there another goal yet to reach? I want more growth. I want this to become a place that is beyond just, like, I think we've already succeeded past goal one, which is like it exists, people enjoy it. I enjoy going there.

You guys enjoy going there. I think goal two is like, can this be more than a public community board for two podcasts, even if it just means a public community board for three podcasts? Yeah. We would take the Joe Rogan show listeners if they want to sign up. I want to hear about their meat smoking tips.

I want to hear about how they're a bow-hunting elk. I want to know their peptide stack. Yeah, what are you injecting if you're listening to that show? Well, speaking of that, you know, one of the most frequent questions that we get over on the for-covers is about how many people can fit in the server before it explodes. We had originally told them we think there can only be 2,000. There are now 4,000.

What is our answer to that question? So I dug into this a little bit because as the site was growing, as we saw, sort of saw the dashboards keep ticking up as it looked like we were approaching our limits. I reached out to Hugo, the very nice man, who runs the Masto host hosting platform that the Forcaverse uses. And I sort of said, hey, it looks like we're growing faster than we anticipated. Are we going to have to, like, upgrade our plan soon? He basically said, no, it's not like a hard cap, but like if you exceed that, you know, number of active users for, you know, some sustained period of time, like we will have to talk about upgrading your plan.

So we are not yet at the point of having to shell out for an even bigger bespoke plan. And I will say our users on the Forkaverse are being very nice and courteous. Some of them heard what we said about the maximum files upload sort of storage size that we have. And they have been uploading very grainy, low-resolution photos. This is my favorite norm in the Fediverse

is people uploading downscaled black and white images to try to help us stay under our storage cap. Like, truly, every single person who has done that, you are a hero of the Forkiverse. That's true. Yeah. So can I, like, offer maybe a little bit of a downer note on what has otherwise been a very exciting week for the Forkiverse,

which is that all of this growth scares me. Really? Like, I see people showing up to this website having a great time, and I just think we are going to invariably let these people down. Like, I do not want people entrusting, any part of their daily fulfillment and routine to our little stupid hobby project because we are not like devoting our entire lives to this

and I just worry that somebody somewhere is going to be let down or hurt because of something that we have done or more likely failed to do. I think that's a fair point. I would also say, Kevin, you and I have now been letting people down for over three years on this podcast. They're used to it. Here's what I'll say. If you are running a small business and you're thinking,

about like maybe putting your fork of verse handle on a business card or maybe painting it onto the shop window, maybe give it a year, see if it's still around. You know, don't rush into anything. This absolutely is an experiment. Things could go wrong. I think we can commit that like if we decide to wind it down, we will have some kind of awkward. Like, we will explain to you how you can transfer your account onto another server. You know, we will try to be responsible in that regard. But like, I personally am like, if this is like a fun throwaway thing that I do for a year and then never look back, maybe that was just a good use of my time online. Yeah. I mean, it does make me feel a little bit of sympathy for the sort of social media barons that we have

covered and talked to over the years who I think live in fear of their most active and invested users sort of revolting against them. We've seen this with YouTube. We've seen this with Instagram. We see this like many communities grow so large and so fundamental to people's lives and businesses that any time they make like a little change, even if it's like a couple pixels here, a couple pixels there, like sets off this cascading chain reaction of failures for like everyone who depends on this as vital infrastructure. And so like for the moment, I am glad that we are not vital infrastructure for anyone. And I'm a little nervous if we ever start to edge in that direction for anyone, even if it's as simple as this is a place I like to go every day while I

have my coffee in British Columbia. Do you worry that visiting the Forkiverse lot could radicalize teenagers into listening to podcasts? God, I hope so. All right. Well, we will have further updates on the Forcaverse as events continue to transpire. But PJ, I want to thank you so much for helping us put this project together, for making such a great episode about it. If you haven't listened to it yet, go listen to the search engine episode that they did. can actually find a version of it right here in our feed. But yeah, we will be back at you

at some point in the future. Once the Russians successfully conquer the fork ofers, you'll hear about it here. You will hear about it here. More thing before we go for any of our L.A. listeners, we wanted to let you know that on Tuesday, January 20th, Times opinion, is holding a live event on the first year of Trump's second term. The editor of New York Times opinion, Katie Kingsbury, and columnist Jamel Bowie and Ross Douthit will be taking stock of the administration's biggest actions and what it all means for the country and the world as we know it.

So we'll be including a link to the event in the show notes. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Viren Pavik. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love and Will Pyshal. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurran. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant, original music by Leah Shaw-Damron, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell.

Video production by Soya Roque, Rebecca Blandin, Jake Nichol, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at YouTube.com slash Hartfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Puiwing, Tam, and Dahlia Hadad. You can email us at HeartFork at NYTimes.com with what you've been seen in the forecomers.