Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Protocol Wars - The Fediverse Explained!

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

In this episode, we dive deep into the origins of two of the leading social networks and the protocols they run on - Threads/ActivityPub and Bluesky/AT protocol. If you've been wondering what the heck the Fediverse is, this episode is for you! Music provided by Epidemic Sound  Special Thanks to: Evan Prodomou at Activitypub Eugen Rochko at Mastodon John O'Nolan at Ghost Mike McCue at Flipboard Adam Mosseri at Meta Jay Gruber at Bluesky Ryan Barrett at Bridgy-Fed Sources: W3C: https://www.w3.org/ Identica logo: By _Identi.ca_logo.png: Status.net Teamderivative work: Valarauco (talk) - _Identi.ca_logo.png, CC BY 3.0, https://bit.ly/4cKI4le NY Times Elon and Zuck Cage Match: https://nyti.ms/3XmP2IM ActivityPub Graphic: Image creator: mray https://bit.ly/3T6sYjh Activity Streams graphic: By User:Unoli - https://bit.ly/4dIoUhi Huffpost Twitter Clown Car: https://bit.ly/3YWzPiW Original Hacker News Mastodon Post: https://bit.ly/3Z9oeNk NBC News Elon buys Twitter: https://bit.ly/4dwNBx7 Bloomberg Elon Buys Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Z4X3mW CBS News Elon Buys Twitter: https://bit.ly/3yUBaw6 NBC News Elon Buys Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Xk5WYB NY Times Elon Buys Twitter: https://nyti.ms/3z8xLcW NBC News Twitter Rebrands to X: https://nbcnews.to/3MqIUc8 Verge Twitter Paid Verification: https://bit.ly/3Xn4o06 Forbes How Facebook Beat Myspace: https://bit.ly/3Z3B27X Guardian Digg users revolt: https://bit.ly/3AF2v5U Verge Reddit API Shutdown: https://bit.ly/3YWsyzE Adweek Reddit Platform Visibility: https://bit.ly/3MnLX4Z Elon F You to Advertisers: https://bit.ly/3XjY35w 404Media AI Shrimp Jesus Explained: https://bit.ly/476VGWJ Forbes Threads Fastest Growing App: https://bit.ly/3T4VAco Waveform Secret History of the Internet: https://bit.ly/4dDCmTv Instagram Statement about Political Content: https://bit.ly/4cJxw65 Wired Google Launches Buzz: https://bit.ly/3X7f69s Business Insider Google Buzz Privacy Flaw: https://bit.ly/3X2ThIbFTC Charges Google: https://bit.ly/3AD76FA Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Timothee Chalamet, Edward Norton, El Fanny, Monica Barbaro. A complete unknown. Only in theaters Christmas Day. Really quick fun fact before we start to get you guys freaking hyped about this. Perfect. The CEO of Blue Skies' name is Jay Graber, but their given name is Lantian, which in Mandarin means blue sky. and that is a complete coincidence no it's not yes it is she was hired for the for it after jack dorsey had already

named it that's incredible what if jack just really knew he was gonna pick her does jack know mandarin because that might explain it. Dude, have you seen Silicon Valley? Who named Blue Sky? Jack Dorsey. And he named it before knowing this person. Yes. Unbelievable. I know.

I know. Unbelievable. I know. I told you. Yo, what's going on people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm your host on this very special episode of the bonus episode of the Waveform Podcast 2024.

What's your name? David. That's David. And I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And today we are going to dive extremely deep. Deep. Into the Fediverse. Ah, the cheese land.

The cheese land, the land of federated cheeses. Cool, cool. Of which there are many. Okay, a lot of people have been asking us a lot of questions about what the heck the Fediverse is. There's this word that keeps getting swirled around the internet. Up and down and left and right, people talking about this. Threads is adopting it. People don't know how it works. So today, we decided to do a deep dive episode.

This episode is, probably unofficially, called Protocol Wars. There are many protocol wars, but this is the protocol wars of ActivityPub and the ad protocol is there gonna be a winner or we don't know yet we don't know who the winner there is no winner okay there may be a winner in 20 years it's an actively fought war currently yeah cool yes where'd the cheese come from like fed I would think the dad joke would land well. I missed that one.

We've been making this joke for months. You've been sitting there all quiet. I get it. Perfect. Okay. I've gone down this deep, deep, dark rabbit hole about the Fediverse and the app protocol, interviewed a bunch of people and have come out enlightened. Fedipilled

you might say. Whoa. Activitypilled. Meaning you've taken a side? No, not really. He's atpilled too. Atpilled as well. Okay. I haven't really taken a side. We will have a discussion about which protocol you think is better because I'm going to lay out all the different things that these

protocols do, what they're good at, what they're meant for and then we can have a little bit of a discussion around that. Deal. Yep. You guys ready? Deal. Let's do it. All right. Okay, so at the time of this recording, it's around mid-2024.

And I know it probably doesn't seem like it, but Elon Musk bought Twitter a little over two years ago. And he rebranded it to X a little over a year ago. Now, by all accounts, this was a pretty controversial move, right? He immediately fired 80% of the staff, started charging for verification, started paying people for engagement, and just generally, he really changed the vibe

and the tone of the platform. Now, generally, throughout internet history, when there's a huge change in company policy, usually nothing really happens. People get upset for a while, but eventually they just go back to their regular habits. But sometimes the users can defect and move to an entirely different platform altogether.

Like in May, 2009, Facebook finally passed MySpace users, partially because of how bad MySpace's user experience had gotten. Like there was an influx of ads, it had a choppy UI. past Myspace users, partially because of how bad Myspace's user experience had gotten. Like there was an influx of ads, it had a choppy UI. There was all these decisions that would eventually lead to their death spiral into oblivion. And in 2010, Digg redesigned its site in a way

that felt so user hostile that most of the users actually pivoted over to Reddit and turned that into what it is today. This kind of defection doesn't really happen anymore. And that's primarily because of something called a social graph. Do you guys know what a social graph is? In general? Yeah, I'm familiar with the concept, which is like your social graph as a person on a social network is all the people you follow all the people who follow you all the people you engage with and just the general circle of engagement on social networks is your graph. Right.

Yeah. Right. You have different social graphs on different networks. On Instagram, you have certain followers. On Twitter, you have certain followers, whatever. But the point is, people only really want to use a social network that has users on it, right? Like, that's a recursive issue.

A new social network pops up every other week, and some people will join, hoping that it's going to be the next big thing. But without a critical mass of users, those same people are just going to stop using that network, and it dies. So everyone stays in the same place, no matter what the company does to change their product. I mean, look at Reddit. Reddit gave a clear middle finger to its users by effectively shutting down its API and its third-party app community. And yet, traffic is currently exploding. So even though Twitter now X is still holding on, there was and still kind of is a reason to think

that it could just go out of business at any time. If you cut a ton of your staff, that's a pretty risky business move. It was purchased for basically double more than it's worth. And Elon's been telling advertisers to go F themselves, which has left the site with not the highest quality advertisers or probably revenue. If you're on X, you probably know what I mean. If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money,

go F yourself. That few months around the acquisition of Twitter was pretty much the best possible Go f*** yourself. P2, which was run by a bunch of ex-Twitter employees that didn't go so well. Post News popped up, which was trying to change the ways we consumed information, and they've closed down. And other apps like Hive received some, like, temporary popularity, but not nearly as much as they needed. But here's the thing. Like, Twitter was founded in 2006. Reddit in 2005. Facebook in 2004, still pretty early on in the Web 2.0 era.

And whatever the next era of the internet is, nobody wants it to be owned and operated by this small number of really powerful companies and really eccentric billionaires. For a lot of reasons. A lot of the companies that made it out of the early era of the internet eventually found pretty huge success, but it's been about two decades or so since then. And pretty much all of these platforms have, for the lack of a better word, and I'm paraphrasing here, been encrapified, meaning they have significantly degraded their user experience in order to achieve unlimited growth. it somehow gets worse you think it's at it's worst already and it gets worse it just keeps getting worse somehow yeah like at this

point facebook giant land of ai garbage yeah have you been on facebook lately it's crazy it's like i say that out loud sometimes but then i went on facebook and i was like oh oh it's just all ai generated garbage and you think like oh no one's looking at this and i'll have like 10 000 comments yeah that are like this is amazing yeah and the comments are all ai bots too probably probably yeah should we be engagement farming on facebook are we missing an opportunity right i don't think you get i don't know it's probably not worth it my instagram lately the first post it always shows me is someone i don't follow. Has nothing to do with anyone that I follow. Dang.

Or a real, right? It's crazy. Trying to expand your graph. A real from someone I don't follow. Yeah, real from someone you don't follow. My graph is shut down. No one else is invited. But really, are you really going to just move over to another centralized platform,

hoping for dear life that your friends move over as well, and hoping that that company has your best interest in heart and doesn't degrade in the exact same way as the other companies. Some people might, and a lot of people might try, but most people are just tired, okay? Like nobody wants to start a new social media account over and over again,

especially people with businesses that have staked their livelihoods on these platforms. This is the biggest motivation behind the decentralized social web, or the Fediverse, this new kind of social media that could change the way that we interact online and is actually gaining a lot of traction right now. Can I tell you an analogy that this reminds me of? Yeah. And then you can tell me if this is like a good analogy or not.

When you were talking through like these new social networks popping up and not getting enough critical mass and then disappearing, that kind of feels analogous to like solar systems and like the universe where if there are a whole bunch of- Not where I thought you were going. Okay. So hear me out. Hear me out, right? If you have a whole bunch of mass yeah it can all sort of drift through space for a while you've seen the asteroid belt or whatever and then early in the universe these these masses were just kind of floating around and if enough of them

got together in the right place at just the right time with the right circumstances they would start to orbit each other and they would have enough mass to become a planet or a star or whatever yeah yeah and i think the older the universe gets the more of these like obvious uh things that we have we have planets now we have stars now and there's still some of this mass floating around but none of it is quite enough to gather enough critical mass or maybe it might get enough mass and it might slowly become like a small object and then fall apart and there's not enough gravity to keep it together. Or it's just niche enough that it has enough mass to still exist. It's just kind of like orbiting slowly.

Yeah, but small somewhere. Right. So like we have a star, like all our planets orbit this one really large star and that's all great. And maybe there's a little tiny bit of solar mass floating around somewhere a few thousand light years away from our solar system, and it's kind of there for a bit. It's kind of orbiting, technically. And then it falls apart, and that's T2. That's it.

Well, T2 existed for like only one year, or one light year. They made it, though? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I think that's a good analogy. I was going to say, if we're following this analogy, then the Fediverse is like wormholes. Right.

You can just take your Earth, put it somewhere else. Yeah. Around another star. We're looking at the next universe. Right. We're looking at another way of building the universe. Sure. Federating social media promises to give you the same connections you've already got,

the same core ways to interact no matter what platform you're on. It removes the power from the corporations that are holding those users hostage with social graphs, and it makes those platforms compete for the quality of the platform. Crazy idea, right? Like you might remember our secret history of the internet episode where all those networks got connected over this universal protocol, which made all of these siloed networks interconnect. Like imagine if that could happen with social media. In this episode, I want to talk about the two leading protocols that could make this happen and the platforms that are running them.

It's still really early days, so whichever ends up winning is still really up in the air, but it's probably good to understand how these protocols work and then you can make your own decisions about what could work better. Let's get into it. The two platforms I want to talk about today are Threads and Blue Sky, or more specifically, the protocols underlying them, ActivityPub, and the AT or AT protocol. They both have some similarities, but they're also really fundamentally different, and to fully understand them and why they exist, I think it's important to get a little history into their founding and development.

Okay, so if you haven't heard, Threads is a relatively new social media app from Meta. And less than a year after ChatGPT became the fastest growing app to hit 100 million users, Threads did it a lot faster. What ChatGPT managed to do in about a month, Threads did in five days. And currently, at least at the time of the recording,

a little over a year after launch, they're sitting at a little over 200 million users, which is a lot of people. Didn't we do the math? It's like 10% of Instagram's base or something like that. It is 10% of Instagram. That's crazy. Did you guys know that Instagram has over 2.3 billion accounts?

Active users? Yeah. That's crazy. That's really... I mean, Instagram's worldwide. 2.3 billion accounts? Active users. Yeah. That's crazy. I mean, Instagram is worldwide. Yeah. Threads is not yet worldwide. I thought Pitbull was worldwide. No, Threads is Mr. Worldwide.

Out of a series. Don't get it twisted. It's in a lot more countries now. Hitting 100 million users in five days is kind of nuts. Now, to be fair, it mostly did this by bootstrapping itself to Instagram accounts and making signups basically just hitting a button, but still. So normally, threads wouldn't be all that interesting, at least to me. Like it was basically made to be Twitter with Mark Zuckerberg instead of Elon, which really

doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. And I wouldn't say it's actually fully replaced what Twitter used to be, considering it's got this insistence on defaulting to algorithmic feeds that push engagement bait, and it's got the stubbornness against elevating any kind of political content. The most interesting thing about threads is Meta's commitment to support the ActivityPub protocol. It is a mechanism for making social networks work more like email. My name is Evan Pedromo. I am the co-author of the Activity Puff specification published by the W3C. And I am a social web hacker and open social web advocate. I started a distributed social network called Identica

in 2008. There was kind of a wave of Twitter clones right after the Twitter launch happened. A lot of folks were like, hey, this is a cool mechanism. We should do something similar. And I launched one called Identica, and it had a mechanism to connect multiple network networks. And that attracted a lot of attention. At the time, we had a lot of folks start using it, the software was open source. So we had a lot of clones and those clones would connect a lot of different people could kind of spin up their own versions of Identica based on that code, or they could just use the same underlying protocol as Identica to interoperate with each other.

This meant that they could see each other's posts. They could like each other's posts. They could reshare each other's posts. The works. This is an example of a federated social network. Just like the United States is a federation, right? Like this group of states with independent laws, but also this higher order of laws under the constitution that could freely move and trade with each other. A federated social network is kind of the same idea. It has its own rules and algorithms depending on a platform

you're using. But all of these different platforms could freely interact with each other and interoperate in their own federation or fediverse can i can i say something real quick just before we launch into this sure you see on on twitter on x all the time like silicon valley folks being like why would anyone go get an english degree what a what a waste of time you you stupid idiot why don't you go get a computer degree like me? Where is this going? And then because we're using the word Fediverse, we've decided the word Fediverse is the word for this. There's a word that is the noun form of a group of federated individuals. The word is federation.

And all of the freaking programmers who have never read a book and are dunking on English majors don't know the word Federation. I would say most people... Make it up words. Most people of our age demographic, when they think of Federation, think of the Star Wars Federation. It's Star Trek.

There's no Federation in Star Wars. Star Trek Federation. And the thing is, I don't... It's hard to associate... I don't know. It feels evil to me. The word Federation... The Federation is the good guys in Star Trek.

What if it feels evil? This is crazy. What if Fediverse is a concatenation between Federation and Metaverse? It's universe. Here's a man. Or universe. Yeah. Here's a man who, luckily not Metaverse.

Thank God. That's my rant. I'm just like, whenever y'all are like you twitter twitter engineers like why would you ever read a book and get a human it's like this is why so we're not making up words on the freaking spot they love making they just they coined the term though they love coining terms but they coined a term of which there is already a word that's what they do imagine how people would react if you're like, Marques, join the federation. No!

That is how the English language works. You wouldn't associate that with a social media federation, though. I absolutely would. Especially if it was a federated bunch. I think you'd have to describe, you'd have to be like, join this social media federation. The social federation. Tech companies love making new words that describe existing things.

Like, instead of a computational photography algorithm that enhances details in the mids it's deep fusion now like they name everything also it's the thing they love this is made by a random user as well and to ellis's point i think the people that are pushing this have realized that it's a bad word and have started calling it the social web. Yeah. That's another word. That's true. I actually talked to a few people and some people were like, no, but Fediverse

is fun and we should use it. And I was like, I don't know. There is a federation in Star Wars. I knew it. It's the trade federation. You doubted me. And they are evil. They are evil. This is why it feels evil to me. That's a good point. Thank you. Well, because Star wars is better than star trek oh what episode is this what's going on hot takes episode is anakin the good guy

okay anakin had a point i'm just saying oh my god we need to oh i don't know okay do you think anakin was on t2 or mastodon can't get that username on Mastodon. Okay. Let's get back into this. This is what you guys sign up for when you join Waveform. Evan's ideas generated a lot of buzz at the time, but mostly in pretty niche communities.

But it did generate enough buzz that it got the attention of Google, who a couple of years later decided to launch Google Buzz. Okay, so this is kind of an aside, but I think it's pretty worth telling cause it's kind of fun. Google Buzz was this microblogging service that was built into Gmail.

The dream of Google Buzz was that it was run on this open social protocol stack that could plug into all these different services, like a nexus of social media. According to Wikipedia, it could plug into YouTube and Blogger and even Twitter to interoperate between all those platforms. And it even plugged into Identica, Evan's software. So you could post from your Buzz on Gmail and then follow those Buzz accounts on your Identica feed. If you post it on YouTube, other people were supposed to be able to see those videos on their Buzz. It was kind of this like post once, share everywhere idea, and it was a pretty good idea. So as much as those really niche open social communities

got super excited about Buzz, the launch had a lot of different security issues that were mostly oversights from Google that they just didn't think about. Primarily, the idea that signing up and following accounts was integrated right into Gmail. Like normally on a social network, you gotta sign up,

you gotta manually go and follow everyone else. And this is like a pretty tough point of friction between social networks, right? Like just like Instagram bootstrapped the social graph of Instagram to launch threads, Google bootstrapped Gmail contacts to connect people in Buzz, just not in a good way.

Like Google Buzz launched with this auto follow feature that would automatically follow a bunch of different people that you had communications with, regardless if you wanted to follow them or not. And by default, people could publicly see the accounts of the people you interacted with the most. It wasn't great. It's kind of escalated to a pretty insane degree and ended in a lot of lawsuits that you can go read about separately. Google eventually did switch to this suggested follow model, but the damage was kind of already done by then. Can you guess how long Google Buzz lasted?

It was launched on February 9th, 2010, and it got closed down on December 15th, 2011. Not great. 15th, 2011. Not great. When Google moved on and decided they didn't want to do social stuff anymore, that world kind of, we went into kind of a nuclear winter of like open social. Like as much as the point of an open social network is to take away consolidated power from these giant companies, getting the backing of someone as big as Google can really help these smaller services flourish, right? Because if Google is onboarding all these users, you have the opportunity

to build all these other smaller platforms that people can use too. So without Google's support, things were feeling pretty bad. But then in 2015, about four years after Google Buzz shut down, the World Wide Web Consortium reached out to Evan's Open Social Network group that he was chairing, which he called the Federated Social Web Summit. Now, if you don't know, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is this standards group that maintains things like HTML, CSS, XML, all these internet standards that everyone uses right now. all these internet standards that everyone uses right now. It was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee,

the guy that invented the World Wide Web, and who we talked about in our secret history of the internet series. See the W3C wanted to develop a standard for social media because by 2015, it had kind of already become a part of our social fabric. And as much as it seems like the closed source, like consolidated version of social media

was exactly as it would have always developed, that's not really the case. We all know the experience of getting an email address from your employer, from your university, maybe getting a commercial one from Gmail. But we understand that you can get email addresses from lots of different places, but you can still send email to people on other servers. So even though I'm on the OpenEarth.org domain and you're on the Gmail.com domain, we can still converse as if we were using the same mail server. And that's because those are separate servers that are connected using open standards. We've gotten very used to having our social networks not work that way. If you're on Instagram and I'm not on Instagram, I just can't follow you. Right. Like email works differently on this standard set of protocols.

works differently on this standard set of protocols. Like you can use Gmail or Outlook or Superhuman or Hotmail or Yahoo or whatever you want, and you still receive and send the same information. Like they can have different features built on top of them, but the fundamental email features still work. And it's kind of interesting that social media didn't develop in this way, right? Like social media developed in this weird siloed closed way, which, you know, has its pros and cons. But lately, I think we've been starting to see more of the cons.

So over the next three or so years, Evan and a group of 30-ish other people developed the ActivityPub protocol, which used this previously developed data structure standard called ActivityStreams. A really great computer scientist named James Snell did Activity Streams. And then there are four other authors, Christine Lemmer Weber, Jessica Talon, Aaron Shepard, and Amy Guy, who are listed ahead of me on the Activity Pub.

And let me just say, pretty amazing that we have a woman-led standard. It's so rare to see that in any kind of standard. Now, activities, if you're wondering, are basically a standardized set of actions that can be taken over a social media network or really anything federated over ActivityPub. So think like the like, the repost, the quote, the comment, images and videos and audio. These are all activities that can be streamed over ActivityPub. So if I'm on Mastodon and you're on Threads and we're both federated, I can like your post and it shows up as a toot for you. Think of it like a Rosetta Stone for social actions. I get it.

I have a split view of how this could go. Okay. One version is where we all live happily ever after in the Fediverse. And the other is the pillars of the universe of the internet that we had where these giant star systems formed and the only reason you would leave is if there was actually something bad about it. This is what I wrote down. Social network needs features, UI, and users.

And that's essentially what makes it the social graph. It's mostly users users but you need these three things and if MySpace was the big social network in this style and they started ruining it with like ads or something went horrible there was

enough reason that people would actually leave and go to one that didn't ruin one of these things like UI or features. Facebook, for example. Right. And so Facebook became the next thing, and then people started joining Facebook, and it had this critical mass.

And then it got to a point where everyone who is going to come online and start using this feature more or less is now. Yeah, and no one leaves. Now, if Facebook ruins part of their UI yeah some small amount of people will find it ruined and will go to this new social network but they won't have the users right and they'll come back to Facebook because it's still good enough that it's better than not having the users right so there's so you're kind of stuck now,

and we have created the giants, and we're living with these giants now. Yeah. And that's not too big to fail, but it's pretty close. Kind of, yeah. There was this moment where everyone was like, Elon took over Twitter, he's firing everyone,

they're getting kicked out of their HQ, it's happening, one of the giants is disappearing. Yeah. And so everyone hopped on, Mastodon, T2, we're finally gonna take one of the giants is disappearing yeah and so everyone hopped on mastodon t2 we're finally going to take one of these giants down right but none of them could combo all of these things right and eventually people went okay never mind t2 is not actually okay mastodon it's cool it's got some ideas but all right yeah and then threads is the interesting one because they kind of hacked the user's part.

Yeah. And so it was just everyone who's already on a different giant clicked a button. And also now I'm on threads and I'm following everyone. And so it felt like it was a new thing. Right. But it's not new. Yeah.

That's where I'm at. We're kind of stuck with the pillars that we have. With all of this, though, it does this. And it puts the users it crosses it takes users out of one of the things that is you need to be in the social graph and it now when you switch you don't you have the exact same users because they're all part of the same thing yeah yeah so it makes switching more free like you can actually make those. There's lots of people who wanted to get off Twitter, but are still on it.

Me, one of them because of the users and a lot of other things there. I don't go on Twitter every day and I'm like, oh man, this is so great. Everything's just like it used to be. If I could go somewhere else that out all the other users and still better feed and features,

I would love that. That'd be great. Right. And the question is, can we get enough people to start engaging in this new thing to actually have a new pillar, like a new UI? That is definitely the question. That is exactly where we find ourselves now. But the cool thing about it is that you have all these small asteroids and these small islands of people that are on these new platforms that are all federating.

The cool thing about them federating is they're all talking to each other. So you have this mass of all of these objects together that are all interconnected. So it feels like you've got the users, hopefully. There's enough users that a new platform isn't totally empty. It's got all the users already. It just needs to nail the other two. Yeah.

And if that platform ruined the experience, you move somewhere else. But there is account portability that they're working on and you should be able to take your social graph with you. These are the foundations

of the social web. And I think it's really important to understand that context to understand what happens next. We're going to take a quick break. But after the break, we're going to talk about Mastodon. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh.

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Skip to the good part and get groceries, meals, and more delivered right to your door on Skip. You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience. And lead by example. You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces, a message from the government of Canada. Okay, so while Activity Pub was being written, this guy in Europe named Eugene Rochko was having some pretty valid concerns about Twitter.

Like, as important as Twitter had become, it wasn't exactly profitable. Twitter was growing really fast, but it never really figured out a way to actually make money. Like they made enough, some, but reports saying that they might close down any day were pretty much nonstop, which led Mark Zuckerberg to say that Twitter was basically a clown car that crashed into a gold mine. So around 2016, Eugene decided to do something about it. Eugene had known about all of these open social protocols, but at the time, they were kind of used for super niche technical communities and they weren't really centered around user friendliness.

So he started working on something called Mastodon. I'm Eugene Rochko. I am the founder and CEO of Mastodon. And the reason that I started working on it was because I felt like Twitter was not doing well. And I've been using Twitter since 2008. So I was quite a heavy power user. And I felt like it was something very important for the world because it was like an instant global communications platform, but at the same

time it was in the hands of a single company that was seemingly on the verge of some kind of disaster from day to day. I mean at that point they were not doing well financially and there were talks that they were gonna get bought out by either Disney or Peter Thiel or something like that. And it didn't feel right that that was how it worked and I wanted to see if there was something else. And Mastodon was not like an innovation in itself because the idea wasn't new and I didn't invent the protocol that it was on or anything like that but it was just my take on the concept that already existed of decentralized social media.

There were different platforms that worked with similar protocols, but they lacked a certain mainstream appeal. And I place a lot of importance on design and user friendliness, and I just wanted to try to do a better execution of a social media platform. So Mastodon is kind of similar to Identica in that it's this open source social media network that anyone can like spin up an instance of. anyone can like spin up an instance of. You might've seen mastodon.social, but there's also things like disabled.social or mass.town or mastodon.xyz. There's all these instances of Mastodon

that can intercommunicate with each other, but they have their own set of moderation and rules. So Eugene went and posted Mastodon on Hacker News and it got its first batch of users. And for a couple of years, there were these major events that made people realize that maybe centralized social media was not what they wanted to be using. Like Eugene specifically called out that Gamergate

was a pretty big wake up call for people in terms of the harassment they wanted to deal with on social media. And there was this huge delete Facebook movement with the Cambridge Analytica scandal where this outside firm was using Facebook user data without their consent and was using that data to advance political motives.

So originally, Mastodon was using Ostatus, which was this decentralized protocol that was actually also written by Evan. But around 2017, when they were finishing up the ActivityPub standardization, the W3C and Evan reached out to Eugene to see if he'd be interested in testing it. What we did was we implemented two protocols at the same time during that time.

So Massadon was speaking both Ostatus and ActivityPub for probably a year until basically most of the networks switched over. And then we could just drop the old code and stick with ActivityPub. And over the last few years, more and more of these small services have been popping up, adopting ActivityPub and federating. Like now there's PeerTube, which is this federated YouTube alternative that launched in October, 2018. There's PixelFed, which is a federated Instagram alternative, which launched in December, 2018.

And slowly but surely the Fediverse has been populating with all sorts of decentralized versions of these popular services. But of course, if you're gonna unseat an incumbent, you kind of need to reach a critical mass, which at the time seemed like a pretty distant future. And then Elon Musk bought Twitter. The big breaking news this afternoon, Elon Musk's Twitter takeover.

Elon Musk has agreed to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. We are following breaking news. The deal is done. Twitter has been sold to Elon Musk. Twitter's board accepted an offer from the billionaire to buy the social media company and take it private. And ever since Elon bought Twitter, these calls to move to a more decentralized version of the social web have kind of amplified tenfold. There was immediately a huge influx of new Mastodon accounts after that happened. And Eugene said that it got so hard to keep up with

that they actually had to pause Mastodon signups for a short period of time. But luckily it's not just Mastodon that's the answer to this problem. Other bigger platforms are taking notice of this too. This seems like the perfect opportunity to move to a new way of thinking about the web, not just socially, but in general. Hi, I'm Mike McHugh. I'm the CEO of Flipboard.

When Elon took over Twitter, I left Twitter. I joined Mastodon and I started looking at what was happening there with ActivityPub and the Fediverse. And it dawned on me that like this was the beginnings of the open social web and that it would have profound implications for Flipboard, for all of our users, for how Flipboard works and give us the opportunity to tear down the walls around Flipboard, open it all up and actually make Flipboard a part of the open social web. Like since the acquisition, products like Flipboard, WordPress, Tumblr, Ghost, and a bunch of others have actually committed to using ActivityPub to try to unify around an alternative idea,

not just an alternative platform. There's been some movement, maybe not enough to change things immediately, but probably in the future. And then in July, 2023, Instagram launched Threads. So at first, Threads just kind of looked like the thing everyone was expecting. Like Instagram was already working on this notes feature,

which already supported text and video. But the weirdest thing about Threads is that when it launched in July, 2023, they committed to supporting ActivityPub. Meta had committed to supporting the OpenSocial web. Now, this is so weird, right? I mean, this is Meta. This is the company that either buys you or outbuilds you.

So supporting an OpenSocial protocol that actually gives you the ability to leave for a different platform, I mean, that's a really weird concept. So why would they support this? I have some ideas. I don't know if you guys remember this, but in around April 2021, Apple pushed out this update that forces apps to manually ask users if their data can be tracked.

Meta launched this whole advertising campaign pleading with users to please keep letting apps track your data, because that was kind of the main thing making them money. So maybe it's that, but it's probably more complicated. So I decided to ask around. My name is John O'Nolan. I'm the founder and CEO of Ghost.org. It's a compete with Twitter for sure. That's my take.

I'm sure they'll say something different because that's not a PR friendly answer, right? Just we want to beat Elon is not inspiring enough. So I'm sure they'll have some extended waffle. It's interesting, right? Like Facebook has done so many of these clones where they just rip off someone else's app and launch it. And they have a track record of falling flat like 100% of the time time this is the first one where like that hasn't happened so i i would be surprised if it hasn't vastly exceeded their uh their expectations for it potentially even to an extent where could it have worked without the

activity pub integration i'm not sure i think the activity pub fediverse side of things was a big enough draw to get that initial audience interested. I think that in order to compete with Twitter, you have to get creators like you and others excited about being on this platform, on this totally new platform. Now, if it's yet another walled garden controlled by yet another billionaire, and who knows how it's going to shape up? Are you excited about doing that? I don't know, right? I mean, it's really hard to attract savvy creators who are kind of done and tired with like building out yet someone else's proprietary walled garden with their own content, and not being in control of the algorithm and the discovery and even their own social graph, right? You don't own your

audience, you rent your audience as a participant in these walled gardens, right? So the thing I think that's really savvy for Meta is that they were like, okay, we need to do something different than Twitter. Different. And this, I think, as they talked to creators, this theme was evolving, you know, I think largely because Macedon was, you know, very, was very, very popular very early on, you know, when after Elon bought Twitter. And so I think a lot of savvy creators were like, I'm not, I'm not going to do that movie again. But if you're going to offer me something different, like this concept of the Fediverse, now I'm interested. So I think that helped. And I think that's a big reason why they've embraced it.

The final thing I'll say is that, you know, they have a lot of different social networks today, and none of them really work well with each other, right? And so like, are you going to build yet another one that's totally its own little island? And now you have 12 social networks, or however many they have, like, when are these things going to be interoperable? How do we experiment with interoperability? And how is that then sort of stack up against the regulatory scenarios that are playing out in the EU and in the United States? You know, so I just think that like Meta is actually pretty savvy about this. They're like, look, you know, this is kind of where things are going. This is what creators want. And let's figure out a way to embrace this rather than have it disrupt us. What do you think is Meta's motivation for having ActivityPub when they already have a platform that's growing so fast? Yeah, what a good question, right? that this federated model can be really successful is when you're trying to unseat an established incumbent.

And in particular for the microblogging world, there's an established incumbent in Twitter and running at Twitter as a single network is hard to do. But if you can establish a federation of different companies, and it's not just your 100 million at Threads, but it's another 50 million Mozilla social users and people at Flipboard and people at Medium and then the long tail of

Mastodon sites, Tumblr, you start to get close to the size of that incumbent and it's a good way to possibly unseat that incumbent. So if the intention is, I think for Facebook or excuse me, Meta, their goal is not necessarily to take over microblogging. Their goal is to like mess things up for Twitter, like take Twitter out of the equation. So like partnering up with lots of other companies to make a federated network is a good strategy for them. And that's speculation on my part. I've had a chance to talk with Threads folks quite a bit. They are, the typical answer that they give, which I think is at least on the part of people in the Threads organization is they're like,

this is the right thing to do. I'm like, okay, yes, but you're also running, right? But I think they see it, they also see it as strategically really valuable to be able to partner with a lot of other organizations. And those are all pretty sensible answers, right? I think it makes sense to need to try to grow as fast as possible to compete by Twitter. And it gives you access to all these Mastodon users and the other companies that are in the Fediverse. Now there's Flipboard and there's Ghost and there's Tumblr and there's WordPress. And Threads is gonna be able to connect to all of these

and have a lot more potential connections. And the more of these platforms that federate over ActivityPub, the more Threads value grows over time, which you can use as an advantage against Twitter. But I really wanted to know Meta's stance on this. So I reached out to Adam Asiri, who is the CEO of Instagram and the guy that's currently in charge of threads.

It was a question that was, I think, a good one before we launched. And I think it's an even better one now. I think a couple of different reasons. There are some longer term ones where I do feel like the web is going to move to a more open and decentralized place over time. Exactly what that looks like, time will tell. But it's, I think, good to lean into these long term trends as a large incumbent, just because I think the biggest risk to any company the size of ours is both not only competition but what you do becomes irrelevant and then you

slowly become irrelevant but honestly with threads specifically the bigger motivation was to try and really set up a really strong set of incentives i think it's a healthier set of incentives to be in a place where creators can feasibly leave your platform and go to another platform with their followership. And that is a challenge. There's risk to that. But it's also, I think, creates value because it forces us to really try and differentiate and create the most dynamic and compelling experience and not just to lean on um our size so Adam is basically saying that they're trying to adapt to where the web is going early instead of just ignoring change like AOL did for example like in a way it's kind of

the exact same story http decentralized the web from AOL and there's this real chance that the movement to the next version of the social web wipes out all the current incumbents, or at least makes them a lot smaller. So maybe this is just a long-term play. As far as that second part about giving users the option to leave the platform, maybe, like I guess if the Fediverse took off and people still didn't like Meta, they'd have the option to leave. But now they do have the option to leave.

Meta's kind of betting that they're gonna have the best experience in the Fediverse and people might actually stay. That's kind of a risk Meta's willing to take. Now, Threads isn't just flipping a switch and making all 200 million accounts on Threads federated over ActivityPub. Right now it's opt-in.

And that's, I don't know, it's kind of a bummer. It'd be really nice if you had access to the whole threads network from mastodon and other places so i asked why that is and this is what adam had to say i think it would be tough from a privacy and a regulatory perspective i think there's a lot of misunderstanding i mean you get a bunch of questions you can imagine the questions we get from regulators around the world who might be less technical and i assume a bunch of questions. You can imagine the questions we get from regulators around the world who might be less technical. And I assume a lot of your audience is pretty technical. And there's a lot of concerns about your content going to places that you don't anticipate it going to. So from a privacy consent perspective and from a compliance perspective, it's pretty

hard to imagine us getting all the way to opt out. But we want people to opt in. In fact, I actually think more people, if the community grows, I think more people will opt in over time because it will be a great way to just increase your reach. And most creators are interested in increasing their reach. I also think that if you look at text-based social networks like Twitter, like Threads, like Macedon, based social networks like Twitter, like Threads, like Macedon, they tend to be even more head heavy than other social networks, which are also head heavy. So a small number of accounts create a majority of the impressions or the content that draws a majority of the impressions. So you can get a lot of the value without getting everyone to opt in by getting the

accounts that have the most reach to opt in. Because I think that's what threads can do that can really help other servers is get some bigger names with bigger appeal onto a more mass appeal app, and then have their content flow out and create value on other servers. Now, one of the biggest things that I hear from a lot of people who say that they're sort of worried about the Fedverse is that there are different social cultures on different platforms which is very true for example i don't post work related things on my instagram page i just post extremely long images right yes this is true right yes so i don't want all my like work mumbo jumbo intermixing in with my long images right so theoretically if

instagram were to be able to federate as well you could follow on your social media reader of choice you could follow my images stream or you could follow my thread stream or you could follow this. And so they are working, like there are people that are thinking about, oh, like maybe we could do like one singular Fediverse account that sort of links out to all your other Fediverse accounts. But currently the people that say like, oh, well, I don't want my Tumblr stuff

like intermixing with other stuff. People just only follow your tumblr if they want to follow your tumblr like all these different social media sites are different versions of you and people sort of know what to expect from these different versions of you yeah so you only really have to follow the version of the person that you want to get yeah so instead of i follow david on instagram and dav on Twitter, it's now I follow David's federized long images. And I also decided to follow David's work text posts.

Right. And it's just two accounts. Yeah. And then theoretically, you could have a platform that only shows images. You could have a platform that only shows text posts, or you could have a platform that shows both. It's an interesting concept, right? Because the idea that the technology

leads to a particular culture and those barriers like protect the culture. But I think that our choices as individuals are what drive that culture, right? So if you're on Tumblr right now and you're just like, hey, I don't want to have people on threads showing up in my feed, it's like, don't follow people on threads then, right? Like that's

a relatively easy thing for you to do. Or maybe there are people on threads who aren't on Tumblr that you really do want to follow that you don't know about yet, right? And so it think that there is a lot of opportunity for that kind of cross-cultural pollination to happen and a lot of opportunity to say, like, hey, that's not for me. And for me in particular, I'm going to kind of make my choices in a different way. I think this is a really interesting thing about the Fediverse. There's definitely this tension around what data you want to be where. And right now, there are some people that have the opinion that we should just all post all of our content on one account, and everyone should just have access to one singular version of us. But other people want to be a little more segmented. Right now, ActivityPub kind of does both. You still have to create an account on this

federated platform and you still have to grow a follower base there. But now your potential followers are kind of everyone all over the Fediverse. So in the future, if I publish an article on Ghost, it'll show up as an account you can follow on Mastodon or Flipboard. And if you comment on that post in Mastodon or Flipboard, it will also show up in Ghost. That's pretty cool. So ultimately, if I could leave you with a succinct version of what the Fediverse is and how it works, Evan says that it's basically like email. You can have various accounts that are hosted across various different servers, and they can all interoperate. But who you choose to host you kind of dictates your experience,

right? So if I'm on Gmail, I'm gonna have a certain experience with certain features. Outlook is gonna have another. Superhuman's gonna have another. But they all have the same key features that let email be email. But you kind of choose them for the overall experience

and the extra features they build on top. Eventually, you're gonna be able to migrate your account to somewhere else and take all those followers with you. This mechanism is still in its early stages and it only kind of works, but eventually you should be able to change what accounts hosting you and where you're viewing the content pretty simply. So if you're interested in all that and you're already on threads, you can turn on Fediverse sharing so other people across federated platforms can interact with you. And if you're on Mastodon, Flipboard, or some other federated social service, it'll just do it by default. One thing that Adam Masseri said was being able to differentiate products based on features

is going to lead to things like threads, monetizing threads. They have to turn that on at some point. But if people don't like that, if they they do it in a wrong way they would just leave and go somewhere else yeah you go to a platform that doesn't have that doesn't have ads so they he was saying that they need to really get the features up there where people really want to use it that they're willing to sit through ads because there's going to be other readers you could just download another app just like twitter with phoenix and all that stuff how easy will it be for the rest of this awesome switching that we think is a great idea? Because it can be there and it can be a great idea, but will people actually do it? Mike McHugh, the CEO of Flipboard, actually did this because he was on Macedon.social.

And then when Flipboard decided to federate, he was like, I should probably be on Flipboard.social. You know, this is my company. I should do that. And he said that switching was very technical and difficult right now but it also depends on the app developers which in his case is him and his team that they're going to put that feature in the app so if you use that there should just be like a switch that you can just export all and switch to another app hopefully it's easy to find it's at the top if i'm threads i'm not maybe I'm burying it too many levels deep just to make it a little harder. Because that stuff at scale makes a difference.

Like you have 200 million users. If it's a button on the homepage, everyone finds it. If it's three menu layers deep, way less people find it. It will definitely be three layer menus deep because you don't want to accidentally do that either. True. But again, most of this is just based on where you're hosted. Right. Like if I just don't want to be davidml.thread True. But again, most of this is just based on where you're hosted. Right. Like,

if I just don't want to be davidml.threads.net anymore and that's my main Fediverse account, I could be, and I want it to be on Glorp Social or something.

Like, I would only really move that if I was like, I do not like meta and I want to be on something that's not owned by meta and I want that to host me. Then I go through the process. Otherwise, you don't really have to think about it as long as people

know that that's your account on that thing yeah like I can switch email apps but I don't need to migrate all of my emails off of google servers right it's it's technical right now and like the social web and especially activity pub is you you know, made by a standards group and it moves slowly because it's made by a standards group. And because of that, you know, it's going to keep evolving over a period of time as working groups put things together.

But that's also one of the primary things that blue sky is trying to do with the AT protocol. Damn. What a good segue. There's still blue sky. Yes. is trying to do with the AT protocol. Damn, what a good segue. There's still blue sky? Yes. So, I guess we'll get to that after the break.

I guess we'll get to that after the break. It's a break! As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca.

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Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Okay, so if you haven't heard, Blue Sky is this newish social network that looks a lot like Twitter. And that kind of makes sense because it was incubated at Twitter. Blue Sky is not actually as new as you might think. Well, it is, but it also kind of isn't. In late 2019, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter at the time, announced that Twitter was funding a small team of developers to build an open and decentralized standard for social media.

At the time, Jack felt really regretful that Twitter had gotten more and more centralized. He said that centralized social media was struggling to meet global enforcement policies, and he was frustrated that the incentives trended towards outrage and argumentative content versus something more user focused. So Jack was giving this new team two options. He was either going to, and I'm quoting here, either find an existing decentralized standard that they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch. This matrix chat room of interested people in the

community got created to talk about potential implementations of this, but no one could really come to a consensus on the protocol itself, particularly around how much power these servers should have, how they should handle moderation, things like that. So they decided come to a consensus on the protocol itself, particularly around how much power these servers should have, how they should handle moderation, things like that. So they decided to take individual proposals instead. And Jay Graber, who had been in that chat room for Blue Sky and had separately created this decentralized platform called Happening, sent in a proposal to lead the project, and she got chosen for it. Then in late 2021, Blue Sky spun off from Twitter as a public benefit LLC to develop that project in the open with a $13 million grant from Twitter itself.

But just like everything else in the story, Elon buying Twitter threw a wrench in things. Now that Blue Sky was totally separate from Twitter and Elon was trying to cut costs everywhere, it became pretty unlikely that Blue Sky was gonna receive any more funding from them, which kind of kicked that project into overdrive. The Blue Sky team worked really quickly after this, especially considering they were now running on this fixed amount of funding with no additional income. They announced a waitlist for their own platform called Blue Sky,

which would use their own protocol around October 2022. And they announced an iOS app for an invite only beta in February 2023, with Android coming out in April. All this work was just enough to snag them a little additional funding in July 2023 to kind of stay afloat. The protocol that's underlying Blue Sky is called the AT Protocol, or AT, which, you know, I think it's kind of apt considering it's for social media. Even though the AT Protocol and ActivityPub have pretty similar goals, they actually kind of apt considering it's for social media. Even though the AT Protocol and ActivityPub have pretty similar goals, they actually kind of work in a fundamentally different way. And which one you think is better, I think kind of just depends on your values. So the primary function of the AT

Protocol is to have total control over your social experience without any individual company deciding what you see and when you see it. Apps can pull information from all over the AT protocol network and have their own take on it, but it all kind of shares the same bigger network. I'm Jay Graber. I'm the CEO of Blue Sky Social. It's a company that's built Blue Sky, the social app, and the app protocol,

which is the open source decentralized protocol that it runs on. It's designed a lot for composability, meaning that you can take the blocks of it and put them together in different ways. So you could, for example, just use the identity and social graph piece to build a different kind of application. Or you could just borrow one of the labelers to label photos in your application or something like that. And it's designed a lot around account portability. So you can take your data, your friends, and move them from one app to another without much disruption at all. You could have a separate AT protocol app that uses the portability. So you can take your data, your friends, and move them from one app to another

without much disruption at all. You could have a separate AT protocol app that uses the identity part of the protocol, but has its own way of doing moderation or has a certain way of orienting feeds. And no matter what social network you're on personally, all that information is going to spread all over the AT network. It's all accessible. Probably one of the most important functions of AT is account portability. Your account's untethered from the server you're on, and instead it's tied to this hidden unique user ID that spans the entire network.

So your account can be used to log into any service using the AT protocol, and you'll still have all the same account details and followers. You're just gonna be posting from a different platform with different features. That gives people a really easy way to choose who's going to host their account, whether it be bluesky.social or like, I don't know, glorb.net. And if you want,

you can even host your own account. So for example, I'm just at davidml.com on the AT protocol. So I can use any service using that protocol and my host is just me. So Blue Sky, the company, spun up Blue Sky the social app to basically showcase what's possible with that protocol so other companies could see what you could do with it. Are there more... How many people are on the at protocol? Or is it only Blue Sky?

Because I felt like it was partially easier to understand ActivityPub because I know of all the ghosts. Right. And the other ones I don't know. Currently, Blue Sky is one of the only ones building on the AT protocol. It is an open protocol,

so anyone can build on top of it. But just like you need a critical mass to use a platform, you also kind of need a critical mass to have the incentive to build an application of people that could come to the platform. One of these other features is custom feeds, which lets you create and share your own feeds with your own filters. So where ActivityPub is kind of just this fire hose of information that you receive, the AT protocol kind of lets you

pick and choose what kind of information you want to receive from all across the network. Yeah, I mean, the one I really like is the Moss feed. It's just pictures of Moss, pretty much. And it's very calming because, you know, you have the Discover feed, which is one that we build that gives you kind of trending content across the network, as well as some stuff that, you know, your likes indicate you might like. And that kind of gives me a big picture of what's going on. And then when I get tired of that, I just, there's like a lot of politics on there usually. And then I just go over to the mossy, just pictures of like mossy rocks on hikes

and like green nature scenes. And it's very soothing. It's just a moment of zen in like the social scroll. That sort of makes AT like a mega social protocol that can encompass a lot of different types of social media. Like if I want to only look at nature photos, I could use that feed for a while and then hop over different types of social media. Like if I wanna only look at nature photos, I could use that feed for a while and then hop over to my regular social feed.

Somebody in a blog post described the app protocol as a toolbox for building social applications. And that sounds pretty apt because it is, like I mentioned this toolbox of different sets of pieces. Like here's like the way that we structure the data. Here's the way that we structure your identity. And like the way that we have decided to structure your's the way that we structure your identity. And like the way that we have decided to structure your data is something that we've tried to make really portable.

Which is cool, right? You can also do things like choose your own moderation, which you can stack with other moderation to kind of create your own filters that you can then share. You can create a custom algorithm to rank your content that pretty much anyone can build. Now, currently Blue Sky is open for anyone to join. And just like Mastodon,

they have a bunch of little spurts of new users popping up here and there. But they're building on it really, really fast. Like just recently, they've added direct messaging, stackable moderation, and these starter packs, which helped onboard users a lot faster. Again, Blue Sky is still a company which generally builds a lot faster

than a standards organization. The AT protocol has a lot of really great ideas and a lot of people are really stoked about its potential, but it is a very fundamentally different way of thinking about the web versus, say, ActivityPub. But again, they both have really good ideas and some people like both of them so much that they're actually building bridges between the protocols to make the protocols interoperable. Yeah, I'm Ryan Barrett. I am a stereotypical Silicon Valley engineer. But what we're talking about here is mostly the stuff I've done kind of on the side, which is working with decentralized social and building bridges between social networks. Ryan is building something called BridgyFed, which is basically exactly what it sounds like. The idea of BridgyFed is to bridge

different federated protocols and make them interoperable. Meta, I know. Again, these are all open protocols. It's like HTTP or any part of the internet. And so BridgyFed is this middleman, this server that sits in the middle that knows how to speak all the protocols

and translates from one to the other. Whenever there's an individual action, like you post, you reply, you like, you follow or unfollow, it understands all those actions on each protocol and it just knows how to translate into the other protocol and deliver it to wherever it should go

and vice versa. Double federated? Kind of. Double federated? Kind of. I mean, again, we are like in the really early days of the decentralized social web. So it's like, we don't really know what's going to like win out yet. So everyone's just kind of trying a lot of different things.

Sounds like one is winning, if I'm being honest. Yes. I mean, for a while, ActivityPub was not really being used by anyone but basically mastodon and some very small projects like pixel fed which was trying to be the decentralized instagram but now that threads join there's like tons of momentum and you know some people will say like oh now we have access to the 200 million threads followers you don't really because you have to manually turn it on.

Yeah. There's something called Metcalfe's Law. It's named after Bob Metcalfe, who was an executive at 3Com. And he was talking about LAN networks, but it also applies in social networks. And the idea is that the value of the network is not necessarily in the number of people. It's in the number of potential connections, right? So how many people can get connected? And that, so, you know, the value goes up by the square of the number of people.

So if you have a really big network, it's got a huge amount of value, and it's got a lot more value than a network even half the size. It's got a huge amount of value, and it's got a lot more value than a network even half the size. So all of those people that could be turned on as a connection in the Fediverse, that sort of amplifies the value of the Fediverse exponentially. I mean, those people are closer to joining the Fediverse than people without a Threads account. Who don't really know what's going on. Because it's one click away, and it's right there. Yeah. Yeah. And it was embraced by like a major platform does blue sky still have invites no right no no now it's public but that was one of the things too that david and i kept like coming back to was that the more we learned about these different protocols where like at kind of sounds really good yeah but activity pub seems like the one that's gonna win because of threats

yeah right they're fairly different like like activity pub is just a different way of looking at the internet all together where all the content that you make is now social media you know if i make a youtube video it is now social media if i make a blog post it is now social media whereas at protocol is more just like i want to tailor my social media if i make a blog post it is now social media whereas at protocol is more just like i want to tailor my social media experience exactly how i want it to be and i can take in the streams of data from everyone else that's making social content as well could there not be a platform on activity pub where the user experience is better tailoring to your own needs. That is true.

So ultimately, if it's already winning, something like that would make sense? Probably. I think what a lot of people will say is that ActivityPub is just way simpler of an idea. A lot of people even say that the AT protocol is over-engineered because they have thought through everything. And a lot of the things that they have thought through like the simplicity of account portability

and all and like different algorithms or like choosing different feeds is like a very good idea but it's almost like too complex for some people and it's like the platform some people think the platform should be really simple and the creativity of the apps that get built up on top of the platform can then be a lot more complex. So, all right, both of these protocols have pretty similar goals to decentralize social media

and separate power from individual companies, but they're handling it in pretty different ways. The idea of ActivityPub is to allow sources of media from all over the internet to connect to a single fire hose and let users follow and interact with that media wherever they are.

The AT protocol works as more of a piecemeal framework for building decentralized social networks, which gives you this single source of identity that can be easily moved wherever you want and can be structured however the user or platform wants. Ultimately, these are just really different ideologies on how open social should work. They both want the same thing,

which is to remove consolidated power and give users more control over their social experience. And I think that's a good thing for everyone. We'll see how the future plays out. So if you wanna be part of the new web movement, federate your threads account, just like we bullied Marquesa. Can you show me how to do it?

Yeah. It's just one box. Are you about to federize live? I'm going to federate, and I'm just going to live on the podcast. What's tweeting called on threads? Are you about to join the federation? Skeeting.

That was blue sky. That was blue sky. I'm just going to say you're welcome after I do it. Wait, turn it on. I want to see your face as you turn on sharing. Wow. You are now sharing to the Fediverse. Nothing has changed.

That's crazy. Yeah. I want to say one more thing. Now watch your notifications. Now watch me not open threads until the next time we talk about it. You should not have notifications on any social media platform. It's healthier that way. Especially with my job. Especially likes.

It's my job. Push notifications. I only get notifications from people that I mutually follow. I only get DM notifications. I professionally post on social media. Yeah. That's all I do. But you need to see every interaction?

Not everything. No, no, no. But I still get some notifications for some important things that happen to my posts. What if there was like an app that was specifically made for creators that dealt with notifications and only give you useful ones? Oh, look. That'd be nice. Opportunity. An opportunity arises.

Opportunity. Yeah. No, I agree. That sounds great. I would love that. I'm going to say one more thing before we get out. Close it out. Okay.

Okay. I asked Adam Asir. That was so wrong. I wish you saw Alex's face. That was amazing. Beautiful. Okay. I'm keeping all this, by the way.

Okay. I'm keeping all of this, by the way. I asked Adam Asiri if there was a potential for them to make Federation opt out, right? Because a lot of people talk about like, oh, the Fediverse now has like this huge opportunity because Threads has 200 million people in it. And that's 200 million people in the Fediverse. It's 200 million people potentially in

the Fediverse that federate and I asked Adam Asiri do you ever see a world where you turn it on as an opt-out instead of an opt-in and I guess he didn't say or said no he said he said probably not yeah and the biggest reason that he said is that, it's actually really funny, he said, most senators and legal people don't understand anything that we do. And the questions that we are going to have to field if people's data start going places that we don't control

is going to be awful for me. On the legal side, a lot of laws only kick in once you get above a particular scale that we are above and the vast majority of the other players are not. So we just have to do things that other people don't have to do. We're also scrutinized much more than probably anybody else. And that also means that the tolerance for mistakes is also much lower.

Which is kind of fair um yeah and so there is that there is that point like when you si if you sign up for threads and you're not federated if it's not a core part of the platform it's not a core part of the way that the internet works that you assume that the internet is going to work and then all of a sudden all of your data can be accessible in other places that you don't assume that is something that maybe people would be annoyed at but but if we're scraping your data opt out baby that's right that's right um but i think that there will be a world eventually in in which it's just kind of assumed that all of your everything you post is accessible from everywhere because

it's not necessarily that it goes everywhere it's just that other people are being able to see your fire hose from other platforms if you sign up right now is there an option right off the bat to that would be a good sign up button i feel like that's just quickly explains it it obviously didn't happen for us because it wasn't federated when we all signed up for threads yeah but i think currently you can still only sign up for threads through instagram but i don't know if they have i doubt they've added that they have done a couple of like q a sessions around about the fediverse but i do think they need to get a do a better job of uh kind of talking to people about it that said just like you said they don't currently have full integration

with federation so currently on threads at least of time of recording all you can do is see comments and like comments but you can't reply to them which is a problem because a lot of people keep from mastodon keep asking me questions on threads that i can't reply to he's not ignoring you i'm not ignoring you it's all adam's glasses loud as he can i see you but there are some leaks that by the end of the year they'll have potentially finished that process of federation federation i'll believe it when i see it i would like to see it though yeah for the sake of my notifications please thank you all right well and if you don't know now you know you've heard the song yeah i know for sure okay yeah for sure i don't really you don't know what i don't think i know that song. Oh my goodness. Is it Biggie? Never heard Hitman. Biggie, Biggie, Biggie. I think you're joking.

Oh, no, I do know that song. That's not the song. Oh, okay. Well, if you heard the line. Federate me. You've heard the, mm. I feel like I've heard the line being said. I just don't know what the song is.

David, take us out. Come on, Biggie, don't you wait. Never mind, Marques, take us out. I bet you can't wait to federate. And if you don't know, now you know. That's the Fediverse. This has been a bonus episode. Thank you for joining us on this winding road.

You now know more about it than you ever thought you would. Me too. It's great. Hopefully we're all federized, federated. Federated. Federer-verse together. Federer-verse. Catch you guys in the next episode on regularly scheduled programming.

Peace. These guys are now Fed-a-versed.