The Vergecast - ActivityPub is the next big thing in social

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of overthinking thermometers:  The Verge's David Pierce and Dan Seifert discuss what’s happening in the weather app world, and hear from the developers of Carrot Weather and Hello Weather.  Apple’s Weather chaos is restarting the weather app market A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece  forecastadvisor.com Carrot Weather Hello Weather Flipboard CEO Mike McCue joins David and Nilay Patel to discuss the potential of ActivityPub, a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. Can ActivityPub save the internet? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of overthinking thermometers. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently sitting here cleaning out space on my desk for our Webby Award. It was just announced that the Vergecast won the Webby's People's Choice Award for Technology Podcasts, which means it is thanks specifically to all of your votes that we won. I'm not going to lie to you, this award makes me much happier than I thought it was going to, and it means even more that you all voted for us. So thank you so much. And please, excuse me, as I let it all go, just absolutely right to my head and become a total diva monster going forward.

It's all over for everybody. Anyway, we have a great show for you today. First up, Dan Seaford and I are going to talk about weather apps, because it turns out we're in the most interesting moment for weather apps in a really long time. And then we're going to spend the rest of the show with Nelai and Flipboard CEO Mike McHugh talking about the future of social media. and why Activity Pub, which is this little web protocol that most people have never heard of, might be that future. All that's coming right after the break, but I have a little more sprucing up to do. I can remove pictures of my family to make room for my awards, right?

That's totally cool and fine. This is the Vergecast. We'll see you in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. So a few weeks ago, something totally catastrophic happened. the Apple Weather app went down multiple times for many hours at a time. This is the kind of thing that doesn't sound like a big deal, but for so many people, checking the weather is part of their daily routine. And obviously, knowing the weather matters.

So people freaked out. It was a huge deal. And there's a larger story underpinning all of this, too. Apple Weather exists in its current state, in part because Apple bought an app called Dark Sky a couple of years ago. Dark Sky was this beloved, beautiful weather app, but it was also a really popular data provider that other apps could use to display weather info their own way. People were mad when Apple bought Dark Sky.

They were really mad when Apple said it was going to shut it down, and they were furious when it seemed like Apple couldn't even build a serviceable replacement. Since that outage happened a few weeks ago, I've been asking around the weather app industry to see what's new in this space. In some sense, it seems like not much. Most of the weather apps you see now, especially the popular ones, are a number of years old. But with all the changes with dark sky and Apple weather and all the chaos of just a few weeks ago, it turns out there's a lot brewing in this weather world. So I grabbed the Verges Dan Sefert, who might be the only person I know with more weather apps installed than me to talk it all through and figure out what's next.

Hi, Dan. Hello. You are the Verge's number one licensed weather app nerd. or at least you were like 10 years ago the last time we talked about weather apps. It does feel like 10 years since we last talked about them. I honestly, it legitimately might have been. Are you still a weather app aficionado? No, I would not say I am anymore.

What changed? Well, I think like 10, 12 years ago, it was a very different landscape for apps in general. And I think weather apps were kind of like a nice little encapsulation of all the things that were really interesting in app design 10 to 12 years ago. the mobile platforms, whether it was like iOS or Android or whatever, they were relatively new. Developers were getting their like fingers into all the different tools they could do. And they were like trying out a bunch of different things and a bunch of different experiments. And you could see this in weather apps pretty clearly. There was a bunch of different design ideas.

There was different notification ideas. There were things that like you wouldn't have seen before done in these small independent third party apps. They were in response to the fact that like the built in weather apps weren't that great on their phones. And there was a bunch of new tools available. to them to develop these kind of things. And I think weather apps are an interesting category in that it's a useful utility that everyone can pretty much benefit from. And they're also like a really challenging data display presentation problem to solve, right? You have to display a lot of data in a very quick and easy to digest way. It has to be accurate data, of course, and it kind of like has to be

reliable. Obviously everyone remembers dark sky. That one kind of like had the unique thing of these hyper-local notifications that you didn't get from watching the weather channel on TV or listening to the weather forecast during the morning radio or whatever. This can now tell you like, it's going to rain in 10 minutes on your city block and it's going to last for 12 minutes. And like, when that is right once, your head is like blown away. You're like, oh my God, this is like the future that I'm living in now. Yeah, it's about right. And I think what happened over time was, and this story parallels dark sky pretty one-to-one, people learn that weather data is really expensive. And after a while, these apps couldn't really sustain because they were pulling in this data that they had to pay for.

And at the time, most apps were either a single purchase, one-time purchase, which was what Dark Sky was, I believe it was like $3 or $4 when it came out, or they used advertising. And then later on, the subscription model came out and now pretty much all of the weather apps that you can buy now that are reputable are based off of subscription models. But a lot of them died away. They couldn't, they weren't sustainable. They couldn't afford the data. They couldn't really make a sustainable business on it. And so progressively, you know, the platform weather apps got better, whether it was Samsung's or Apple's or whatever Google uses now. They got progressively better.

They started incorporating these features. Apple went ahead and just absorbed dark sky entirely. And so like now a lot of the features that people relied on in dark sky are somewhat available in the Apple Weather app on their iPhone. So there became less of a need for these like boutique designed third party independent weather apps. And I think that's kind of where we're sitting today. And that's not to say that there aren't other weather apps out there. there definitely are, and there's some that have, like, really strong followings. But there isn't anything that people are super excited about, like, when dark sky came out

or when all these other ones were coming out and all the experimentation was happening. The end of this story is you use Apple Weather, don't you? Yeah. Sure do. Well, I'm so sorry about the time it went down for, like, three days. Yeah, you know what? I looked out the window. You know, it's like part of this is like a personal story, right?

I don't travel nearly as much as I did. Ten years ago, I was younger. I was more mobile. I wasn't like at home watching kids all the time. Like we didn't go through a pandemic that locked us down. Like how much weather reporting did I really need in the three years of the pandemic? So like, you know, part of that is personal. I don't really rely on it or need it as much as I used to.

But it's also because the built-in weather apps have gotten better. And the third-party weather apps had just gotten more expensive. And then it's like, I don't really get $30 a year of value out of a weather app. And I can get basically the same forecast for free. That is totally fair. So I'm so glad that's how you feel because it's actually like, that exact feeling is one of the things I just spent a bunch of time reporting on because my sense was, and I tried to sort of prove out that this is true, and I think I was right, but the distinct vibe

that I got was basically like there was, like you said, this massive explosion and really interesting weather apps, call it like seven to ten years ago. Somewhere in the kind of like 2012 to 2015 range was like full of really interesting stuff. And then nothing after that. And like if you look, even all the most popular weather apps now are the ones that were popular back then and very little has changed. But then Apple bought Dark Sky, which a lot of people cared about and had really strong feelings about, Apple released Weather Kit, which, I mean, I don't know how to put this more delicately, like shit the bed aggressively in its early launch. And so I went out and just asked a bunch of weather people like, okay, what is going on in this space right now and kind of rewound?

And I learned a bunch. Can I play you a couple of clips that I have about the Dark Sky API? Yeah, let's hear them. So one of the things I found really fascinating was I kept asking developers why it was such a big deal when dark sky went away and like why dark sky was so special. And one of the things that I heard, have you ever used the app, hello weather? I have. I've got it on my list of like weather apps that like I'm aware of and I know about. Hello weather is like my go to just because it has this really great widget that is just basically just a bar graph of temperatures. Yeah. And it's such a like straightforward thing, but it's like hourly temperature bar graphs. I get a sense of the day. It's very useful.

But I asked basically like why was this such a big deal when dark sky went on? away. And this is what Trevor Turk, one of the co-founders, said about basically why Dark Sky's API was important to begin with. I don't think that we would have made a weather app if it hadn't been for Dark Sky. The weather data industry is very annoying. Like having to make enterprise contracts with each one of these data sorts. Some of them have, you know, self-service sign up. There's like a cold start problem. Like Dark Sky, it was what, like a thousand hits a day, for free and then you pay as you go and you should see the history of our bill it was like $3, $8, $12, and at the end it was like $800 a month or something, right?

Okay, so he goes on like this for a while, but he told me two things. One is that the thing dark sky did that was magical was it was one API call for all of its data. And right now if you want to go to AccuWeather, you have to hit Accuethers API every single time you want any particular kind of data. And all the rest of them are like this, dark sky, you would just be like, what's the weather and Dark Sky would tell you? And so if you're an app developer, especially if you're like one person, that makes your life a thousand times easier.

Also, you could just put down your credit card and it would just charge you instead of having to make like business development deals. But the other thing he told me that I thought was so interesting was that Dark Sky did minute-to-minute weather data before anybody else. And that since Apple has shut down Dark Sky or has said it was going to a lot of these other providers have it. But the reason Dark Sky was doing those like, it's going to rain in 10-minute things, is because it could.

And nobody else was even, like, using that data to say, here's what the weather is going to be, like, in 12 minutes. So we owe all of that, which is now everywhere, to your point, like, you can figure out what the weather's going to be in 10 minutes across all these apps. And all of that is because of dark sky, which I thought was totally fascinating. And dark sky, I also learned, is famously not that accurate. Well, I think it's like a perception thing, right? It's like, it could be wrong a bunch of times. But that one time it's right where it said, it's going to rain at 11 minutes. and you look at your watch and 11 minutes later

starts raining and then it says it's going to last for eight minutes and it stops eight minutes later. It's just so one of those things that sticks with you more often than the times that I said like, oh, it's going to be partly cloudy. Yes, oh, 100%. And actually, one more clip from the Hello Weather guys. I asked Jonas, their other co-founder,

why he thought weather apps were important. And like that thing you're describing is exactly what he talked about. Let me just play this for you. I really liked this. There's something like psychological about this particular thing that's unique, which is it like the weather happens to you and you don't have control over it.

And a weather app sort of like gives you the feeling of having control. And they all have like different degrees of accuracy and different like information that they surface in different ways. So you can like, if you're into this in some like basic level, you can just completely nerd out because there's so many options and there's like so many different ways to like read the same data. And in the end like the outcome is always like, well, it might rain and you might not know. Like it's like they're never going to be perfect. So, but I think, like, customers seem like they're striving for, like, I want this perfect thing that's, like, going to work in my area and it's going to tell me everything I need to know and it's going to work for my very specific sort of like life situation.

I don't know. There's, like, some kind of, like, motivation there that's, like, beyond just, like, using an app, I think. Like, I feel that deep in my soul, right? That it's like, it's just, just the thing where I can, I can know what's going on. It's a crazy world out there, but I know it's going to rain in 10 minutes. And I've got my umbrella and I'm ready for it. Yeah, exactly. So, okay, my other question for you is as a weather app guy, are you also a weather data source guy?

Like, are you in the settings of all your weather apps mucking around with where the data comes from? Not too much. I know there's some apps that, like, allow you to control that. I think Kara is famously one of them that allows you to choose different data sources depending on whatever you prefer. I think the one that I use on Android, which is slipping my mind right now, also allows you to do that. And it's like if one of them has gone down, I've changed it so that like I actually get a forecast. or I kind of compare them very casually, but most of the time I would just probably leave it on the default.

I think Carrot Weather defaults to Apple's weather service now at this point. So I don't really spend too much. I think the thing that really I liked about the weather apps many years ago was just really their UI and presentation. They were using these unique designs and unique UI designs and all of the tools that were coming with the new platforms to be able to present all of this dense information in aesthetically pleasing.

and helpful ways. And I think that's really what I liked about the weather apps back then. And then, of course, being able to know that it's going to rain in 10 minutes or not was a beneficial. But like getting into, like, even things like radar and stuff like that never really mattered to me. Didn't really make a difference where I live. I know in some areas of the country, radar is hugely important to be like your day to day. And some people really rely on it. But for me, it's like, whatever, it's just a perk on top of it. But it's really the design of the app that really grabbed me. Yeah, I really agree. And I think one of the things I noticed, like, I also have a folder of weather apps because I'm a monster. And the thing that I realized in going through all of my weather apps is that it's exactly what you described that that

first screen where I can just open it up and get a sense of what's going on without having to, like, do a lot of work or math or tapping. Yeah. It's like, it's a super hard design problem. And a lot of apps get it really wrong, especially all the ones like, like, I hate the, the weather channel app and the weather underground app and the ACUweather app because they just, they just throw data at you. It's just like, Here's a bunch of like news stories and stuff going on. I'm like, I don't care about any of that. I just need to know if it's going to rain while I'm walking my kid to daycare. Like, that's literally all I need to know.

And so many of these smaller apps do that really well. And like none of the bigger apps do it well. And it drives me totally nuts. And Apple seems to have hit a good middle ground there, I think. It's a hard balance, right? There's a lot of information that you have to present. And you have to identify what is going to be the most important thing to the user and what they're going to want to know the most. And I think like the ones that you mentioned, like I think the website,

I think the Weather Channel is pretty egregious with it. They are making the decisions that they think is most important as opposed to what you might think is most important. So a lot of the third-party apps that are still available today. I think, again, Carrot is a really good example of this. They give you a lot of customizable over the UI, and you can say, like, I want this piece up higher on the screen, and I want you to tell me this summary and stuff like that,

or I don't want to see this. I don't want to see the radar map, and I don't want to see all this other stuff, and you can just really customize it to your own personal preferences. And you mentioned widgets with Hello Weather is very similar that you can choose which widget you want to show on your home screen because it's the thing that's most important to you as the user. Yeah, I actually talked to Brian Mueller, who makes carrot weather. He was telling me about a feature I had never even noticed before, which is that you can have different looking home screens for different kinds of weather. So you can have like in the morning you can customize it to show you one set of information, whereas at night, like you don't care when sunset is or whatever.

Right. So you can actually have it change based on the. weather to show you different stuff or based on the time of day to show you different kind of stuff. And that to me is kind of mind-blowing because it's, it really is like a totally context-dependent thing. And one of the things a couple of people said to me was like the dumb thing about a lot of weather apps is that they show you so much information you just don't need or means nothing to you. Like when it's 10 p.m. showing me the UV index is like not useful because it's zero and there's no sun out and what are we doing here? But most apps, it's just sitting there. Like it just exists on the page.

And Brian from Carrot also said an interesting thing to me about like that simplicity versus he is a guy who has spent a lot of time on radars. He gave me like a 10 minute speech about radars. But he did say an interesting thing about like simplicity versus the complexity of it all. Let me just play this for you. I spent a lot of time figuring out a way to make the app really easy to use for people who are just brand new to it, but also layering in all these powerful features in a way that isn't overwhelming and doesn't. make the app like super clunky. It's there if you want to dive in and find that data and it gets out of your way if you just want something really simple. And he used this idea of what he called it progressive disclosure to talk about, especially with the radar things. Let me just play that too.

One of the ways that I did that, for example, was building it into the legend. So when you'd scroll across the legend, it would tell you this is the range of colors that you'd be looking for for hail. and this is the range of colors that you'd be looking for, wind that's coming towards the station and wind that's blowing away from the station. And so building that all into the UI and progressively disclosing it to people and finding ways to use the UI to teach users

what different stuff is so that they don't have to just go into a guide and read a wall of text in order to figure out what's going on. I like that idea very much. And revealing itself to you over time is what I want. Like, I don't care about most of that stuff.

And I, frankly, never get to those menus. Exactly, yeah. I think even the examples that he gave of, like, how much do I care whether the wind is blowing towards the weather station or away from the weather station? I don't really care. I just want to know if it's going to be super windy out and blow my hat off. Like, that's all I care about as the level of user that I'm at. Some people really want to drill into that data in.

But, like, throwing all of that data at me initially is just going to turn me off to the app because I'm going to be like, where is the thing that I actually care about? And so being able to like layer that on or allow customization where the user can say like, yes, tell me that data. I want to know it. Totally. Dan, can we play one game before you leave? I want to try something. Do you know this website Forecast Advisor? I don't. Okay, good. I just learned about this a few days ago. So there's this company called Forecast Advisor. And basically what it does is match historical data against various forecasts from various different providers to tell you for where you are in, I think it's only in the the U.S., which weather service is going to give the most accurate data. And the thing I've heard a bunch, like, the thing that came up over and over, which I was

really surprised by, is all of these weather providers are trying to figure out exactly what you were saying, which is like how to use these different providers to give people more accurate data, right? And so a bunch of them have a bunch of different ones. A bunch of them couldn't afford to have a bunch of different weather providers, and that became really complicated, which is why all this stuff is subscription. And it got more expensive because you have to pay acqueweather and you have to pay tomorrow. and you have to pay IBM and all this different stuff.

But the ones that did it are now trying to figure out how do we put this information in front of people, right? Because the weather app that's the best where I am may not be the best weather service for where you are. And it's totally different in other countries. Like the hello weather guys are telling me that they, for a while, use dark sky. And then when they first got a big uptick, it was because somebody in Amsterdam tweeted about the app and a bunch of people found it.

And so they get to, I think he said, like 2,000 users all at once from like, you know, friends and family to 2,000 users. And they start getting emails from people in Amsterdam saying, this weather is crap. It's all wrong. And it turned out ACU weather was more accurate where they were. So they had to sign up for a different one. And now they're using more and more providers.

And especially now that like when Weather Kit was a mess, people were like, okay, well, we can't even necessarily rely on that yet. So we have to have more providers. And so over and over people were like, we want Forecast Advisor to just have an API so we can just put in our app for, you know, your longitude and latitude, here's where you are. This is the one you should use.

So I actually have not done this for my own yet, but will you go to ForecastAdvisor.com? All right. I'm doing it. Put in your zip code. And then I think you have to scroll down. There's a thing that says weather forecast accuracy last month. All right. Top three are the weather channel at 86.29%. Okay. And then weather underground at 84.95%. I assume this is percent of accuracy. That's right. Yeah. How many times its forecasts were correct about the weather. Yeah. And then ERIS weather, which is a service I'm not familiar with, at 81.72%. Interesting. Okay, so mine are completely different. So I have ACU weather at 85.06%. Weather underground at 83.33%.

And 4ca, like forecast minus the ST slash Vaisala, two words and companies I've never heard of, at 83.06%. So like the weather channel, not in the top three. A bunch of the other like big name ones. Aris, not in my top three. this is super interesting. And just like playing around at this entering zip codes, the numbers are different everywhere. And a lot of these, like I have five of these over 80%. But like the difference between, you know, my whatever sixth place one,

which is 75%, and my acueather, which is 85%, it's like that's one in 10 forecasts. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a big difference in whether or not I get rained on while I'm walking my child to take care. Oh man.

This is a real heartbreaker. So if I scroll down a little bit further to, the 2022 last year, which does have dark sky in the list. And dark sky is only 72.21% accurate for me. 77 for me. What's your number one for last year? It's the Weather Channel again, 81.27. Weather Channel is IBM's data, right? Yes. Well, this makes sense because I basically live in IBM country. Oh, that's true. It's like how Apple's Apple Maps was really good in Cooper Tino and terrible everywhere else. It's, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So the thing that I have learned, my big takeaway was like, do this check on Forecast Advisor and then whatever app you use, go in and put it on the most accurate one.

And then from there, it's just interfaces, right? If you want to pay more money for a really nice interface, fine. Otherwise, take the cheapest, built-in-iest one you can and move on with your life. But this kind of made me interested in the future of weather apps. I also got a bunch of data from the folks at Censor Tower who track all the app downloads that said weather app downloads in like the week after the Apple weather disaster went like through the roof, like 10 next in some cases. And so all of a sudden there's like zest in this space again. And I'm, sort of hopeful that for the first time in a decade, there's going to be like actually interesting weather stuff going on. Yeah, I hope so too, because it's like, it's fun to get excited about them and

try different ideas and different things about. I think it's definitely challenging now that, you know, when the weather apps are working, they've gotten a lot better. So like the default ones are not as stripped down as it used to be. And then, of course, the price challenge that we mentioned earlier. Like, I think Hello Weather is actually one of the more affordable options. I did a little bit of research before coming on and like carrot is $20 to $30 a year depending on the features that you want. Hello Weather is about $13 a year. What's key about both of those is that there's no real tracking of you. Like you're just paying the developer money and like that's how they're making money. Everything else, whether it's Acuweather, Weather Channel, Weather Underground, Tomorrow I.O., they charge you

money and they track you. So like, they're like, your data is like going out there. So but even Acuweather's $20 a year in the year. weather channels 10 to $30 a year. So like these aren't really free anymore. And if they are free, it's probably not a great experience. You're definitely right that there are some people who like really, really need lots of information about the weather or just people who sort of care about it. Right. Like it is, it is, whether is a lot of people's hobbies, it's a perfectly valid thing to like spend a lot of time interested in. Totally cool. But I think the question is for like the sort of average every day like do I need to wear a coat today person, the question of what is there that I

would pay for is a really complicated one, especially because I think Apple weather has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years. I still think it's not as good as like Hello Weather and Carrot and some of these other ones, but it's like it's gotten a lot better. It's much closer to those than it was. And so I kind of feel like for you as a now Apple Weather user, like, do you have a sense of what it would take to make you actually like foot a bill for a weather app at this point? Yeah, I don't know. I guess it would have to be like a really, a design that really grabs me and it's like really enjoyable to use. I know I've played around with Carrot Weather before and I can like recreate the dark sky interface in it, which is pretty cool.

It's not $30 a year cool to me. So like, you know, it's cool but not that cool. And like, ultimately, the thing that I like the most about dark sky was the local notifications, which Apple weather kind of does now. Again, I haven't like scientifically tested them out, though. So, like, I can't say, like, whether they're right all the time or not. But do they feel right? I feel like the vibes are really important.

Yeah, the vibes are important. Like, you know, I get the notifications to say, like, rain will be, this weekend was a really good example because it was like super rainy here. And so it kept going on and off. And so I was getting notifications all day long. Like rain will start in your area in 20 minutes. You know, rain will be stopping in 15 minutes and stuff like that. And it seemed like pretty accurate. But there were times where I will open the app and it'll say it's raining outside and I look outside. It's not raining outside. So like, you know, it's not definitely not perfect. But yeah, it's, it's tough because it's like, and if you can't sell me, like, how are you going to sell the average user? Really doesn't care.

Yeah. If you've lost Dan on your premium app, it's safe to say you've lost everybody. I want to try something, though, like, now that I've done the forecast advisor thing, because I really hate the Weather Channel app, like, no offense anybody that makes that app, but I really don't like it. But apparently that's the best data. So, like, I need to go find a third-party app that has that data because the Apple Weather app doesn't use that data. And I got to go find one that maybe taps into the Weather Channel app without having to use the Weather Channel app. That's for the best. Well, luckily, I have AccuWeather in all of my many apps now, except for the built-in one. So I'm good to go there. All right. Well, if you find a cool one, let me know. And the other thing I heard from lots of developers is that every WWDC is like total chaos time because a weird quirk of being a weather app developer is that everybody demands that you support all of Apple's weird new stuff. Like when widgets came out, they were like, we have to have the best widgets. And when live activities came out, it was like you got to make it work. And so it's like every time, I think it was the hello weather guys who told me basically like they get nervous right before every WWDC because it's like what weird thing are you going to force us to work on this summer?

Every single Apple event includes a huge amount of work for us. Like, we're watching WWDC and we're like, we're like, that's some work. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that was the assignment of weather apps is like they would be using the tools that were available and experimenting and trying things out. And you could reliably, like, live activities is a really good one that really hasn't propagated to a lot of apps yet.

But there's probably a weather app out there that uses it. Or widgets is a really great example or whatever it was 10 years ago. That was like the new feature, whether it's, you know, flat, or gesture-based UIs or something like that. Like you could experience that first in a weather app before it went to like all the other apps that you rely on all day long. Totally.

All right. Well, when Apple launches the AR headset and blows up the weather ecosystem again, we'll come back and do this again. That sounds like fun. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to spend the whole rest of the show

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Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to short-listing candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent.

And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. Here's the theory for you. I think when we look back on the overall story of the internet, Elon Musk buying Twitter is going to turn out to be an inflection point for the internet. Not because he saved Twitter, because that sure doesn't seem like it's happening,

but because Musk's acquisition seems to mark the end of an era in social. For so many years, we've had these big platforms, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and now TikTok and YouTube, and they became our portals to our friends and in many ways to the internet as a whole. But that structure seems to be going out of style. In its place, at least according to a lot of people in the tech industry, might come a whole new way of thinking about social and even the internet as a whole. And now this is where I have to use a term that I hate, which is the word fetavers. I hate the word fetifers. It's this awful term that describes a really important concept, a decentralized version of these platforms in which your content and followers and friends don't all belong to a single

company, but can be created, shared, and interact with across platforms and servers. It's more like email, really, where you can use your Gmail account to message someone on Outlook or AOL than it is the current state of social. It's a huge change. Underpinning a lot of what makes the Fedaverse, again, that word, work is this protocol called Activity Pub. It's a simple web standard finalized five years ago that basically creates a structure for moving content around so that in theory any app could create content that any other app could understand and read. There are lots of ideas about decentralized protocols right now. You might have heard of Blue Sky, the decentralized Twitter or things like Noster and Farcaster, and there are even a handful of other ones,

but Activity Pub is the clear leader right now. In part because Activity Pub is the thing that makes Mastodon work, and Mastodon is so far the biggest thing in the Fediverse by a long shot. The idea underpinning all of this of decentralized social media is old, almost as old as the web itself, and it's been tried and failed several times over. But some really smart people think it's going to happen now in a really big way. One of those people is Mike McHugh, the CEO of Flipboard, which is a newsreader app that is now all in on the Fedaverse. Before he founded Flipboard, Mike also worked at IBM.

He was an executive in the early days of Netscape, and in general he has been thinking about and building the future of the web since basically the beginning of the web. The guy knows his stuff, and he thinks the Fediverse is what's next. I've been reporting on the Fediverse for months, and Mike has been one of my favorite people to talk to on the subject. as is my co-host, Nilai Patel, who is kind of obsessed with the possibilities for activity pub. So I grabbed them both, and we're going to try and figure out where all of this is going. Hi, Nealai. Hey, man. How's going? Hanging in there.

Mike McHugh, the Flipboard CEOs here. Hi, Mike. Hi, guys. We have a lot to talk about. But, Mike, I want to start by reading you a quote back that you said to me, because that's super fun when people throw words that you said to them back in your own face. And because I've been thinking about it a lot. We talked a while ago for this big activity pub story I wrote. And you said the following.

You said, I was there in the early days of the web, and this whole thing with Activity Pub is as big a deal as HTML was back then. This is the single biggest opportunity I've seen for the web since the dawn of the web. And I want you either right now, you can say, you know, I'd had too much coffee. I was too excited. I went too far. Everybody calmed down. Or you can double down and then we can go from there. So I'm going to give you the chance, confirm or deny.

This is as big as you said it was. Yeah, I'll double down. In fact, I think as we talk about this more, you'll see why. Why, this is probably the most exciting opportunity I've seen since the 90s as a founder, as an entrepreneur. So this is a very big deal. All right. I think we should probably just start at the beginning here. One of the things Neil and I have been debating for months is like how to talk about activity pub.

Because there's like, we live in this world where Massanon is very powerful and a lot of people are talking about it. But it's also like not nearly sort of in the stratosphere of the other social networks. But then there's this thing underpinning it, which is this activity protocol that feels like a very big deal. what's the case that you make to people? Like as you're doing what Nelai is doing and just like running around yelling the word activity pub to anyone who will listen, what's the story you tell them? Like, why is this a thing that you're convincing people you work with who have lots of things to do that this is a thing worth thinking about? Well, it is the future not just of social media, but of the web. Activity pub, you know, when I think about it, I think there are two things that it does.

and one of them is to create an open social graph that becomes a part of the web, which in and of itself is a very big deal. The other thing it does is it creates a common two-way streaming platform or architecture that allows services to be interoperable. So what this means is that all, as we've seen, all these social media platforms basically just become other versions of themselves. They all have vertical video now. they're all copying each other. They all build everything into this vertical stack that's totally proprietary. And if you leave and you try to do a new one, you've got to rebuild your social graph. As a creator, that's a big issue.

As a brand, as a publisher, that's a big problem. So what this reminds me of is the days of AOL before the web really happened. Everything is built vertically. If you want to put something up online, you have to go do a business development deal with AOL. And all of the innovation is locked in by, one company. So they're only doing as much as that one company can do. And with this activity pub breakthrough, what it really allows is the web to flourish again and to, you know, kind of reopen up all of that innovation that currently is really controlled by just, you know,

a handful of social media platforms today. When you say interoperable, that means I post something to Mastodon. It comes into Flipboard. I hit like and Flipboard, and that like shows up on someone else's Mastodon that's following me? Well, so there's that level, and then it goes deeper. I'll give you an example. Let's say Barack Obama, who's not on Macedon, he's not on Flipboard, but he is on Medium. So as Medium integrates activity pub, you will be able to follow Barack Obama on Medium. When he posts something, you'll see it, when you comment on it, and you'll see it from Macedon or from Flipboard. When you comment on it, those comments will flow back into Medium. That's one level of interoperability. But then it goes,

further, who's Barack Obama? Is this the real Barack Obama? What about verification and identity? Right now, we rely on these individual walled gardens to provide that service. But there's an opportunity for a new company, a new third party. Maybe it's not even a company. Maybe it's a non-profit that gets created that their whole focus is to do verification. You could have a whole other set of companies, multiple companies or multiple entities or developers that do moderation, right? So what you have is you're not just decentralizing the user experience, you're decentralizing the innovation, right? You're allowing all sorts of new ideas and new opportunities to do verification incredibly well or moderation incredibly well and have a lot of choice in how that happens.

What you just described sort of intellectually makes total sense to me is how the internet should work, right? That these things should not be all in one place controlled by one company, especially for things like the creator economy, right? Like, it's crazy that you have to have essentially 12 different businesses on 12 different platforms. Like, that's nuts. Definitely, this is how the internet should have been built 25 years ago, right? I think the open web would be a better place with this stuff built in. And we've had versions of this conversation about security and about identity. And like, we got a lot of things wrong about the web in the 90s and before that. That wouldn't it be great if we had gotten them right then, life would be a lot easier.

But what you just described, even that thing with Barack Obama being on medium is such a, like, break in how we think about the web and the internet that it almost feels like the hill. that all this stuff has to climb, even in just how people like understand the vocabulary of it, is so big that I almost wonder if like that hill to climb back to, yes, of course, this is how it should work, is so great that it might not even have a chance that like if we had done it back then, it would have been awesome and it would have been different. But we've just veered so far from that now. It's like trying to reinvent the QWERTY keyboard, right? Like maybe you can do better, but nobody cares because this is what we've been doing for all this time.

Well, I think it'll happen in stages. You're already. seeing the beginnings of it because of what's happening at Twitter, right? That is one moment for people to say, well, actually, there's a better way. There will be more of those moments that will come. And I think that over time, as more people that you care about that you want to follow, who are posting interesting things, that will ultimately drive a gradual increase. And then at some point, there'll be a tipping point. I don't think we're at that tipping point just yet. I think we're in a phase. But that tipping point, I think, will come when you have a critical mass of creators,

publishers, interesting people to follow who are on activity pub. Let me ask you about that critical mass. So Twitter, whatever's happening, Twitter is happening, Twitter. But Twitter is the smallest of the social networks. In fact, the reason that it is in the position it is from right now is because it was so small and so mismanaged and made so little money compared to Facebook, compared to Instagram, compared to YouTube. Isn't the critical mass of people you need to attract from those platforms?

Don't you need to get the YouTube community onto an activity pub-based YouTube or the Instagram community onto something like Pixel Fed, which is an activity pub-based Instagram clone? Yes, 100%. You know, you've got to get people like you guys, people like Marquez Brownlee, people like Barack Obama. You know, you need a collection of interesting people to make this whole thing work. Remember back in the early days of the web, where, you know, on AOL, you used to be able to go to AOL and you'd see all these little boxes. If you go back and look at some screenshots of AOL, which I did the other day, it's mind-blowing. There's all these little boxes in the home screen. And every one of those boxes represents like a multi-billion dollar industry. Right. Yeah. Like there's booking travel online. And, you know, and then they have one box like called the internet. You can go to the internet. And so what happened was people didn't just automatically.

one day decide to switch off of AOL and switch on to the web. It was much more of a gradual, you know, change. And on the web, what you saw, remember, you know, I remember when San Jose Mercury News came online, fantastic newspaper, really digital forward, and they had a fantastic web experience. It was way better than anything you'd get on AOL. So more and more and more publications came to the web, and that started to get the ball rolling. So, you know, if you remember when Jim Clark started Netscape with Mark Andresen, they also announced, I think it was five major publishers that were coming along to the web, that were going to be actually backing Netscape. So that's one of the things that has to happen as well. The case that I heard from a couple of people in reporting this that I thought was really interesting was that one way to get to that critical mass is kind of the sum of a lot of smaller parts, right?

And I think this is where something like Flipboard comes in for you, Mike. like flipboard is not the size of Facebook, but if you add flipboard and medium and Tumblr and this other sort of growing massive things, like the Metcalf's law thing, right, where the value of the network increases exponentially by the number of people on the network is that seems to be the bet, right? And that you don't have to have one three billion person platform. You can have 10, 300 million people platforms or 103 million people. That's bad math. Whatever. You know what I mean. You can win this game sort of a piece at a time rather than having to beat Facebook with Facebook, right? That's kind of, that's a big part of the whole activity pub pitch.

Absolutely. And, you know, if you are a creator, okay, one of the parts of your job is to adopt new social media platforms as they happen, right? We've seen this movie. Everyone's on TikTok now, you know, Snap was the number one thing. And before that, it was Facebook and so on. So what I'll tell you is that a creator wants to build an audience. and wants to have that audience be an audience that they can continually reach without interference

from someone else. And when Facebook changes their algorithm or Elon changes the for you algorithm or takes away your verification checkmark and all of that time and energy you put into building that audience in a Walt Garden starts to go to waste, that's terrible. Plus, as a creator, you know, when I talk to creators, they tell me all the time that like having to spend time on all these different social platforms is like really hard. Right. They've got all these fragmented audiences.

You know, YouTube is now, you know, prioritizing vertical video, of course. So now you got to go make vertical video too, you know, in order to be in the recommendation algorithm. So this is a real challenge. What I think is going to happen is that creators are going to start to realize if I invest in the open social web and I start building an audience there, I don't have to leave all these other platforms. But I can start building an audience there, and over time, linking back to my content, maybe even starting to host some of that content in the open social web, in the Fediverse, over time, more and more people are going to go there because they know that that audience that they create, they'll be able to keep that audience for as long as they want to. And nobody can interfere with that.

We're speaking in Eli's language now. And that is my language. But what's actually about that is the reason the big platforms have succeeded is that the thing that they centralized most of all was monetization. So you are a YouTube creator. You go to YouTube. You hit whatever threshold to turn on YouTube, AdSense. You hit the button. Now YouTube is out there in the market selling ads and allowing people to buy ads on a platform.

They're serving against your content and you're just getting a check. There's no analog for that in the Fediverse yet, right? where some other big platform has figured out monetization on the scale of a YouTube or a TikTok or whatever and is providing into creators. Do you think that is, you know, you say moderation might be one of those functions that an ecosystem of companies arises for, is monetization going to be one of those functions too or one of these platforms figure it out? I think so, Mila. I think, well, let's take a look at Patreon. Patreon is actually a pretty effective way for creators to monetize. And right now, you kind of have

to go to Patreon to see like the special posts from those creators. And Patreon's not really set up that way as a discovery vehicle or as a consumption experience, right? But you could imagine something like Patreon or maybe Patreon itself integrated with activity pub so that when you subscribe to a creator and that creator posts something interesting just for their patrons, you'll see it. You'll see it in whatever experience you're using, whether that's the ivory client on Macedon, whether it's flipboard, you'll see it. And that is, I think, an example of a kind of centralized monetization applied in a decentralized way, if you will. This sounds like kind of like a super RSS, right? In many ways, you're going to, you have a bunch of feeds, and you got a feed reader, and those things aren't

connected, and then you open your feed reader, and here's all the stuff from all your people. And it occurs to me that flipboard is a kind of super feed reader. So I understand why you are in particular are interested in this. The problem for us with RSS historically is that our business model doesn't go with it. Right. So for The Verge, we give it away for free. We put ads on the page. That's why it's free. The ads make us enough money to pay the staff. When we were giving out full text RSS, or when we were posting all of our stories on Twitter, which is something that we did for some reason for a decade, are monetization. We were just giving the stuff away for free. Do you see a world in which the advertising or the other kinds of business models travel with the content and

Activity Pub? This is something that I think is very different than how monetization works today on the internet. You know, advertising is very primitive when you think about it. We have digital advertising. Now, advertising tracking you and all of the privacy violations and the surveillance economy, you know, that happens because of advertising today online is terrible. In a lot of ways, Macedon is a reaction to that, right? They don't want any algorithms at all in Macedon because of that. Algorithms, there's nothing wrong with algorithms. Algorithms can be very helpful for content discovery and personalization and all sorts of things, right? But when they're used to monetize in ways that are not transparent, that violate users' privacy, obviously you're

going to lose trust. And so that's what's happened. So now I do believe that there will be an opportunity for brands who want to promote themselves, who want to be recognized, who want to be discovered, to participate in a much more genuine, transparent way that's much more respectful of users. When we started Flipboard, it was about we were inspired by print advertising, right?

You would never go by Mountain Biking magazine and rip out all the ads, right? The ads are part of the experience, right? It's actually something I like to have, right? That world can exist. I think there's a lot of thinking, a lot of collaboration that has to happen, across the Fediverse. I think what you'll find most, though, aside from advertising,

will be this more Patreon. Think of it as like a decentralized Patreon type of model, where people are paying for content or paying for access to communities or paying to be able to interact with a creator. And I think those payments can take the form of micropayments. They can be subscriptions. It might even be tokenized. There's a lot of opportunity here to rethink the business model in a way that's much healthier. Does that exist in Activity Hub now? I subscribe to you on whatever Fediverse Patreon, and then I have access to feeds that can pump into any Fediverse product.

Is that in the standard yet, or is that to be built? No, it's not in the standard per se in terms of monetization, but the subscription. I see the RSS thing you mentioned earlier is dead on. I think of Activity Pub as two-way RSS. It's a dual RSS. And yes, you can subscribe to multiple feeds. right and those could be from multiple services and some of those might be behind a paywall of sorts this is my favorite thing about activity pub by the way and the thing i think is the most interesting

tension of it is like boil it all the way down and activity pub doesn't do very much like what you just described like that two-way rSS thing that is the entirety of activity pub that's all it does it has no thoughts about how we think about identity it has no ideas about algorithms it has no ideas about monetization it's just like it's a it's a push and pull of content in a in a relatively structured way such that you can say here is how I understand content and you can say here is how I send content and those two things can talk to each other.

That's it. And that's what brings up, I think, to me, this big challenge and I just keep coming back to this idea that there is sort of a chicken and egg problem which is that like the Patreon example to me is a really interesting one, that it would require everybody to decide to support federated Patreon, right?

That like if you want this big ecosystem to exist, everybody has to play along, all the readers would have to support it, all the creators would have to play into it. And then you have this big giant centralized platform that controls all the monetization of the creator economy. And I'm not sure that's good either. Or the flip side is you have a hundred different ones that everybody has to support.

And that I'm not sure just works from a UI perspective. So I feel like I just have a hard time breaking down the big platforms actually have some real user experience wins that we've never really seen this huge decentralized things pull off in such a way that actually makes sense. I don't know. Is there a middle ground there that works? Do you think? What does that look like? Yeah, I can tell you guys have been spending a lot of time talking about activity pub. This is all we talk about. It's all we talk about. Yeah, man, this is awesome.

Because, you know, by the way, I was out at South by Southwest. And I felt like I was like that weird guy on the street, like, the end of Waldgarten's this year, you know, holding up the sign. And it was like, what are you talking about? That's a dream. But look, I think that, you know, the point around activity pub. being this very simple protocol, that all it does, it's, you know, two-way RSS is a good way to think about it, right? And it's the connection points that create the social graph. RSS wasn't really sort of thought about as like, oh, this is something where you have a person

who's actually publishing RSS, right? It was more publisher to individual, right? What activity pub does is it's like, well, it's an individual to another individual, or, could be an organization. And that very simple protocol, basically when you look at the effect of it, it creates a graph. It creates a social graph that is open. And that's huge. So the byproduct of Activity Pub gets you that, right? Now, when you come to monetization, you have to ask yourself, what's the kind of core protocol level thing you need to produce the friction for monetization? not to say, like, and try not to bake into that protocol some predefined way that it's going to work with a centralized company or whatever, right? But really create it in a way that's flexible so that it could be used in all sorts of different models.

So I think probably one of the most important protocol things would be some kind of tokenization, some sort of point system. Think of it like miles for the Fediverse, right? Some way where it was kind of built in, and then it could be monetized. It could not be, it might be monetized in a subscription model or maybe on a micropayments model. But that's the kind of thinking that I think you need to do now. So it is a middle ground. And I do think that there's this incredible opportunity to collaborate with people right now who are building this Fediverse to do something like that and create something that's fundamentally healthier, leads to a healthier business models. The reason I keep asking about money, which is kind of like the most boring part of

this all is because that's how you're going to get creators to start to use this stuff, right? You offer them a better deal than the big platforms. My joke about YouTube is that the lifecycle of every YouTuber is marked by the video that they make about how mad they are at YouTube. And if you just are a YouTuber long enough, you end up making that video. And that changes your relationship to YouTube permanently once you've made that video. How do you go capture those people? And then how do you prevent them from being as frustrated with the decentralized platform?

and then have the worst problem of there being no one to yell at. Yep. Right. At least YouTube, like, you can go yell at people at YouTube. Then the centralized platform, you're just yelling at sort of a loose conglomerate of incentive structures. Yeah, that's a great point. Well, you know, I think that it's a gradual process. So one of the things I think would be good to adjust in terms of how people are thinking about activity pub and the Fediverse is that you have to leave one platform to, you have to leave one platform to,

to join Fediverse. And that's just not the case. So, you know, I think it's important to be pragmatic. Initially, if you build an account on the Fediverse, right, as a creator, your main point there is to start to collect more audience and start to build an audience that ultimately you will have control over. And use that as a way to post a link to your YouTube video, post a link to your newsletter. That is a gradual way to start getting the ball rolling. And also, by the way, when you're on, every YouTube video you make say, hey, follow me on Macedon, right? Like, follow me in the Fediverse. You know, I have this account here, and if you follow me, you'll see other things that I'm posting that you can't see here on YouTube. And what you'll have is over time, more and more people will

start to follow that creator in the Fediverse. And then as these monetization capabilities start to come online in the Fediverse, you know, that say there's a Patreon type of model, or maybe they even just use Patreon and Patreon adopts activity pub, right? Which would be a great idea. Then over time, more and more of their monetization will come from the Fediverse. So I think that's probably what you're going to see. And the cool thing here is like, it's a no-brainer. It doesn't take that much work to create an account on Macedon today. It's a totally new social platform. There's fantastic people on there now. You get very high engagement. I see 10x or 100x the engagement on Massadon than I do on Twitter. And you don't have to just leave Twitter. You can still, you know, tell your Twitter

audience to like start following you on Macedon. And over time, you'll have a critical mass of creators there. Okay, we need to take a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about how this all actually appears in the apps that people use every day. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro

streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply.

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All right. We're back with Nilai and FlipBore. CEO Mike McHugh. We should talk about Flipboard because I think to Neil's point, this is still so much just like a word you say in rooms and no one knows what you're talking about. But you're in the process of trying to like actually make this real for people. And I think the stuff that you're doing in Flipboard mirrors a lot of what I'm seeing other companies start to do in the Fediverse. And so my first question is it seems like rather than reinvent the wheel and try to make Flipboard a gigantic on its own activity pub thing from the very beginning, your first move, is really centered on Mastodon. That seems to be what's happening everywhere. Everybody is saying, like, this is a big long road, but the first kind of killer app for all of this seems to be Mastodon. Is that right?

Do you see it that way? Like, why bet there before sort of building out your own thing? Well, yes, you're right. Mastodon is by far the number one implementation on activity pub. And it looks and feels kind of like Twitter. And there's a need for a Twitter alternative now, which didn't really exist a year ago, but now there is.

And so I think that that's a good place to start. Now, that said, there is going to be other experiences that embrace activity pub, right? WordPress, Tumblr, and Flipboard. And so really, when I zoom out here, I guess the thing I'm trying to make sure we do at Flipboard is not create just another Twitter clone, you know, just another thing that looks like Macedon, but it does things a little differently, right? I think, you know, it's really important to think about how these pieces fit together. would you use something like Macedon for? And what would you use something like Flipboard for? What are the different kinds of audiences that will use one or the other to the extent that they're going to make a choice? Flipboard is very much focused on the kind of mainstream audience.

So my mom and my 16-year-old daughter, right? Those are the two people. If I can get them to use the Fediverse, I know we're making progress. And that is what we're focusing Flipboard on, is to win people like that over. And the idea that all the publishers you work with, they're going to sort of back into adopting activity pub because they're going to publish to flipboard and then flip board will support it. Well, yeah, I, you know, so I think that this is a conversation we're talking about with publishers now and we can help be a helpful on-ramp for publishers to the extent that they need that. I think other publishers are able to, you know, stand up an instance and, you know, actually get going here. And I hope that they do.

Again, same argument we were just talking about for creators applies to publishers, right? why wouldn't you do this? It's like, this is your audience. It's like building a website right now, right? This is like a no-brainer. So I think that like, you know, I'm not, when I say stand up at instance, I don't mean, hey, you know, now the verge is a social network and everybody can join it, you know, unless you want to do that, which you absolutely.

I'm super want to do that. That's from my head is that completely. Exactly. Welcome to hell. But, you know, the FT, they opened it up so anybody could join, right? And they were like, oh, you know, this is hell, so we're out, right? But you don't have to open it up, right? You can say, okay, well, this is an instance where our journalists are going to have an account.

They're going to be able to communicate with users. People can follow them here. They know this is the actual author or writer, you know, or journalist. So I think that, yes, the publishers increasingly will come. And again, it's like a no-brainer. Why wouldn't you? Right. I mean, this is, it's just, it's more audience. It's more of an opportunity to get in early. you know, people in the Fediverse are extremely welcoming to new entrants right now. And you can build a really fantastic following now. So I think that's going to be happening more and more. Well, and I think even just in the like structure of Flipboard, this didn't click to me the first time we talked, but it just made sense to me out.

Like what you're describing is the original pitch you made for Flipboard about web articles. Right? You just said, like, look, worst case, what we are is a new way to see and sort through stuff that lives on the web. If you want to like make a deal with us and ingest your content and have it look beautiful and we can do all this stuff, we can sell your ads for you. Terrific. Or we will just essentially set up a rich link to your page and people can flip through it and sort through it in new ways. And that's essentially the same structure you're describing, right? Like if you want to just use this distributed, this new system for sending rich links, terrific. Or if you want to drill like six or seven levels down deeper, there's even cooler stuff you can do.

But the pitch is not that different, right? you're still just kind of doing flipboard things to the internet. So exactly. And, you know, this reminds me, by the way, of back when I joined Netscape, I used to be the guy that would go out and convince publishers to, like, build a website. So it's like, hey, the web is a really cool thing and you should build on it. And one of the things that I tried to do back then was help publishers not just take what they're doing in print and just pick it up and drop it down on the web.

It's a different world. The same thing is true here. So you don't want to just take like an RSS feed and drop it onto the Fediverse. Really, what this is about is the journalists who work at a publisher to actually start to curate and post content, by the way, not just from that publisher, but content that they're reading, content that's inspiring them, that's informing them to audiences. And the publisher instance becomes a collection of those thoughtful journalists. journalists who are building audiences on their own. And that is a very different approach to how most

publishers, you know, that just have a bot and RSS feed and put it out on Twitter, that doesn't build community, right? You need a genuine way for people to interact with other people, have conversations. So that's a different modality. And I think there's an opportunity to actually do that here. We're having this conversation in a really interesting, larger context. Twitter is whatever is happening. It's hard to even describe what is happening in Twitter. It's imploding. It's exploding. Something is forever changed with Twitter. At the same time, BuzzFeed just shut down BuzzFeed News. That has prompted a wave of articles and lamentations about the end of what you might call the social platform era where Facebook would send lots of

traffic to something like BuzzFeed News or Twitter would send lots of traffic to something like BuzzFeed News. That's over, right? These platforms are not sending lots of traffic to pages on the web anymore. They're trying to keep it all for themselves in vertical video. Do you see this as a response to that, is we've got to build a new way to send traffic around the open web? Or do you see this as something different and new? A bit of both. And I'll add to the challenges that the web is facing. The whole realization that advertising is violating people's privacy, that's an extinction level event. What we're seeing now are profoundly damaged monetization streams for publishers that are making it so that they cannot support their journalists and building out on the web.

And if you go to a web page, it's a disaster, right? There's pop-ups. There's ads everywhere. You can barely even find the content, right? And you've got belly fat ads and Outbrain and Tapula, and it just is a disgusting, horrible place. And a lot of what used to be great, content. So as GDPR and CCPA and other kind of well-meaning privacy things come online, it's only serving to make it even harder to sustain quality journalism, right? So with advertising. So the whole ad model is changing and will have to change drastically because it just doesn't work anymore. So this is another thing to add into that. So I think what you're seeing with the Fediverse, and this is coming back to why I see this is one of the most interesting and most powerful

opportunities since, you know, I really started building companies, is that this gets at everything that we know about online, about the internet, right? Not just content discovery and connecting to people, but it also gets that content presentation. It gets that monetization. It gets that moderation. It gets that the impact on our societies, the impact on our own mental health. This is a big moment. David's going to kill me because this is my other obsession. I'm going to work it into my the activity pub conversation. If you start talking about copyright law, I'm kicking you out. I'm not going to talk about it. Although I can.

Okay, good. No, I want to talk about search. The last thing that distributes traffic to web pages is Google Search. We see what is happening with AI. We see a company that needs to change how search works to just answer the question, maybe have a robot, somewhat accurately answer the question for you instead of sending you to some SEO optimized web page. When you talk about how bad web pages are, yep, it's pop-ups, yep. It's the sign up for our newsletter, interstitial that shows up.

But it's also how structurally. shirt every web page is to serve the Google robot instead of a human being. And that's changing too. Does that play into this for you that Google is about to break on top of everything else and like a generation of internet consumers might create new habits? Yeah, that is a great point. And the whole generative AI revolution is setting it up so that, you know, browsing the web from Google isn't going to be increasingly a thing. You know, you'll just stay on Google or on Bing. you know, why would you go click over to a link? So, yeah, that's a big part of this. And what I think is going to require, what's going to start to happen here is the very nature of what a website is,

what content is, and how journalists are adding value to the conversation is going to, is going to have to evolve. So, you know, anybody can write an article about Macedon, right? There's a whole bunch of them out there. And they tend to say the same things, right? You guys have been spending time actually digging down into the depths of the technical protocol that powers it and all of the different implications of that. So you're adding real value to this conversation, right? And that value can be captured by directly interacting with your audiences, right? Which you've had to do through third parties. You've had to do that through a publisher, which then had to do that through Google, you know, interfered with a business model around advertising so that came back to like what content

you would even, you know, be asked to write or would be able to write, right? So what's happening now is like true value, true thoughtful content is prized. You know, this generic stuff that you can get from chat GPT, like, okay, yeah, I can type in what is activity pub and I'll get a good answer. But this conversation here, for example, you know, this is the kind of stuff people are really looking for. Yeah, what makes this exciting is that you know I'm lying, there's one or two huge lies buried in the context of this. That's how I'm going to start competing with Chatsy-B-T is we're just going to insert some definite falsehoods along the way and you just have to suss them out. It's a good strategy. Excellent. Before we let you go here, Mike, the two things I want to talk about

are kind of the rest of this space a little bit because I think we conflate like there's activity pub and there's the Fedaverse and there's Mastodon and everybody talks about these all is the same thing. But also there's like, Blue Sky is out here with the AT protocol and Noster is a thing that Jack Dorsey talks a lot about. Where do you think this lands? Are we going to end up like everybody quotes that XKCD comic where it's like, you know, there are too many standards. Let's have one that governs everything. And then it's like, oh, no, now we have too many plus one standards. Does this land there?

Are we going to end up in this really awful place where everybody is trying to do their own flavor of decentralized and things just get worse? Like, what do you see when you look around the rest of the space? I think you're going to see that blue sky alt, ultimately would become part of the Fediverse. Blue Sky is very good. It is a hardcore, just exact Twitter clone. Yeah. It really is.

Yeah. And they've advanced the state of the thinking on some things like moderation and portability and things like that. That said, Activity Pub is a very simple, straightforward protocol. It reminds me of like HTTP, right? It's a very straightforward, simple, does one thing, does it really well. That doesn't mean that there won't be other protocols that will come in will specialize on things like portability or identity moderation.

So I think that you're going to see ultimately there will be bridges built between things like Blue Sky and things like, you know, Macedon or activity pub. Think of it this way. Remember how when we had email clients, initially they were Pop 3 based, right? Because that was like most people weren't online all the time. So you downloaded all your email to your laptop. That was how Pop 3 worked. And then IMAP came online.

And IMAP was a different protocol, different ways. of doing email had some extra functionality. Most email clients support both Pop 3 and IMAP, right? Maybe even to this day, I don't really know. I haven't been keeping on top of it. But what you would do is be able to use one email client and it would talk in Pop 3 or talk in IMAP, you know, whatever your server was. So I can see a scenario where there'll be bridges between these protocols, where clients will integrate both protocols. I believe that Blue Sky work in particular will just become part of the Fediverse. Yeah, Blue Sky seems to have gotten a lot. lot of things around like user experience. Well, because they just copied Twitter. They had a decade

of Twitter's work to build on. For sure. But it works, right? And it's like the thing for me is just like the usernames make more sense. Like the Macedon's things where you have two at symbols and it's an email address, but it's not an email address. It's just it's too much. And Blue Sky is like it seems to be well ahead on some of that stuff. So I kind of hope you're right that everybody learns from each other and we eventually find somewhere that actually makes sense. But then to that point, we're very much in the. this like rising tide lifts all boats thing in the fedaverse right everybody's welcoming to everybody because there's no real competition because the competition is still facebook but like play this out a few

years and this stuff gets really huge and you know flipboard is a is a big player in the in the fedaverse and everybody's on the fedroverse and then i don't know like smart news shows up and it's like smart news dot social we're in the fedroverse now like can this work without eventually getting competitive like are you going to have to try to ruthlessly destroy other fedever's companies 10 years from now in order to stay successful? Like, how long does this goodwill last? It lasts as long as you're providing genuine value to users, to people, right? I want to stop calling them users, in fact, because they're just people that are communicating

with each other, and they're looking for genuine value from others. And that might be an individual, might be a creator, it might be a company. If you stop doing that, then, yeah, you're going to get swamped by somebody else. Because lock-in basically is gone, right? Like the price of being bad goes way up because it's going to get so much easier to leave. Exactly. That idea of decentralizing the innovation is so powerful. Let's just look at another example.

You could imagine where somebody could just do nothing but make amazing filters for video, like awesome, augmented reality, virtual reality, cool AI filters. That's all they do, day and day out. That doesn't have to be part of. a social media platform, right? And I guarantee you that like somebody just totally focused on that, they're going to build, you know, really something really cool. And now they can't. Now people can actually say, hey, you know what? I'm using this social experience and I want to integrate these filters in. So there's going to be a lot of innovation that's going to happen similar to like the AOL to web

transition, right? With AOL, there was only certain number of things you could do to like book airline tickets. Like, you could book an airline ticket, yes, but it was like going through the saber system and all of that. Now you have like this incredible ability to like find the lowest ticket and the right time frame with all these other connections to hotels and other travel kinds of experiences. That didn't exist before, right? So I think what you're going to see, rather than everybody just trying to be the same thing, you know, which is what's happening now. Instagram looks like YouTube looks like TikTok looks like Snap. It's like they're all. all just becoming more and more of the same thing.

That's going to end, and you're going to have this blossoming of innovation that, yeah, they'll still be competitors, but it'll be much more on a level playing field where the best ideas will win, and the most genuine experiences will be adopted. How do you think the big platform companies are going to play into this? There's a report that Meta is working on an activity pub Twitter clone. At some point, if this goes the way that you're saying, YouTube will have to do something How do you think the big platforms handle this? Do they do embrace, extend, extinguish, and start, and then somehow centralize it again?

Or do they play nicely? Well, you know, hard to say. But, you know, if we look at past history, again, come back to AOL, you know, they had that little internet box. And that was what they did. And they just like, yeah, now we do internet, right? So it depends on how Facebook really approaches this. Is this just like a rogue team inside of Facebook and like, okay, now we do activity pub. cool, we're open, but mostly they haven't changed anything. Or do they go all in? I remember when

Bill Gates decided one day, it was December 7th in 1995, I think, where he was like, you know what? We are all in on the internet. Like everything we do will now be internet, every single thing. That was a big moment, right? So is Facebook going to react that way or will they react more like AOL? I don't know. I have this vision of Mark Zucker, but being like, that whole metaverse thing, pause, activity pub. Yeah, Metaverse to Fediverse. Yeah, that's pretty good. That is pretty good.

All right, we need to go here in a minute, but before we do, Nelai, why aren't you on the Fediverse? I cannot tell you the number of people who are like, is this fake Nelai bot on the Fediverse, which A, is a perfect elucidation of all the problems on the Fediverse. But Nelai, what the hell? Yeah, so I have an account of Massa on Social, which people have found and are replying to you, try to get me to use. then there is a Verge reader or a Vergecast listener who made a bot called the Verge.

That reposts our quickposts into the Fediverse. You can just follow that account and you get all my quick posts in the Federer's. I think that's super cool. But the real reason that I haven't engaged this is I'm just letting my mind heal. I've spent a full decade on Twitter. I've had too many emotional experiences with Twitter good and bad. I've run my brain in 240 characters for too long. And I think it's healthy for me to not think about the rhythms of my day that way for a little bit.

I think fundamentally, I am a true believer in what activity pub will do. I want there to be a more decentralized internet. I really think that everybody who makes media for a living, who is a creator, should think about their relationship to their audience in a more direct way. And that's what Twitter did for people. It was just the default answer for every question for so long. And before I dive head first and do it again, I would just like to take myself out of that way of thinking for a little bit

and come at it with just like a fresher perspective, a healthier state of mind. I don't know if it's working. My daughter turned five and we had a birthday party and I said a Twitter joke to a group of five-year-olds. That's what I mean. Like my brain is broken and they had no idea. what I was saying. I just want to just release that tension for a little bit longer before I dive

back into posting things that look like tweets all day. I mean, that's an annoyingly good response. That's a great response. It won't work, and I expect you to be back very quickly. Oh, yeah, no, I'm poisoned. And I'm just like, it's like, can I get the, how much of the toxin can I get out of my system? It's not going to be all of it. But I think this is the next turn. My inclination is to come to that next turn with as fresh of a slate as possible, not all of the old habits. Fair enough. Okay, so Mike, to go back to just as we go here, to go back to one of the first things you talked about, Nick Negroponte got up and said, by next year, everyone will have heard of this and be using this. Put us on a timeline here. Like, not for it takes over the world and

this is the only thing we do, but like, how long is it going to take before like this idea and these concepts get full, honest to God, like your mom and your daughter mainstream? Well, This year is incredibly meaningful. This will be the year where you have the experiences actually happen, where the mainstream audiences can come. I think you'll also be going to see this year a lot of important creators and interesting people join. And then probably next year is where it really goes fully mainstream. That's fast. I think so.

I really do. That doesn't mean all the monetization and, you know, moderate everything will be completely fixed or, you know, thought through. those things will all be evolving as we go. But I do think that, like, well, I mean, I'll tell you this. I think I'm working to get my mom to use this year, 100% this year, right? She doesn't use Twitter. Good for her. And just, you know, have it be something where she's like, okay, this is, I get this.

This makes sense to me. For my daughter, I think that'll be more a next year thing. And the reason for that is that you just need more creators of that TikTok era to come to the Fediverse. And it's going to take longer for that, I think, just pragmatically to happen. Fair enough. I like it. All right. Well, we need to go. Thank you so much. This was really fun. And I suspect the three of us are going to have to do this a bunch more times over the next two years because this isn't going away. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you guys for having me. All right. That's enough activity pub. That's it for the Vergecast today.

Thanks so much to Dan, Neli, and Mike for joining the show. There's lots more, as always, on all this stuff that we talked about at the verge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also just hit the homepage. It's good time. I also wrote a big feature about activity pub. If you want to get even deeper in the weeds on the future of social, there's lots in there for you. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or your own weather setup that you want to tell us about, you can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or keep calling the hotline. Like I say, every week, it is my favorite thing that we do on this show.

866, Verge11. Send us all of your tech thoughts and questions and ideas and feelings. and we're going to do a hotline episode again soon. Please keep everything coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brook Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Virgecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We just want a Webby.

Thank you again so much for all of your votes. It means so much to me and the whole team here. Eli, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about the chaos at Twitter, Apple headsets, whatever that humane demo was last week, and all the biggest news in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.