Search Engine - Vladimir Putin's Forkiverse

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Nine months ago, three podcasters attempted to build a better internet. Today -- they confront foreign adversaries on a digital battlefield.Watch the Machine Gods trailer.Instructions for moving your ...Forkiverse account to a different server.Become a premium member!

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Mooby. If you're tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming algorithms designed for passive background noise, you need to check out Mooby. Mooby is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world, curating and elevating visionary filmmaking that's hand-picked always. It's the kind of platform for movies you'll actually watch, fall in love with, and keep thinking and talking about long after the credits roll. One of their newest exclusive titles is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Myasma.
Starting point is 00:00:30 directed by visionary writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, who you might know from, I Saw the TV Glow. It's a world-expanding, genre-bending wonder starring Hannah Eindler and Gillian Anderson. This story follows a young director trying to resurrect the faded Camp Myasma slasher franchise, but when she visits the original reclusive star, they spiral into this blood-soaked world of desire,
Starting point is 00:00:53 fear, and sheer delirium. If you can try movie-free for 30 days at movie.com slash search engine, That's M-U-B-I-com slash search engine for a whole month of great cinema for free. Hello, fellow moguls. What's up, legend? What's the opposite of moguls? I feel like that's what we are and are here to talk about. Minions?
Starting point is 00:01:47 Like a mogul who just absolutely fails. Like a we-work situation. Look, it's easy to criticize when you're not in the arena. I would like to get out of the arena. Please get me out of the arena. At the beginning of this year, search engine launched with fellow podcasters Casey Newton and Kevin Ruse,
Starting point is 00:02:11 our own social media network. And now, something fairly unfortunate had happened there. Before we get to that unfortunate thing, which is also pretty funny, I want to refresh your memory about how we got here and all. In January, in a moment of unmitigated optimism, we'd designed our network, starting with its name. We could call it the fours,
Starting point is 00:02:30 I mean, I tried to do a blended name and came up with search for a hard engine. Heart engine sounds like it belongs on a different internet. That's what Casey's incognito tab. Why did we do that? Well, not so long ago, people were very upset about Elon Musk's takeover of what was one's Twitter. Everybody was fed up with billionaires in the way they'd made social media addictive and polarized with their fiendish algorithms.
Starting point is 00:03:00 I mean, people are still mad about those things, but a year ago, people were talking about solutions. And one solution that was floated that I found very intriguing was that social media might be better if instead of being concentrated, like just a few platforms owned by moguls, if instead it was really widely distributed. Like you had all these little platforms
Starting point is 00:03:19 that were operated by anybody who wanted to run them, but those platforms could be interconnected with each other through something called federation, a federated internet, a Fediverse. This seemed like a long shot but not entirely impossible plan for an actual better internet. And so Kevin, Casey, and I wanted to try it.
Starting point is 00:03:38 We wanted to build our own little piece of the Fediverse. And so on January 9th, we'd opened the Forkiverse up to any internet stranger who wanted to join, and then we'd waited. It's kind of cool to see an unfilled universe. It's so beautiful to just see it, you know, without any misinformation, any sort of toxic hate speech or bullying.
Starting point is 00:04:00 Yeah, many people are saying this is the ideal social network. It really is. It's very Zet. All of this was documented in the search engine episode called The Fediverse Experiment. There's a link to it in our show notes. But what happened was almost 10,000 people joined right away. And they did what people do on social media. Chitter-chattered, shared links, made friends. It was a bigger success than any of us had imagined.
Starting point is 00:04:23 But the reason we were meeting last week was, to discuss a grave situation that had since transpired in our dear Forkiverse. Kevin was the one bringing the news and also catching us up to speed about the events between launch and now. We spent a glorious couple of weeks receiving posts from people, participating in the discussion there, and then a few things happened. One was we ran out of room on our Mastodon hosting plan. We were a victim of our own success. We're a victim of our own success.
Starting point is 00:04:57 I forget how many gigabytes of storage we had, got exceeded by people posting their photos of forks, which is one of the... It was a classic fork-averse activity that everyone loved. Yes. People would also post photos of just where they were when they were listening to our shows. And that all took up some space. And so we have exceeded the limits of our Mastodon hosting plan. Which is good. Good problems, but, you know, champagne problem.
Starting point is 00:05:25 but still problems, especially because I have not yet build you guys for your portion of this. So I'm just eating this cost on my personal credit card, which does not feel great. I thought this was cheap. This is not killing Zurdent. I mean, it's not like, I'm still feeding my family, to be clear. Yeah, yeah, but that is really a problem. Yeah, it's not, the juice has not been worth the squeeze for me in terms of bringing enough joy to my life to justify the expenses I'm laying out for this thing. So that was strike one. Strike two was,
Starting point is 00:06:02 I would say, just a sort of decline in engagement on my part. And I think both of your parts, too, where I just found myself like, I'm not checking this thing every day or even every week. I have no idea what's going on there. It's just kind of turning into a ghost town. I can sort of see the tumbleweeds from here. And by the way, I would say that Kevin's participation in the Forkiverse declined precipitously after the announcement, or rather, after the publication of our episode announcing the Forkiverse. It was sort of like, once it had been created, Kevin said, this feels like the right place to say goodbye. It just felt like another feed to me. You know, it's like I spend my life just juggling between these feeds that I have to sort of maintain a
Starting point is 00:06:44 regular posting cadence on. And it was just one more feed. PJ, how did you feel? I, like, I think I may have fought like longer than you. But, It was a similar feeling where it's kind of like, my complaint about social media is it is addictive. I don't like how I feel when I'm at the end of it, yada, yeah, yeah, blah, blah. But it turns out if you make an unaddictive, pro-social, nice, nice social media feed, it's kind of hard for it to compete with the other ones. Like, I'd still rather go, like, read bile on X or a book.
Starting point is 00:07:17 But, like, the idea of kind of the more vegetable-y social media didn't totally work. bad describing our social media network as vegetablesly, but it felt like something I ought to do rather than something I wanted to do. Well, you know, something that I want to acknowledge that I think was really nice about the Forcaverse, because I do think that I probably contributed more to the actual posting on it than either of you, two clowns. And what I noticed when I would be there is that mostly it was just people who are kind enough to listen to our podcast just coming on to be like, Hi, I would like to say something nice to you. Here is a picture of where I listen to your podcast.
Starting point is 00:07:58 Here is a picture of a fork. You inspired me to create a project that I would now like to share with you. This was lovely. And so I would say for like a nice, you know, three or four weeks, I was getting a lot of value out of just sort of showing up. And it was a little bit of show and tell. And it was a little bit of an ego boost. So that part of it was really lovely.
Starting point is 00:08:19 But to the end of Casey, how come you found yourself trailing off from it? Because I can only take so many compliments, PJ, before I say I need to go back to Blue Sky and have somebody tell me to kill myself. You have to, yeah, you have to take the bad with the good. It starts to feel a little inauthentic when you're online and people are only saying nice things. It's a bit of a sort of like sycophantic chatbot situation where you're like, I'm not sure where this is leading me. I don't want to start, you know, believing my own press. So strike two was that us three founders waned in our excitement and participation. in the Forkiverse, a very small strike like Strike 1.
Starting point is 00:08:58 Were the third strike of the same magnitude, the Forkiverse would undoubtedly have rained for a thousand years. But Strike 3, the one Kevin was about to unveil, was the doozy. A strike so big, I realized, our listeners needed to hear some ads before we revealed it. After the break, Portal Combat. Welcome back to the show. Without further ado, Strike 3. Then came Strike 3, which was an email. earlier this month from Jazz Michael King. Jazz Michael King is, of course, the very kind Mastodon expert who has been sort of emailing us tips since we started this thing,
Starting point is 00:10:42 various things like, you know, here's how you create a deny list for kicking people off your server. Just like he's the executive director of this thing called IFTAS, which is a federation, federated internet, what is it? I'm going to guess the international federation of trust and safety. Trust and safety. So anyway, Jazz Michael King, who's the executive director of IFTAS, sent an email, and I'll just read it. Okay. Just a heads up, in case you're not monitoring your Fork averse Mastodon accounts.
Starting point is 00:11:20 Uh-oh. You have had your first Portal Combat accounts created on Fork averse. Now, do either of you remember what Portal Combat is from our early coverage of this? No. I believe it's a Russian influence operation. It sure is. It is the name given to a Russian propaganda operation that's more widely known as the Provda Network. This is a series of websites and social media accounts built to push pro-Russian news stories.
Starting point is 00:11:50 that dates back to 2013. It's a very old, very sprawling Russian social media operation. An ancient evil that predates the Fediverse. Exactly. So Jazz sort of gives me some information about the initial account that appears to be connected on the Forkiverse with Portal Combat. Have either of you heard from an account known as Y-X-O-G-Y-Z-E-E-E? E-O-G-E-K.
Starting point is 00:12:23 No, that's the one that led the attack on Hucking Face? No, this is the password for the Wi-Fi at the Airbnb that you're checking into tomorrow. So this unpronounceable Fork averse account has been flagged by the trust and safety folks as being part of this sort of network of Russian disinformation operators. And I just want to share my screen with you so that you can see what this thing is posting because I found it very interesting. I'm so curious.
Starting point is 00:12:57 Okay. So here we have the profile for our Russian disinformation agent. Okay. This is so strange. It's just a normal picture of like a middle-aged white guy and they're...
Starting point is 00:13:11 It looks like he's from like the stock... Yeah. I'll say it. He's handsome. He's handsome. He's handsome. handsome. He's unthreateningly handsome. And then his name, according to this, is Yixagi Zoguek. And his bias says he's a painter by trade and wood carving by choice.
Starting point is 00:13:34 He's not a forced woodcarver. By the way, that expression sounds much better in the original Russian. And then he's posted, I guess, four times. His first post, I'll just read it out loud. Guard bail against have. Okay. Second post, curiosity unlocked. Okay.
Starting point is 00:13:57 Third post, 1993. I love monochrome. Oh, this is a repost. This is a boost post. It's a repost of some guys post about an art exhibit. About an art exhibit near the Chicago Board of Trade. And then the final post is a boost of someone else's post about a restaurant. in Ohio.
Starting point is 00:14:19 So how's this guy a problem? I don't understand this part of portal combat. He's just being kind of boring. So, Jazz Michael King says that this is what's known as the base account in this scheme. And he says that the methods
Starting point is 00:14:38 that this actor uses include establishing an initial account as our friend Wigoxi Zogeck that then invites hundreds more accounts that can sort of bypass the usual new account approval path. And he points to one of these apparent follow-up accounts, these sort of accounts that were invited by this initial portal combat account.
Starting point is 00:15:04 Because can I just say, if I'm honest, here was my plan up until this conversation for the Forgerverse. I was like, because we've had stuff, basically the way it was working in phase one, is that there'd be like 40 requests from people who wanted to join, and I just click them all. And then two weeks later, somebody would be like, oh, somebody came in and they're saying something like big and and terrible. I kicked that person out. Then it led in 40 more people, whatever. And eventually, I was like, if I'm not paying attention to this, as long as I don't approve any more members, we have a community of people who are treating each other well, it's fine. Right. But this guy was saying that this boring, handsome guy, who's curiosity unlocked,
Starting point is 00:15:38 he's got like a hack where he can let more people in without our permission. Exactly. He has the ability to sort of cede the network. and then invite other people, as happened with this follow-up account, which is a photo of a woman, and the username is at Kyle Palmer. Kyle Palmer is a very traditional Russian name. Yes. Also a very traditional name for a woman.
Starting point is 00:16:07 Yeah. So this Kyle Palmer woman, she's posted, I can see this 59 times. Her bio says, Taylor, who experiments with 3,000. 638, Bavarian wheat fermentation on weekends. Yes. Now, does she fermenting wheat by trade or by choice? That question goes unanswered to the bio. So now if you scroll through her timeline,
Starting point is 00:16:32 which she, in quotation marks, has been posting, this does look more like Russian propaganda. So post on September 16th, moving from the city to the countryside for the winter will not change the situation. If Russia wants to leave Ukraine without electricity in the winter, it will affect all settlements. That's apparently a quote from the head of the Office of Migration Policy, Vasily Vosabonnik. Okay.
Starting point is 00:17:00 Then we have some videos of Vladimir Putin. We have some updates on troop movements. It's a lot of, it's funny, it looks like, oh, there's like gruesome-ish pictures from war. Oh, yeah, that's a dead body. Okay, that's not good. Oh, no. We've got some, like, surveillance footage. Oh, that's like some kind of a strike on an administrative building in Odessa, which she seems happy about.
Starting point is 00:17:27 Yep. Okay. Yeah, so she really has, like, one thing to say. And it's, this is, like, it's funny. I feel like people are always talking about how Russian propagandists are on the internet. I'm always like, I don't run into them. She's totally a Russian propagandist on our internet, on your credit card. I am subsidizing the creation of Russian propaganda.
Starting point is 00:17:49 It makes me a little sad that you guys just left the New York Times because the New York Times' Kevin Ruse is paying for Russian propaganda is just a much better headline than the machine gods, Kevin Ruse, is paying for Russian propaganda. Oh, NPR's Kevin Ruse is paying for Russian propaganda. Hey, buddy. That's where your tax dollars would have gone if your tax dollars still went there. So anyway, we have some choices to make, fellas, because now, apparently we are infested with these portal combat disinformation agents.
Starting point is 00:18:25 Pravda is on the Fork averse. Pravda is on the Forkiverse. And Jazz Michael King says, if we don't do anything, our local timeline will slowly be taken over by these accounts. And so we basically have to choose. We could go with option one, which is to basically shut down our server and recommend that everyone on it go to this other server, find out media, which they say has actual support and people who pay attention to moderation and things like that. Or we could keep the Fork ofverse up and running, but hand the administration. administrative tasks over to NewsMast and IfTas, this trust and safety group, which could clean out the bots and either they call it mothball or just shut down the Fork Reverse over a period of time. I mean, the latter option feels better to me, right? Because that way nothing changes for our listeners right away. They'll have some time. If they want to make a transition somewhere else, they can do that. And I trust if test.
Starting point is 00:19:37 which after all does have trust in the very name of their organization to figure out the best way to dispose of the forkverse. I disagree. I think we should just pull the plug. How come? I don't think that the fork averse, as much as we loved it for the brief period that it was part of our lives, is sort of critical infrastructure to anyone.
Starting point is 00:20:00 No one has built a small business drop shipping, you know, uh, forks from the fork of verse. I don't think anyone's going to miss it, frankly. Do you know that? Have you visited it in the last three months? You're very confident for somebody who has not actually used to the fork averse. I mean, I know somebody who'd be sad if the fork of verse ended. Who?
Starting point is 00:20:23 Vladimir Putin. Why, can I just ask before we make a decision here? Like, why are, I don't think that, like, the, bind-ven diagram of search engine and machine gods listeners are really that's successful to Russian propaganda? Like, what are they thinking? Why are they here? I think it just has the basic logic of spam.
Starting point is 00:20:55 Go everywhere you can get in. It's like, if there's a free place to post on the internet, put your propaganda there. It's very low cost to do it and potentially high upside. Okay, so wait. So, Casey, you say, let's try to hand this. over to another organization. Kevin, you say, let's just send this dog to a farm upstate. I think we've got to send the dog to the farm upstate. I really do. And as much as I want to continue paying $89 a month for the Galaxy plan on masto.com. I know, bro. I am spending more on this
Starting point is 00:21:30 stupid Fedever server than on my cell phone bill. I feel like we're in one of the ads on search engine and like rocket money would have taken care of the fork of us a long time ago. It's true. So yeah, look, if you guys want to keep it around for a month or two to like let everyone sort of adjust and process the news and move to their new homes, I'm fine with that. But I would also just feel comfortable just shutting the place down. I mean, to be clear, I'm comfortable like today saying Jazz Michael King, you run the show now. I'm just saying, like, give the people on the Forkaverse a few weeks to decide what they want to do before you, you know, laterally pull the plug.
Starting point is 00:22:13 Do you feel any, do you guys feel any sense of shame? Yes. About the state of the Forcaverse under our benign neglect. Yeah. Like, I feel like someone has just come over to our house and, like, found our hoarder collection and is just, like, horrified by it. And we are basically saying to them, like, we can't clean this up. If you want to clean it up, it's your house now. First of all, something like that has happened in my life once every three years.
Starting point is 00:22:42 And yes, I feel ashamed, period, end of sentence. And certainly, I feel ashamed about this. And I feel like one of the things that's kind of hard about the Federated Internet is once you join it, there's a lot of, like, I would say 90%, the nicest people you'll ever meet, like, really the nicest people you'll ever meet. And 10% these people who are like, hmm, I don't think you're going to stick around. I don't think you really love this place. I think you're going to end up with a rat's nest
Starting point is 00:23:07 filled with Russian disinformation and disappoint us once again. I mean, when we launched the Fediverse, we got some angry replies for people saying, essentially, how dare you launch this without a pre-announced plan for how you will transition us out of the Forkiverse if and when you do decide to pull the plug?
Starting point is 00:23:28 And my response at the time was, we are telling you that this is an experiment we are not promising you that we have created a pillar of internet infrastructure that will be here until the heat death of the universe we are just trying something and we did try something and it was a little bit of fun for a little bit of time
Starting point is 00:23:44 and it's okay if that ends you know you go to the fair and you ride the Ferris wheel and then you go home and that was what the Forkiverse was to me I think you're a more psychologically healthy person Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. Exactly. So you don't feel ashamed, Casey.
Starting point is 00:24:01 I don't. Because here's a thing. Like, you have to try things. You know what I feel shame about? Probably within the next two weeks, I'm going to start posting on X again. Something I thought I would never do in my life again. But I have looked around and after making many, in my opinion, valiant efforts to try to promote other social networks. I personally lobbied Adam Masary to create threads and have posted there near daily for three years. I personally lobbied Sam Altman to his face to just create a different social network to try to move the AI conversation somewhere else. All my efforts have completely failed. The AI and tech and business conversation on X is thriving as never before. And so in order to have any influence over that conversation, I just do feel like I have to post stuff there, even though I truly never want to go there ever again. That is something I feel shame about. Having tried to create an alternative,
Starting point is 00:24:52 that's actually something I'm proud of. Casey got mugged so hard by Elon Musk. Just absolutely mocked. Never seen a harder mugging. How does it feel? Who would have guessed I would lose a fight to a trillionaire? It hurts. Oh, it's beautiful.
Starting point is 00:25:13 So in the end, the lesson, it's a slightly cynical one. The lesson is hopeful. The lesson is it's okay to try things. It's okay to have a little fun for a little bit of time. And when that doesn't work, go try something else. Okay. Well, I think I'm the tiebreaker. vote here, and I vote.
Starting point is 00:25:32 You are. We give it a month and then we take the dog upstate. Yeah, suck it, Roos. Oh, it's fine. It's fine. But we should announce it. We should let people know. I would want to know.
Starting point is 00:25:47 They should get to spend some time. Sir Chenechantian is paying for the extra $89 month of hosting. I can't believe this has been on your credit card. We are happy to pay the $89. I think I spent like $1,000 on this stupid thing. That's crazy. Yeah, so before anybody comes into our replies and is like, how do you guys, and just say, like, did you spend $1,000 to create an alternative platform and rescue us from the hell that we're in?
Starting point is 00:26:11 Because until you've spent one large, we don't want to hear it. And I, like, I planned to expense this to the New York Times before I quit, but then I forgot. You still should. I don't have access to the, like, expense software anymore. AG, if you're listening. Kevin, you want to say your Venmo? I also take cash app. Kevin's Venmo is at Kyle Palmer.
Starting point is 00:26:39 I'm a Vavarian wheat farmer, but only on the weekends. A woodcarver by choice. Okay, you know what? I feel good. Can I just say that is so fucking funny to me. These people have not updated their tactics since 2015. Like, if you go back and you read the first, like, Russian disinformation stories about, like, these weird, like, things posing as Americans are, like, appearing on some.
Starting point is 00:27:01 social media. It was all this like super like weird approximations of what American hobbies would be. It would be like, you know, I like my farm and my truck. And I like to brew beer in my bathtub. I'm a real American. It's like they're still doing exactly the same thing. Yeah, they're like ironic mustache millennials who come from the past to try to influence the present. I mean, that's what happens when you ban the entire internet, which is what Russia has basically done since the start of the war in These people are not able to access post-2017 memes. They're still watching jib-jab videos over there. Yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 00:27:38 They're just waiting in long lines for new memes. Please. Oh, please, Sergey. This month's meme ration. That's Kevin Ruse and Casey Newton. They have a new show that premieres October 19th on NPR. It's called Machine Gods. I have to recommend you subscribe.
Starting point is 00:28:04 their feed is already live. The trailer's up. You can find Machine Gods wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Machine God's music is from our very own Armin Bizarrian.
Starting point is 00:28:19 I had to have one more conversation about all this. One, I was actually slightly avoiding. Before the Fork Averse had started, I'd been greatly aided in understanding the Fedaverse by one of its builders,
Starting point is 00:28:30 a lovely man named Evan Perdromo. And now I had to call him to tell him that we were leaving his vision of a better internet. I was nervous. nervous about this, the way you get nervous about breaking up with your therapist or telling your friend you're moving very far away. That conversation is after these ads, an exit interview.
Starting point is 00:28:49 Welcome back to the show. Can you just introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Evan Podromo. I'm the research director at the Social Web Foundation. I'm probably best known as one of the authors of Activity Pub and one of the instigators of the Fediverse. Instigator is such a good way to put it. I had first talked to Evan back when we were thinking about starting the Forkiverse. He'd been essential behind the scenes. And now I found myself talking to him about ending it. As part of the process, I'd send him a recording of the segment you just heard.
Starting point is 00:30:04 I'm curious, like, what did you feel like listening to me and Casey and Kevin? What did you feel listening to that segment? You know, I'm disappointed. I was really hoping that this was going to be a great experience for you. I am sorry to see the Fork averse go, but, you know, trying to smile because it happened and not cry because it's gone. I feel a little bit sad. I mean, I don't want to overstate it. Like, there's a lot of things happen in the world.
Starting point is 00:30:33 But I just feel sad because I think that I keep wanting a version of the Internet or a version of my own relationship to the Internet that maybe is just not something to want anymore. I felt like there were people who the forkerverse was their doorway into other parts of the federated Internet. And for them, it showed them there were places on the Internet that could function differently, that they could build in a more active way than maybe the Internet that they're used to encountering. I think we gave people some of that. And then I think our attention drifted off. And then I would feel bad because there would also be like, every once in a while, a creeper, a racist running amok.
Starting point is 00:31:15 And I was like, you were responsible for this thing. Like, I don't know, even though it's just an experiment, like, one of the things I really love about search engine more than, or additional to we try to do great journalism here, we try to make an entertainment show. I was like, I'm like, we make a space that when you show up, the space feels a certain way. And it really bothered me that I didn't think I was making our community,
Starting point is 00:31:41 I wasn't attending to it the way I wanted to be attending to it. Yeah, yeah. I guess, well, one thing I want to make sure that you know is that, like, your experience is not atypical at all. I've only got some limited data, but as far as I can tell, about 60% of the sites that are set up on the Fediverse don't continue, right? And I guess one thing I'm worried about is that, you know, you try to make a change, and it didn't work out in the way that you wanted to. Are you feeling dispirited or discouraged? That's a good question. You should do my job.
Starting point is 00:32:21 It is what I've been thinking about a lot. I feel both sides of that question. I do feel dispirited and discouraged. And I feel like I feel also that part of what drew me to thinking about the Fedaverse and the Forcaverse was that there was a kind of moment of a minor pre-Cambrian explosion after Elon Musk took over Twitter where lots of different ideas for social media were being tried. And with this sort of larger sites, like blue sky threads, et cetera, microbogging sites, I feel like none of those ended up places where I found what I'm looking for.
Starting point is 00:33:03 And so, yeah, in terms of finding online community, the thing that social media offered me for a while was that it was this funny room where the people I knew and celebrities I would never meet and strangers I might like and all these other people gathered together and the anarchy of it was enjoyable and exciting but like you never knew when you might have a conversation like you really wouldn't expect with somebody you wouldn't expect to meet and there's a great energy to that and that time in my life or that experience of the internet I still look for it but like I think this is a year where I feel more dismayed about the prospect of finding it again. Like the best conversations I have on my phone are text messages and group chats.
Starting point is 00:33:47 They're not in these sort of private public spaces. But the desire for like community and community where ideas move and people help each other and unexpected things happen, I think I'll look for that my whole life. And I think this year, I've looked for it more in the real world because I struggle to find it on the internet. But the way I am is like, I'll look for it in the real world for a while.
Starting point is 00:34:15 And then when that starts to feel frustrating, I'll look for it on the internet again. And I can describe myself as a person who has given up on it. But every time someone says that that feeling might exist again somewhere, I can't help but look for it, you know? I think that maybe the one thing I'd say
Starting point is 00:34:33 is like there's nothing wrong with like keep looking for that. I don't think you have to give up on that hope and desire just because you tried one thing and it didn't work out, right? I want to ask, are you on Blue Sky or threads or one of the other Fediverse connected big networks? I'm on Blue Sky and threads. So you're still on the Fediverse, right? You have to do a little tweaking, and I can send you some instructions on tweaking them. We can stay connected.
Starting point is 00:35:03 You may not be running your own service. but at least you can have a foothold in the Fediverse. That feels ideal to me, because it feels ideal to have something that I can, every once in a while kind of bop in and see how the party is going if I want to hang out there. But without feeling like, oh, my God,
Starting point is 00:35:22 all the ice has melted, a bunch of weirdos got in the door, and the bouncer's, like, punching somebody for no reason. Exactly, exactly. Well, thank you so much for being, You really are such an ambassador of the world of it. Because, like, the way you are, which is, like, civic, curious, open. Like, the way you are in this conversation is the spirit of the internet I'm looking for.
Starting point is 00:35:52 And I think it's part of what made me want to try. And, like, glad that I experimented with my time in the Fork averse. It's, like, this conversation is how I remember things being. And usually when I open my phone, it's not how things are. are. But I'm glad that I got to meet you through this. PJ, thank you so much. This is a really kind thing to say. I'm glad the internet still has people like you who want it to be the right kind of place for them. So keep looking. Keep searching. Thank you. Keep searching indeed. Okay, so if you are current denizen of the
Starting point is 00:36:27 Forkerverse, we are sharing a link to a Google Doc in our show notes with instructions about porting your account to a new server should you want to. You have until December 31st, 26, on December 31st, New Year's Eve. The rapture will take place. The plug will be pulled on the Forkiverse. If you do not move your account by then, you'll lose your posts, your messages. So you want to save them, please. You've got 90-ish days, fiancés. After that, this particular dream of a better internet will die. Thanks, Vladimir Putin. Surge engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinovennan, who's also our show's editor.
Starting point is 00:37:26 Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. Fact-checking this week by Onica Robbins. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Special thanks this week to Jazz Michael King at IfTos, which, by the way, stands, of course, for independent, federated trust and safety.
Starting point is 00:37:45 You can learn more about their mission at iftoss.org. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Moore, current Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please email us, PJVote85.gmail.com, subject line advertising. That is also where we take your questions.
Starting point is 00:38:09 We are always looking for more questions. If you have one, please send it in. If you're a listener who would like to hear a version of this show without ads, you can sign up for our incognito mode. It's our paid feed. You get ad-free episodes. You get bonus episodes. You can find a link to subscribe in our show notes.
Starting point is 00:38:24 your contributions there would help us keep this running. Also, if you would like to support our show in a cheaper way, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts or following us on Spotify. The algorithms reward those behaviors for their own mysterious reasons. Thank you, as always, for listening. We'll see you next week.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.