00:00:00
really quick fun fact before we start to get you guys freaking hyped about this perfect the CEO of Blue Sky name is Jay
00:00:07
Graber uh but their given name is lanan which in Mandarin means blue sky and
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that is a complete coincidence no it's not yes it is she was hired for the for
00:00:21
it after Jack dorsy had already named a police that's incredible what if Jack just really knew he was going to pick
00:00:28
her does Jack know me cuz that might explain it dude have you seen Silicon
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Valley who named Blue Sky Jack dorsy and he named it before
00:00:40
knowing this person yes unbelievable I know I know unbelievable I know I told
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[Music] you y what's going on people of the
00:00:54
internet welcome back to another episode of the way for podcast we're your hosts I'm your host on this very special
00:01:00
episode of the bonus episode of the waveform podcast 2024 what's your name yeah David that's
00:01:07
David and I'm Marquez and I'm maner and today we are going to dive extremely
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deep deep into the fediverse ah the cheese land the cheese land the land of
00:01:20
Federated cheeses cool cool of which there are many um okay a lot of people
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have been asking us a lot of questions about what the heck the fediverse is there's this word that keeps getting
00:01:30
swirled around the internet up and down and left and right people talking about this threads is adopting it people don't
00:01:37
know how it works so today we decided to do a deep dive episode this episode is
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probably unofficially called protocol Wars there are many protocol Wars but
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this is the protocol Wars of activity Pub and the at protocol is there going
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to be a winner or we don't know yet we don't know who the winner is there's no winner okay there may be a winner in 20
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years it's an actively fought War currently yeah cool yes per where did
00:02:07
the cheese come from F like fed sounds like F I would think the dad
00:02:12
joke would land I miss that one wait we've been making this joke for months yeah you've been sitting there all quiet
00:02:20
it's I get it perfect okay so so I've gone down
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this deep deep dark rabbit hole about the fediverse and the at protocol interviewed a bunch of people and have
00:02:31
come out enlightened fed a pilled you might say whoa activity pilled meaning you've taken a
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side pilled too at pilled as well okay I haven't really taken a side we will have a discussion about which protocol you
00:02:46
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
00:02:52
little bit of discussion around that so yep you guys ready deal let's do it all right
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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
00:03:06
Musk bought Twitter a little over 2 years ago and he rebranded it to x a
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little over a year ago now by all accounts this was a pretty controversial move right he immediately fired 80% of
00:03:18
the staff started charging for verification started paying people for engagement and just generally he really
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changed the vibe and the tone of the platform now generally throughout internet history when there's a huge
00:03:29
change in company policy usually nothing really happens people get upset for a while but eventually they just go back
00:03:36
to the regular habits but sometimes the users can defect and move to an entirely
00:03:42
different platform altogether like in May 2009 Facebook finally passed Myspace
00:03:48
in users partially because of how bad myspace's user experience had gotten like there was an influx of ads it had a
00:03:55
choppy UI there was all these decisions that would eventually lead to their death spiral into Oblivion and in
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2010 dig redesigned its site in a way that felt so user hostile that most of
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the users actually pivoted over to Reddit and turned that into what it is today this kind of defection doesn't
00:04:14
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
00:04:22
familiar with the concept which is like your social graph as a person on a social network is all the people you
00:04:27
follow all the people who follow you all the people you engage with and just the General Circle of engagement on social
00:04:33
networks is is your graph right yeah right you have different social graphs on different networks on Instagram you
00:04:39
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
00:04:46
right like that's a recursive issue a new Social Network pops up every other week and some people will join hoping
00:04:52
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
00:04:57
using that Network and it dies so everyone stays in the same place no
00:05:02
matter what the company does to change their product I mean look at reddit reddit gave a clear middle finger to its
00:05:08
users by effectively shutting down its API and its third party app community
00:05:13
and yet traffic is currently exploding so even though Twitter now X is still
00:05:18
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
00:05:24
cut a ton of your staff that's a pretty risky business move it was purchased for basically double more than it's worth
00:05:31
and elon's been telling advertisers to go um f themselves which has left the
00:05:37
site with not the highest quality advertisers or probably Revenue if you're on X you probably know what I
00:05:43
mean if somebody's going to try to Blackmail me with advertising black m with money go
00:05:51
yourself that few months around the acquisition of Twitter was pretty much the best possible opportunity anyone was
00:05:57
going to get to transition Twitter users to a new platform so a huge number of social networks popped up that were
00:06:03
trying to take all of those users to their side of the internet we got T2 which was run by a bunch of X Twitter
00:06:09
employees that didn't go so well um post news popped up which was trying to
00:06:15
change the ways we consumed information and they've closed down and other apps
00:06:20
like Hive received some like temporary popularity but not nearly as much as
00:06:26
they needed but here's the thing like Twitter was founded in 2006 Reddit in
00:06:32
2005 Facebook in 2004 still pretty early on in the Web 2.0 era and whatever the
00:06:39
next era the internet is nobody wants it to be owned and operated by this small number of really powerful companies and
00:06:46
really eccentric billionaires for a lot of reasons a lot of the companies that made it out of the early era of the
00:06:52
internet eventually found pretty huge success but it's been about two decades or so since then and pretty much all of
00:06:59
these platforms have for the lack of a better word and I'm paraphrasing here been in cified meaning they have
00:07:06
significantly degraded their user experience in order to achieve unlimited growth and it somehow gets worse you
00:07:12
think it's at it's worst already and it gets worse it keep time yeah like at this point Facebook giant land of AI
00:07:20
garbage yeah have you been on Facebook lately I say that out loud sometimes but then I went on Facebook and I was like
00:07:27
oh it's just all I generated garbage and you think like oh no one's looking at
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this and I'll have like 10,000 comments that are like this is amazing and the comments are all AI Bots too probably
00:07:40
probably should we be engagement farming on Facebook are we missing an opportunity right now I don't think you
00:07:46
get I don't know it's probably not worth it my Instagram lately the first post that always shows me is someone I don't
00:07:51
follow has nothing to do with anyone that I follow Dang or a real right crazy trying to expand a gra a real from
00:07:57
someone I don't yeah real from someone you don't follow is shut down no one
00:08:02
else is invited but really are you really going to just move over to another centralized platform hoping for
00:08:08
dear life that your friends move over as well and hoping that that company has your best interest in heart and doesn't
00:08:14
degrade in the exact same way as the other companies some people might and a lot of people might try but most people
00:08:21
are just tired okay like nobody wants to start a new social media account over and over again especially people with
00:08:28
businesses that have staked their livelihoods on these platforms this is the biggest motivation behind the
00:08:34
decentralized Social Web or the fediverse this new kind of social media that could change the way that we
00:08:40
interact online and is actually gaining a lot of traction right now can I tell you an analogy that this reminds me of
00:08:47
and then you can tell me if this is like a a good analogy or not when you were talking through like these new social
00:08:54
networks popping up and not getting enough critical mass and then disappearing that
00:09:00
kind of feels analogous to like solar systems and like the universe where if
00:09:06
there are you were going okay so here hear me out hear me out right if you have a whole bunch of mass yeah it can
00:09:12
all sort of drift through space for a while you've seen the asteroid belt or whatever and then early in the universe
00:09:19
these these masses were just kind of floating around and if enough of them got together in the right place at just
00:09:26
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 or a star or
00:09:34
whatever yeah yeah and I think the older the universe gets the more of these like
00:09:41
obvious uh things that we have we have planets now we have stars now and there's still some of this Mass floating
00:09:47
around but none of it is quite enough to gather enough critical mass or maybe it might get enough mass and it might
00:09:53
slowly become like a small object and then fall apart and there's not enough gravity together enough that it has
00:10:00
enough Mass to still exist it's just kind of like small somewhere so like we
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have a star like our whole all our planets orbit this one really large star and that's all great and maybe there's a
00:10:12
little tiny bit of solar mass floating around somewhere a few thousand light years away from our solar system and
00:10:18
it's kind of there technically and then it falls apart and that's T2 that's it
00:10:24
well T2 existed for like only one year one light made it though I don't know I
00:10:31
don't know um yeah I I think that's a good analogy I was going to say if we're following this analogy then the ferse is
00:10:38
like wormholes and you can just take your Earth put it somewhere else around
00:10:43
another St we're looking at the next Universe right we're looking at another way of building the universe sure
00:10:48
federating social media promises to give you the same connections you've already got the same core ways to interact no
00:10:53
matter what platform you're on it removes the power from the corporations that are holding those users hostage
00:10:59
with social graphs and it makes those platforms compete for the quality of the platform crazy idea right like you might
00:11:06
remember our secret history of the internet episode where all those networks got connected over this Universal protocol which made all of
00:11:12
these siloed networks interconnect like imagine if that could happen with social media in this episode I want to talk
00:11:18
about the two leading protocols that could make this happen and the platforms that are running them it's still really
00:11:24
early days so whichever ends up winning is still really up in the air but it's probably good to to understand how these
00:11:30
protocols work and then you can make your own decisions about what could work better let's get into it the two
00:11:36
platforms I want to talk about today are threads and blue sky or more specifically the protocols underlying
00:11:42
them activity Pub and the at or at protocol they both have some similarities but they're also really
00:11:48
fundamentally different and to fully understand them and why they exist I think it's important to get a little
00:11:53
history into their founding and development okay so if you haven't heard threads is a relatively new social media
00:11:58
app from meta and less than a year after chat gbt became the fastest growing app to hit
00:12:03
100 million users threads did it a lot faster what chat gbt managed to do in
00:12:08
about a month threads did in 5 days and currently at least at the time of the recording a little over a year after
00:12:16
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
00:12:23
10% of Instagram's base or something like that it is 10% of Instagram did you guys know that
00:12:28
Instagram has over 2.3 billion accounts users yeah they're pretty crazy I mean
00:12:34
Instagram's worldwide threads is not yet worldwide I thought pit bull was worldwi
00:12:39
no he's Mr worldwi serious don't get it twisted it's in a lot more countries now
00:12:44
hitting a 100 million users in 5 days is kind of nuts now to be fair it mostly did this by like bootstrapping itself to
00:12:50
Instagram accounts and making signups basically just hitting a button but still so normally threads wouldn't be
00:12:57
all that interesting at least to me like it was basically made to be Twitter with Mark Zuckerberg instead of Elon which
00:13:03
really doesn't inspire a lot of confidence and I wouldn't say it's actually fully replac what Twitter used to be considering it's got this
00:13:10
insistence on defaulting to algorithmic feeds that push engagement bait and it's got the stubbornness against elevating
00:13:16
any kind of political content the most interesting thing about threads is meta's commitment to support the
00:13:22
activity Pub protocol uh it is um a mechanism for making social networks
00:13:30
work more like email my name is Evan Pomo I am a um the author co-author of
00:13:39
the activity Pub specification uh published by the w3c
00:13:44
and uh I am a Social Web uh hacker and
00:13:49
um open Social Web Advocate I started a distributed social network called
00:13:55
identica in 2008 um it was is there was kind of a wave of Twitter clones uh
00:14:05
right after the Twitter launch uh happened a lot of folks were like hey this is a cool mechanism we should do
00:14:10
something similar and I launched one called identica and it had a mechanism to connect multiple Network
00:14:18
networks um and that attracted a lot of attention at the time we had a lot of
00:14:25
folks uh start using it the software was open source so we had a lot of clones and those
00:14:31
clones would connect a lot of different people could kind of spin up their own versions of identica based on that code
00:14:37
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
00:14:43
they could like each other's posts they could reshare each other's post the works this is an example of a Federated
00:14:50
social network just like the United States is a federation right like this group of states with independent laws
00:14:56
but also this higher order of laws under the con Constitution that could freely move and trade with each other a
00:15:02
Federated social network is kind of the same idea it has its own rules and algorithms depending on a platform
00:15:08
you're using but all of these different platforms could freely interact with each other and interoperate in their own
00:15:14
Federation or fediverse can I can I say something real quick just before we launch into this sure you see on on
00:15:21
Twitter on X all the time like Silicon Valley folks being like why would anyone go get an English degree what a what a
00:15:28
waste of time you stupid idiot why don't you go get a computer degree like me where is thisy and then because because
00:15:34
we we're using the word fediverse we've decided the word fediverse is the word yeah for this there's a word that is the
00:15:41
noun form of a group of Federated individuals the word is Federation and
00:15:46
all of freaking programmers who have never read a book and are dunking on English majers don't know the word
00:15:52
Federation I would say most people words most people of our age demographic when
00:15:58
they think of federation think of the Star Wars Federation it's Star Trek there's no Federation in Star wars Star
00:16:04
Trek Federation and the thing is I don't it's hard to associate I don't it feels
00:16:10
evil to me the word fed Federation is the good guys in Star Trek feels evil
00:16:15
what if fediverse is a concatenation between Federation and metaverse
00:16:21
universe here's a man or Universe yeah here's a man who uh luckily not metaverse thank God that's my rant I'm
00:16:29
just like whenever whenever y'all are like you you Twitter Twitter Engineers like why would you ever read a book and
00:16:35
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
00:16:41
coining terms but they coined a term of which there is already a word that's what they do imagine the best imagine
00:16:49
how people would react if you're like Marquez join the Federation no that is how the English
00:16:55
language works you wouldn't associate that with a social media fed I absolutely would especially if it was
00:17:01
a Federated I think You' have to describe you'd have to be like social media social companies love
00:17:09
making new words that describe existing things like instead
00:17:14
ofal photography algorithm that enhances details in the mids it's deep Fusion now
00:17:20
like they name everything also thing made by a random user as well and to
00:17:26
Ellis's point I think the people that are pushing this have real iiz that it's a bad word and have started calling it
00:17:32
The Social Web yeah so that's another word true I actually talked to a few
00:17:37
people and someone was some people are 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
00:17:43
I knew it it's it's the Trade Federation doubt they are they are evil evil this
00:17:48
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
00:17:55
is this what's going on hot takes episode is Anakin the good guy okay Anakin had a point I'm just saying
00:18:02
oh my God we need to oh I don't know okay do you think Anakin was on T2
00:18:09
or M can't get that username on M okay let's get back into this this is what
00:18:15
you guys sign up for when you when you join wave Forum Evan's ideas generated a lot of Buzz at the time but mostly in
00:18:21
pretty Niche communities but it did generate enough Buzz that it got the attention of Google who a couple years
00:18:27
later decided to Launch Google Buzz okay so this is kind of an aside but I think it's pretty worth
00:18:33
telling because it's kind of fun Google Buzz was this micro blogging service that was built into Gmail the dream of
00:18:40
Google Buzz was that it was run on this open social protocol stack that could plug into all these different services
00:18:45
like a Nexus of social media according to Wikipedia it could plug into YouTube
00:18:51
and blogger and even Twitter to interoperate between all those platforms and it even plugged into identica Evans
00:18:57
software so you could post from your buzz on Gmail and then follow those Buzz accounts on your identica feed if you
00:19:04
post it on YouTube other people were supposed to be able to see those videos on their Buzz It was kind of this like
00:19:09
post once share everywhere idea and it was a pretty good idea so as much as those really Niche open social
00:19:16
communities got super excited about Buzz the launch had a lot of different security issues that were mostly
00:19:21
oversights from Google that they just you know didn't think about primarily the idea that signing up and following
00:19:28
accounts was integrated right into Gmail like normally on a social network you got to sign up you got to manually go
00:19:35
and follow everyone else and this is like a pretty tough point of friction between social networks right like just
00:19:41
like Instagram bootstrapped the social graph of Instagram to launch threads Google bootstrapped Gmail contacts to
00:19:48
connect people in Buzz just not in a good way like Google Buzz launched with
00:19:53
this autof follow feature that would automatically follow a bunch of different people that you had Communications with
00:19:59
regardless if you wanted to follow them or not and by default people could publicly see the accounts of the people
00:20:04
you interacted with the most it wasn't great this kind of escalated to a pretty insane degree and ended in a lot of
00:20:11
lawsuits that you can go read about separately Google eventually did switch to this suggested follow model but the
00:20:17
damage was kind of already done by then can you guess how long Google Buzz lasted it was launched on February 9th
00:20:24
2010 and it got closed down on December 15th 2011 not great when Google moved on and
00:20:34
decided they didn't want to do social stuff anymore that uh World kind of um
00:20:40
we want into kind of a nuclear winter of like open social like as much as the point of an open social network is to
00:20:47
take away Consolidated power from these giant companies getting the backing of someone as big as Google can really help
00:20:54
these smaller Services flourish right because if Google is onboarding all these us users you have the opportunity
00:21:00
to build all these other smaller platforms that people can use too so without Google support things were
00:21:06
feeling pretty bad but then in 2015 about four years after Google Buzz shut down the worldwide Web Consortium
00:21:13
reached out to Evans open social network group that he was shairing which he called the Federated Social Web Summit
00:21:19
now if you don't know the worldwide Web Consortium or w3c is the standards group that maintains things like HTML CSS XML
00:21:28
all these internet standard is that everyone uses right now it was founded in 1994 by Tim burners Lee the guy that
00:21:34
invented the worldwide web and who we talked about in our secret history of the internet series see the w3c wanted
00:21:39
to develop a standard for social media because by 2015 it had kind of already
00:21:45
become a part of our social Fabric and as much as it seems like the closed Source like consolidated version of
00:21:50
social media was exactly as it would have always developed that's not really the case we all know the experience of
00:21:58
getting an email address from your employer from your University maybe
00:22:03
getting a commercial one from Gmail um but um we understand that you can get
00:22:09
email addresses from lots of different places but you can still send email to
00:22:15
people on other servers so even though um I'm on the open.org domain and you're
00:22:21
on the gmail.com domain we can still Converse as if we were using the same mail server
00:22:27
and that's because those are separate servers that are connected using Open
00:22:33
Standards um we've gotten very used to having our social networks not work that
00:22:38
way if you're on Instagram um and I'm not on Instagram I
00:22:45
just can't follow you right like email works differently on this standard set of protocols like you can use Gmail or
00:22:52
Outlook or superum or hot mail or Yahoo or whatever you want and you still receive and send the same information
00:23:00
like they can have different features built on top of them but the fundamental email features still work and it's kind
00:23:06
of interesting that social media didn't develop in this way right like social media developed in this weird siloed
00:23:11
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
00:23:18
the next three or so years Evan and a group of 30ish other people developed the activity Pub protocol which used
00:23:24
this previously developed data structure standard called activity stream a really great um computer scientist
00:23:31
named James Snell did activity streams um and then there are four other authors
00:23:37
uh Christine lemmer Weber um Jessica Talon Aaron Shepard and Amy guy who are
00:23:42
listed ahead of me on the activity Pub um and let me just say uh pretty amazing
00:23:48
that we have a woman Le um standard it's so rare to see that in um uh in in
00:23:56
Social in any kind of Standards now activities if you're wondering are basically a standardized set of actions
00:24:02
that can be taken over a social media Network or really anything Federated over activity Pub so think like the like
00:24:09
the repost the quote the comment images and videos and audio these are all
00:24:15
activities that can be streamed over activity Pub so if I'm on Mastadon and
00:24:20
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
00:24:27
like a Rosetta Stone for social actions I get it I have a I have a split view of
00:24:35
how this could go okay one one version is where we all live happily ever after
00:24:40
in the ferse uhuh and the other is uh the origin the or the pillars of the
00:24:49
like universe of the internet that we had where these giant star systems
00:24:56
formed and the only only reason you would leave is if there was actually something bad about it this is what I
00:25:02
wrote down is uh social network needs features UI and users and that's
00:25:11
essentially what makes it the social graph that's mostly users but you need these three things and if Myspace was
00:25:17
the big social network in this style and they started ruining it with like ads or
00:25:23
something went horrible there was enough reason that people would actually leave
00:25:29
and go to one that didn't ruin one of these things like UI or features Facebook for example right and so
00:25:35
Facebook became the next thing and then people started joining Facebook and it had this critical mass and then it got
00:25:41
to a point where everyone who is going to come online and start using this feature the more or less is
00:25:48
now and yeah and no one now if Facebook ruins part of their UI yeah some small
00:25:56
amount of people will find it ruin and will go to this new social network but they won't have the users right and
00:26:04
they'll come back to Facebook because it's still good enough that it's better than not having the users right so
00:26:10
there's so you're kind of stuck now in we have created the Giants and we are
00:26:16
living with these Giants now yeah and there's it's not like too big to fail but it's like pretty close kind of there
00:26:22
was this moment where everyone was like Elon took over Twitter he's firing everyone they're getting kicked out of their HQ like it's one of the Giants is
00:26:29
disappearing yeah and so everyone hopped on masted on T2 we're finally going to take one of these Giants down but none
00:26:36
of them could combo all of these things right and eventually people went okay
00:26:41
never mind T2 is not actually Mas it on it's cool it's got some ideas but all right yeah and then threads is the
00:26:49
interesting one cuz they kind of hacked the users part yeah and so it's just
00:26:54
everyone who's already on a different giant clicked a button and also now I'm on threads and I'm following everyone
00:27:01
and so it felt like it was a new thing right but it's not new yeah that's that's where I'm at we're kind of stuck
00:27:07
with the pillar with all of this though it does this and it puts users it
00:27:14
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
00:27:22
you don't you have the exact same users because they're all part of the same thing so it makes switching
00:27:29
more free like you can actually make those changes there's lots of people who wanted to get off Twitter but are still
00:27:34
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
00:27:39
like oh man this is so great everything's just like it used to be yeah if I could go somewhere else that out all the other users that had a
00:27:45
better feed features I would love that that' be great right and the question is can we get enough people to start
00:27:53
engaging in this new thing to actually have a new like a new that is definitely
00:28:00
the question that is exactly where we find ourselves now but the cool thing about it is that you have all these
00:28:06
small asteroids and these small islands of people that are on these new platforms that are all federating the
00:28:12
cool thing about them federating is they're all talking to each other yeah so you have like this mass of all of
00:28:18
these objects together that are all interconnected so it feels like you've got exactly you've got the users
00:28:24
hopefully there's enough users that a new platform isn't totally empty it's got all the users already it just needs
00:28:31
to nail the other two yeah and then if that platform ruins the experience you move somewhere else but there is account
00:28:38
portability that they're working on and you should be able to take your social graph with you these are the foundations
00:28:43
of the Social Web and I think it's really important to understand that context to understand what happens next
00:28:49
we're going to take a quick break but after the break we're going to talk about mastedon
00:28:56
[Music]
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okay so while activity Pub was being written this guy in Europe named Eugene Rosco was having some pretty valid
00:29:13
concerns about Twitter like as important as Twitter had become it wasn't exactly
00:29:19
profitable Twitter was growing really fast but it never really figured out a way to actually make money like they
00:29:25
made enough some but reports saying that they might close down any day were
00:29:30
pretty much non-stop which led Mark Zuckerberg to say that Twitter was basically a clown car that crashed into
00:29:37
a gold mine so around 2016 Eugene decided to do something about it Eugene had known about all of these open social
00:29:43
protocols but at the time they were kind of used for super Niche technical communities and they weren't really
00:29:49
centered around user friendliness so he started working on something called Mastadon I'm Eugene RKO I am the founder
00:29:57
and CEO of Mastadon and the reason that I started working on it was because I felt like Twitter was not doing well and
00:30:05
I've been using Twitter since 2008 so I was a quite a heavy power user um and I
00:30:13
felt like it was something very important for
00:30:18
the world because it was uh like a instant Global communications platform
00:30:24
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
00:30:32
from day to day uh I mean at that point uh they were not doing well financially
00:30:37
and there were talks that they were going to get bought out by either Disney or Peter theal or something like that
00:30:43
and it didn't feel right that that was how it worked and I wanted to see if
00:30:49
there was something else and masteron was not like uh an innovation in itself
00:30:55
because the idea wasn't new and and I I didn't invent the protocol that it was on or anything like that but it was just
00:31:02
my take on the concept um that already existed of decentralized social media
00:31:08
there was uh there were different platforms that that worked with similar prodoc calls but they lacked a certain
00:31:17
uh mainstream appeal and um I I um place
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a lot of importance on design and and user friendliness and uh
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I just wanted to try to do a better execution of a social media platform so
00:31:33
mastedon is kind of similar to identica and that it's this open- Source social media Network that anyone can like spin
00:31:40
up an instance of you might have seen Mastadon Doo but there's also things like disabled. social or mass. toown or
00:31:48
math stadon doxyz there's all these instances of madon that can
00:31:53
intercommunicate with each other but they have their own set of moderation and rules so went and posted Macedon on
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Hacker News and it got its first batch of users and for a couple years there were these major events that made people
00:32:04
realize that maybe centralized social media was not what they wanted to be using like Eugene specifically called
00:32:10
out that gamergate was a pretty big wakeup call for people in terms of the harassment they wanted to deal with on social media and there was this huge
00:32:18
delete Facebook movement with the Cambridge analytica Scandal where this outside firm was using Facebook user
00:32:24
data without their consent and was using that data to advance political motives so originally madon was using o status
00:32:31
which was this decentralized protocol that was actually also written by Evan but around 2017 when they were finishing
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up the activity Pub standardization the w3c and Evan reached out to Eugene to see if he'd be interested in testing it
00:32:44
what we did was we um implemented two protocols at the same time during that time so um maso was speaking both oos
00:32:51
and activity Pub for probably a year until basically most of the network
00:32:56
switched over and then we could just drop the old code and and stick with activity Pub and over the last few years
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more and more of these small Services have been popping up adopting activity Pub and federating like now there's peer
00:33:10
tube which is this Federated YouTube alternative that launched in October 2018 there's pixel fed which is a
00:33:17
Federated Instagram alternative which launched in December 2018 and slowly but surely the fediverse has been populating
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with all sorts of decentralized versions of these popular services but of course if you're going to unseat
00:33:30
an incumbent you kind of need to reach a critical mass which at the time seemed like a pretty distant future and then
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Elon Musk bought Twitter some big breaking news this afternoon Elon Musk Twitter takeover Elon Musk has agreed to
00:33:44
buy Twitter for $542 a following breaking news the deal is done Twitter has been sold Twitter
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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
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move to more decentralized version of the Social Web have kind of Amplified tenfold there was immediately a huge
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influx of new mastedon accounts after that happened and Eugene said it got so hard to keep up with that they actually
00:34:10
had to pause Mastadon signups for a short period of time but luckily it's not just Mastadon that's the answer to
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this problem other bigger platforms are taking notice of this too this seems like the perfect opportunity to move to
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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
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Elon took over Twitter uh I left uh Twitter I joined Mastadon and I started
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looking at what was happening there with activity Pub and the fediverse and it dawned on me that like this was the
00:34:44
beginnings of the open Social Web and that it would have profound implications for Flipboard for all of our users for
00:34:51
how Flipboard works and give us the opportunity to tear down the walls around Flipboard open it all up uh and
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and actually make Flipboard a part of the open Social Web like since the acquisition products like Flipboard
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WordPress Tumblr ghost and a bunch of others have actually committed to using activity Pub to try to unify around an
00:35:11
alternative idea not just an alternative platform there's been some movement
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maybe not enough to change things immediately but probably in the future and then in July 2023 Instagram launched
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threads so at first threads just kind of look like the everyone was expecting like Instagram was already working on
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this notes feature which already supported text and video but the weirdest thing about threads is that
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when it launched in July 2023 they committed to supporting activity Pub
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meta had committed to supporting the open Social Web now this is so weird
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right I mean this is meta this is the company that either buys you or out builds you so supporting an open social
00:35:55
protocol that actually gives you the ability to leave for a different platform I mean that's a really weird
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concept so why would they support this I have some ideas I don't know if you guys
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remember this but in around April 2021 Apple pushed out this update that forces
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apps to manually ask users if their data can be tracked meta launched this whole advertising campaign pleading with users
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to please keep letting apps track your data because that was kind of the main thing making the money so maybe it's
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that but it's probably more complicated so I decided to ask around my name's
00:36:31
John oan I'm the founder and CEO of ghost.org uh to compete with Twitter for sure um that's that's my take I'm sure
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I'm sure they'll say something different because that's not a a PR friendly answer right just we want to we want to
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beat Elon is not uh inspiring enough so I'm sure they'll have some extended waffle I it's interesting right like
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Facebook has done so many of these clones where they just rip off someone else's app and launch it and they have a
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track record of falling flat like 100% of the time this is the first one where
00:37:05
like that hasn't happened so I I would be surprised if it hasn't vastly exceeded their uh their expectations for
00:37:12
it potentially even to an extent where could it have worked without the activity Pub insiration I'm not sure I
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think the activity Pub fed aever side of things was a big enough draw to get that initial audience interested I think that
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in order to compete with Twitter you have to get creators like you and others
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excited about being on this platform on this totally new platform now if it's yet another wall Garden controlled by
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yet another billionaire and who knows how it's going to shape up are you excited about doing that I don't know
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right I mean it's really hard to attract Savvy creators who know who are kind of
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T done and tired with like building out yet someone else's proprietary wall garden with their own content and not
00:37:55
being in control of the algorithm and the Discover and and even their own social graph right you don't you don't own your
00:38:01
audience you rent your audience as a as a as a participant in these W Gardens right so so the thing I think that's
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really Savvy for meta is that they were like okay we need to do something different than Twitter different and
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this I think as they talk to creators this theme was evolving you know I think
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largely because Macedon was you know very was very very popular very early on
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you know when after Elon bought um Twitter and so I think a lot of Savvy
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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
00:38:39
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
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say is that you know they have a lot of different social networks today and none of them really work well with each other
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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
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networks or however many they have like when are these things going to be interoperable how do we experiment with
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interoperability and and how is that then sort of Stack Up Against The regulatory scenarios that are playing
00:39:08
out in the EU and and in the United States you know so I just think that like meta is actually pretty Savvy about
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this they're like look you know this is kind of where things are going this is what creators want and um let's figure
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out a way to embrace this rather than have it disrupt us what do you think is meta's motivation for having activity
00:39:28
Pub when they already have a platform that's growing so fast yeah what a good question right um
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I think so one place that this Federated model
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right can be really successful is when you're trying to unseat an established
00:39:50
you know uh incumbent right and in particular for the micro blogging world
00:39:56
there's an EST incumbent in Twitter and uh running at Twitter as a single
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network is hard to do um but if you can establish a Federation of different uh
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companies and it's not just your 100 million at threads but it's another you
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know 50 million Mozilla social users and people at Flipboard and people at medium
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and then the longtail of Mastadon sites uh Tumblr um you start to get close to
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the size of that incumbent and it's a good way to you know possibly unseat
00:40:36
that incumbent right so if the intention is um I think for Facebook or excuse me
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meta um their goal is not necessarily to take over micro blogging their goal is
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to like uh mess things up for Twitter right like take Twitter out of the equation so
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like partnering up with lot of other companies to make a uh Federated network
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is a good strategy for them um and that's speculation on my part I've had a chance to talk with with threads folks
00:41:07
quite a bit um they are uh the typical answer that they give which I think is
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um at least on the part of people um in the threads organization is they're like
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this is the right thing to do I'm like okay yes but you're also running right
00:41:25
um but I think they see it they also see it as strategically really valuable to be able to like partner with a lot of
00:41:32
other organizations and those are all pretty sensible answers right like I think it makes sense to need to try to
00:41:37
grow as fast as possible to compete by Twitter and it gives you access to all these Mastadon users and the other
00:41:43
companies that are in the fediverse now there's Flipboard and there's ghost and there's Tumblr and there's WordPress and
00:41:49
threads is going to be able to connect to all of these and have a lot more potential connections and the more of these platforms that Federate over
00:41:55
activity Pub the more spread's value grows over time which you can use as an advantage against Twitter but I really
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wanted to know meta's stance on this so I reached out to Adam maseri who is the CEO of Instagram and the guy that's
00:42:08
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
00:42:13
even better one now I think a couple different reasons there are some longer
00:42:19
term ones where I do feel like the web is going to move to a more open and
00:42:25
decentralized place over time exactly what that looks like time will tell but
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it's I think good to lean into these long-term trends as a large incumbent
00:42:35
just because I think the biggest risk to any company the size of ours is both not
00:42:42
only competition but what you do becomes irrelevant and then you slowly become irrelevant but honestly with threads
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specifically the bigger motivation was to try and really set up
00:42:55
a really strong set of incentives I think it's a healthier set of incentives to be in a place where creators can
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feasibly leave your platform and go to another platform with their followership and that
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is a challenge there's risk to that but it's also I think um creates value
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because it it forces us to really try and differentiate and create the most dynamic and compelling experience and
00:43:24
not just to lean on um our size So Adam is basically saying that they're trying
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to adapt to where the web is going early instead of just ignoring change like AOL
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did for example like in a way it's kind of the exact same story HTTP decentralized the web from AOL and
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there's this real chance that the movement to the next version of the Social Web wipes out all the current
00:43:46
incumbents or at least makes them a lot smaller so maybe this is just a long-term play as far as that second
00:43:52
part about giving users the option to leave the platform Maybe
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like I guess if the ferse took off and people still didn't like meta they'd have the option to leave but now they do
00:44:04
have the option to leave meta is kind of betting that they're going to have the best experience in the fediverse and people might actually stay that's kind
00:44:11
of a risk meta is willing to take now threads isn't just flipping a switch and making all 200 million accounts on
00:44:17
threads Federated over activity Pub right now it's opt in and that's I don't know it's kind of a bummer it'd be
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really nice if you had access to the whole threads network from M on and other places so I asked why that is and
00:44:30
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
00:44:36
lot of misunderstanding I mean you got a bunch of questions you can imagine the questions we get from Regulators around
00:44:42
the world who might be less Technical and I assume a lot of your audience is pretty Technical and there's a lot of
00:44:48
concerns about your content going to places that you don't anticipate it going to so from a privacy consent
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perspective and from a compliance perspective it's pretty hard to imagine us getting all the way to opt out but we
00:45:02
want people to opt in in fact I actually think more people if if the community grows I think more people will opt in
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over time because it will be a great way to just increase your reach and most creators are interested in increasing
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their reach I also think that if you look at text-based social networks like Twitter like threads like
00:45:24
maedon they tend to be even more head heavy than other social networks which
00:45:29
are also head heavy so a small number of accounts create a majority of the Impressions or the content that drives a majority of the Impressions so you can
00:45:36
get a lot of the value without getting everyone to opt in by getting the accounts that have the most reach to opt
00:45:41
in um because I think that's what threads can do that can really help other servers is get some bigger names
00:45:48
with bigger appeal onto a more Mass Appeal app and then have their content
00:45:55
flow out and create value other servers now one of the biggest things that I hear from a lot of people who say that
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they're sort of worried about the fediverse is that there are different social cultures on different platforms
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very true for example I don't post work rated things on my Instagram page I just
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post extremely long images right yes this is true right yes so I
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don't want all my like work mumbo jumbo intermixing in with my long images right
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so theoretically if Instagram were to be able to Federate as well you could
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follow on your social media reader of choice you could follow my
00:46:37
images stream or you could follow my threads stream or you could follow this
00:46:44
MH and so they are working like there are people that are thinking about oh like how maybe we could do like One
00:46:50
Singular fediverse account that sort of links out to all your other fediverse accounts but currently
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the people that say like oh well I don't want my Tumblr stuff like intermixing with other stuff people just only follow
00:47:04
your Tumblr if they want to follow your Tumblr like all all these different social media sites are different versions of you and people sort of know
00:47:11
what to expect from these different versions of you yeah so you only really have to follow the version of the person
00:47:17
that you want to get yeah so instead of I follow David on Instagram and David on
00:47:22
Twitter it's now I follow David's feriz long images
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and I also decided to follow David's work text posts right and it's just two accounts yeah and then theoretically you
00:47:34
could have a platform that only shows images you could have a platform that only shows text post or you could have a
00:47:39
platform that shows both it's an interesting concept right because the idea that the technology leads to a
00:47:46
particular culture and those barriers like uh protect the culture um but I
00:47:52
think that our choices as individual uals are what drive that culture right
00:47:59
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
00:48:06
feed it's like don't follow people on threads then right like that's a relatively easy thing for you to do or
00:48:13
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
00:48:19
right and so it kind of um uh I think that there is a lot of opportunity for
00:48:26
um uh for that kind of cross-cultural pollination to happen and a lot of
00:48:32
opportunity to say like hey that that's not for me and for me in particular I'm going to kind of make my choices in a
00:48:39
different way right I think this is a really interesting thing about the federsee right there's definitely this tension around what data you want to
00:48:46
beware and right now there are some people that have the opinion that we should just all post all of our content
00:48:52
on one account and everyone should just have access to one singular version of us but other people want to be a little
00:48:58
more segmented right now activity Pub kind of does both you still have to
00:49:04
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
00:49:11
all over the Fede so in the future if I publish an article on ghost it'll show
00:49:17
up as an account you can follow on Mastadon or Flipboard and if you comment on that post and MK it on our Flipboard
00:49:23
it will also show up in ghost that's pretty cool so ultimately if I could leave you with a succinct version of
00:49:30
what the fediverse is and how it works Evan says that it's basically like email
00:49:35
you can have various accounts that are hosted across various different servers and they can all interoperate but who
00:49:41
you choose to host you kind of dictates your experience right so if I'm on Gmail I'm going to have a certain experience
00:49:47
with certain features Outlook is going to have another superhumans going to have another but they all have the same
00:49:52
key features that let email be email but you kind of choose for the overall experience and the extra features they
00:49:59
build on top eventually you're going to be able to migrate your account to somewhere else and take all those
00:50:04
followers with you this mechanism is still in its early stages and it only kind of works but eventually you should
00:50:10
be able to change what account's hosting you and where you're viewing the content pretty simply so if you're interested in
00:50:16
all that and you're already on threads you can turn on fediverse sharing so other people across Federated platforms
00:50:21
can interact with you and if you're on Mastadon Flipboard or some other Federated Social Service it'll just do
00:50:27
it by default one thing that Adam misseri said was being able to
00:50:33
differentiate products based on features is going to lead to things like threads monetizing threads you know like they
00:50:40
have to turn that on at some point but if people don't like that if they do it in a wrong way they would just leave and
00:50:45
go somewhere else yeah you go to a platform that doesn't have ad that doesn't have ads so they he was saying
00:50:51
that they need to really get the features up there where people really want to use it that they're willing to
00:50:56
sit through ads cuz 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
00:51:04
it be for the rest of this awesome switching that we think is a great idea because it can be there it can be a
00:51:09
great idea but will people actually do it Mike McHugh the CE of Flipboard actually did this because he was on
00:51:15
Macedon Doo and then when Flipboard decided to Federate he was like I should probably be on Flipboard do social you
00:51:21
know this is my company I should do that and he said that switching was very technical and difficult right now but it
00:51:27
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
00:51:33
app so if you use that there should just be like a switch that you can just export all and switch to another app
00:51:39
hopefully it's easy to find it's at the Top If I'm thread maybe I'm burying it too many levels deep just to make a
00:51:45
little harder cuz that stuff at scale makes a difference like you have 200 million users if it's the if it's a button on the homepage everyone finds it
00:51:52
if it's three menu layers deep way less people find it it will definit be three layer menus deep because you don't want
00:51:58
to accidentally do that either true but again most of this is just based on where you're hosted right like if I just
00:52:05
don't want to be david. threads. net anymore and that's my main fediverse account I could be and I want it to be
00:52:11
on glor social or something like I would only really move that if I was like I do
00:52:19
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
00:52:24
the process otherwise you don't really have to think about it as long as people know that that's your account on that
00:52:30
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
00:52:36
it's technical right now and like the Social Web and especially activity Pub is you know made by a standards group
00:52:44
and it it moves slowly because it's made by a standards group and because of that
00:52:49
you know it's going to keep evolving over a period of time as working groups put things together but that's also one
00:52:56
of the primary things that blue sky is trying to do with the at protocol damn what a good
00:53:03
segue there's still Blue Sky yes so I guess we'll get to that
00:53:09
after the break I guess we'll get that after the break it's a break
00:53:15
[Music]
00:53:27
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
00:53:34
sense because it was incubated at Twitter BL sky is not actually as new as you might think well is but it also kind
00:53:41
of isn't in late 2019 Jack dorsy the CEO of Twitter at the time announced that
00:53:46
Twitter was funding a small team of developers to build an open and decentralized standard for social media
00:53:52
at the time Jack felt really regretful that Twitter had gotten more and more centralized he said that centralized
00:53:57
social media was struggling to meet Global enforcement policies and he was frustrated that the incentives trended
00:54:04
towards outrage and argumentative content versus something more user focused so Jack was giving this new team
00:54:10
two options he was either going to and I'm quoting here either find an existing decentralized standard that they can
00:54:16
help move forward or failing that create one from scratch this Matrix chat room
00:54:22
of interested people in the community got created to talk about potential implementations of this but no one could
00:54:27
really come to a consensus on the protocol itself particularly around how much power these servers should have how
00:54:33
they should handle moderation things like that so they decided to take individual proposals instead and Jay
00:54:39
gyber who had been in that chat room for blue sky and had separately created this decentralized platform called happening
00:54:45
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
00:54:52
public benefit LLC to develop that project in the open with a $ 13 million Grant from Twitter itself but just like
00:54:59
everything else in the story Elon buying Twitter threw a wrench in things now the blue sky was totally separate from
00:55:05
Twitter and Elon was trying to cut costs everywhere it became pretty unlikely that blue sky was going to receive any
00:55:11
more funding from them which kind of kicked that project into overdrive the Blue Sky Team worked really quickly
00:55:17
after this especially considering they were now running on this fixed amount of funding with no additional income they
00:55:22
announced a wait list for their own platform called Blue Sky which would use their own protocol around October 2022
00:55:29
and they announced an IOS app for an invite only beta in February 2023 with Android coming out in April all this
00:55:35
work was just enough to snag them a little additional funding in July 2023 to kind of stay afloat the protocol
00:55:41
that's underlying blue sky is called the at protocol or at which you know I think
00:55:47
it's kind of Apt considering it's for social media even though the at protocol and activity Pub have pretty similar
00:55:53
goals they actually kind of work in a fundamentally different way and which one you think is better I think kind of
00:55:59
just depends on your values so the primary function of the at protocol is to have total control over your social
00:56:05
experience without any individual company deciding what you see and when you see it apps can pull information
00:56:11
from all over the at protocol Network and have their own take on it but it all kind of shares the same bigger Network
00:56:18
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
00:56:25
which is the open source decentralized protocol that it runs on it's designed a lot for composability meaning that you
00:56:32
can take the blocks of it and put them together in different ways so you could for example just use the identity and
00:56:37
social graph piece to build a different kind of application or you could just borrow one of the labelers to label
00:56:43
photos in your application or something like that um and it's designed a lot around account portability so you can
00:56:49
take your data your friends and move them from one app to another without much disruption at all you could have a
00:56:55
separate at protocol app that uses the identity part of the protocol but has its own way of doing moderation or has a
00:57:01
certain way of orienting feeds and no matter what social network you're on personally all that information is going
00:57:07
to spread all over the at Network it's all accessible probably one of the most important functions of at is account
00:57:13
portability your account's untethered from the server you're on and instead it's tied to this hidden unique user ID
00:57:19
that spans the entire network so your account can be used to log into any service using the at protocol and you'll
00:57:25
still have all the same account details and followers you're just going to be posting from a different platform with
00:57:31
different features that gives people a really easy way to choose who's going to host their account whether it be Blu sky. social or like I don't know gb.net
00:57:38
if you want you can even host your own account so for example I'm just at david.com on the at protocol so I can
00:57:45
use any service using that protocol and my host is just me so blue sky the company spun up blue sky the social app
00:57:53
to basically showcase what's possible with that protocol so other companies could see what you could do with it are
00:57:59
there more how many people are on the at protocol or is it only Blue Sky because
00:58:04
I felt like it was partially easier to understand activity Pub because I know
00:58:11
of all the ghost right and that and the other ones I don't know currently the at
00:58:16
Proto currently blue sky is like one of the only ones building on the at protocol it is an open protocol mm so
00:58:23
anyone can build on top of it but just like you need a critical mass to use a
00:58:28
platform you also kind of need a critical mass to have the incentive to build an application of people that
00:58:34
could come to the platform one of these other features is custom feeds which lets you create and share your own feeds
00:58:40
with your own filters so where activity Pub is kind of just this fire hose of information that you receive the at
00:58:47
protocol kind of lets you pick and choose what kind of information you want to receive from all across the network
00:58:53
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
00:59:00
because you know you have the Discover feed which is one that we build that gives you kind of trending content
00:59:05
across the network as well as some stuff that you know your likes indicate you might like and that kind of gives me a
00:59:11
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 Moss feed
00:59:17
just pictures of like just Mossy rocks on Hikes and like green nature scenes and it's very soothing it's just a
00:59:23
Moment of Zen in like the social scroll that sort of makes at like a mega social protocol that can Encompass a lot of
00:59:29
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
00:59:35
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
00:59:42
pretty apt because it is like I I mentioned this toolbox of different sets of pieces like here's like the way that
00:59:49
we structure the data here's the way that we structure your identity and like the way that we have decided to structure your data is something that
00:59:55
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
01:00:01
moderation to kind of create your own filters that you can then share you can create a custom algorithm to rank your
01:00:07
content that pretty much anyone can build now currently blue sky is open for anyone to join and just like Mason they
01:00:13
have a bunch of little spurts of new users popping up here and there but they're building on it really really
01:00:19
fast like just recently they've added direct messaging stackable moderation and these starter packs which helped
01:00:24
onboard users a lot faster again blue sky is still a company which generally
01:00:29
builds a lot faster than a standards organization the at protocol has a lot of really great ideas and a lot of
01:00:35
people are really stoked about its potential but it is a very fundamentally different way of thinking about the web
01:00:40
versus say Activity Pub but again they both have really good ideas and some people like both of them so much that
01:00:47
they're actually Building Bridges between the protocols to make the protocols interoperable yeah uh I'm Ryan
01:00:53
Barrett uh I am a you know stereotypical Silicon Valley engineer um but what
01:00:59
we're talking about here is mostly the stuff I've done kind of on the side which is uh working with decentralized
01:01:05
Social and Building Bridges between social networks Ryan is building something called bridgy fed which is
01:01:10
basically exactly what it sounds like the idea of bridgy fed is to bridge different Federated protocols and make
01:01:17
them interoperable meta I I know again these are all open protocols it's like
01:01:22
HTTP or any part of the internet and so bridgy fed is this middleman This Server that sits in the middle that knows how
01:01:29
to speak all the protocols and translates from one to the other um you know whenever there's an individual
01:01:35
action like you post you reply you like you follow or unfollow like it
01:01:40
understands all those actions uh on each protocol and it just knows how to translate into the other protocol and
01:01:46
deliver it to wherever it should go and back VI Versa double Federated kind of
01:01:52
kind of kind of I mean Federated we like in really early days of the
01:01:58
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
01:02:04
trying a lot of different things it sounds like one is winning if I'm being honest yes I mean for a
01:02:11
while activity Pub was not really being used by anyone but basically messed it on and some very small projects like
01:02:17
pixel fed which was trying to be the decentralized Instagram MH but now that
01:02:22
threads joined there's like tons of momentum and you know some people will say like
01:02:27
oh now we have access to the 200 million threads followers you don't really cuz you have to manually turn it on yeah
01:02:34
there's something called meta's law it's named after Bob metcafe who was an executive at 3om um and he was talking
01:02:42
about land networks but um it also applies in social networks and the idea
01:02:48
is that the value of the network is not necessarily in the number of people it's
01:02:54
in the number of potential connections right so how many people can get connected and that so you know the value
01:03:01
goes up by the square of the number of people so if you have a really big
01:03:07
Network 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
01:03:13
those people that could be turned on as a as a connection in the fediverse that
01:03:19
sort of like amplifies the value of the fediverse exponentially I mean those people are closer to joining the Fede
01:03:26
than people without a threads account who don't really know what's going on because it's one click away and it's
01:03:32
right there versus yeah yeah yeah and it was embraced by like a major platform
01:03:37
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
01:03:44
more we learned about these different protocols we're like at kind of sounds really good yeah but activity Pub seems
01:03:51
like the one that's going to win because of threats right M they're fairly
01:03:56
different like like activity Pub is just a different way of looking at the internet Al together where all the
01:04:03
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
01:04:09
post it is now social media whereas at protocol is more just like I want to
01:04:15
tailor my social media experience exactly how I want it to be and I can
01:04:20
take in the streams of data from everyone else that's making social content as well could there not be a
01:04:26
platform on activity Pub where the user experience is better tailoring to your
01:04:32
own that ISS so like ultimately doesn't that make if it's already winning
01:04:37
something like that would make sense probably I think um a lot of what a lot of people will say is that activity Pub
01:04:43
is just like way simpler of an idea okay a lot of people even say that the at
01:04:48
protocol is like over engineered because they have thought through everything and a lot of the things that they have
01:04:54
thought through like the Simplicity of account portability and all and like
01:04:59
different algorithms or like choosing different feeds is like a very good idea
01:05:05
but it's almost like too complex for some people and it's like the platform some people think that the platform
01:05:11
should be really simple and the creativity of the apps that get built up on top of the platform can then be a lot
01:05:17
more complex so all right both of these protocols have pretty similar goals to
01:05:23
decentralize social media and separate power from individual companies but they're handling it in pretty different
01:05:28
ways the idea of activity Pub is to allow sources of media from all over the Internet to connect to a single fire
01:05:34
hose and let users follow and interact with that media wherever they are the at protocol works as more of a peace M
01:05:41
framework for building decentralized social networks which gives you this single source of identity that can be
01:05:47
easily moved wherever you want and can be structured however the user or platform wants ultimately these are just
01:05:53
really different ideologies on how open social should work they both want the same thing which is to remove
01:05:59
Consolidated power and give users more control over their social experience and I think that's a good thing for everyone
01:06:05
we'll see how the future plays out so if you want to be part of the new web
01:06:10
movement Federate your threads account just like we bullied Marquez can you show me how to do it yeah it's just one
01:06:18
are you about to feder feder I'm going to Federate and I'm just going to live on the podcast what's
01:06:24
tweeting called join the Federation skting that was blue sky blue sky um I'm
01:06:30
just going to say you're welcome after I do it wait turn it on I want to I want to see your face as you turn on
01:06:37
sharing on you now sharing to the Fede nothing has changed that's crazy yeah I
01:06:42
want to say one more thing now watch your notifications now watch me not open threads until the next you should not
01:06:48
have notifications on any social media platform it's healthier that way
01:06:53
especially push notification I only get notifications from people that I mutually follow notific I professionally
01:07:00
post on social media yeah that's all I do but you need to see every interaction
01:07:07
not everything no no no no but I still get some notifications for some important things that happen to my post
01:07:13
what if there was like an app that was specifically made for creators that dealt with notifications and only give
01:07:20
you useful ones oh look that'd be nice opportunity an opportunity arises
01:07:26
opportunity yeah no I agree that sounds great I would love that I'm G say one more thing before we get out of close it
01:07:34
out okay okay I asked Adam a
01:07:40
Ser so I wish you Saw's face
01:07:45
he that was amazing beautiful okay um
01:07:51
I'm keeping all this by the way I asked Adam if there was a
01:07:56
potential for them to make Federation opt out right because a lot of people
01:08:02
talk about like oh the fediverse now has like this huge opportunity because threads has 200 million people in it and
01:08:08
that's 200 million people in the fediverse it's 200 million people potentially in the Fede that Federate
01:08:14
and I asked Adam aeri do you ever see a world where you turn it on as an opt out
01:08:20
instead of an opt in I guess he didn't say or said no he
01:08:25
said he said probably not yeah and the biggest reason that he said is that it's
01:08:31
actually really funny he said most senators and legal people don't
01:08:37
understand anything that we do and the questions that we are going to have to field if People's data start going
01:08:43
places that we don't control is going to be awful for me on the legal side a lot
01:08:49
of laws only kick in once you get above a particular scale that we are above and the vast majority of the other players
01:08:56
are not so we just have to do things that other people don't have to do um we're also scrutinized much more than
01:09:03
probably anybody else um and that also means that the tolerance for mistakes um
01:09:10
is also much lower which is kind of fair um touche yeah and so there is that
01:09:17
there is that point like when you if you sign up for Threads and you're not Federated if it's not a core part of the
01:09:22
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
01:09:27
then all of a sudden all of your data can be accessible in other places that you don't assume that is something that
01:09:34
maybe people would be annoyed at mhm but but if we're scraping your data opt out
01:09:40
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
01:09:47
assumed that all of your everything you post is accessible from everywhere because it's not necessarily that it
01:09:53
goes everywhere it's just that other people are being able to see your fire hose from other platforms if you sign up
01:09:59
right now is there an option right off the bat to that would be a good sign up button I feel like that just quickly
01:10:06
explains it it obviously didn't happen for us because it wasn't Federated when we all signed up for Threads yeah but I
01:10:12
think currently you can still only sign up through threads through Instagram but I don't know if they have I doubt
01:10:18
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
01:10:25
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
01:10:32
have full integration with federations So currently on threads at least of time of recording all you can do is see
01:10:39
comments and like comments but you can't reply to them which is a problem because a lot of people from mastedon keep
01:10:45
asking me questions on threads that I can't reply to he's not ignoring you I'm
01:10:51
not ignoring you it's all Adam glass as loud as he can I see you
01:10:56
but there are some leaks that by the end of the year they'll have potentially finished that process of Federation
01:11:04
Federation I believe it when I see it I would like to see it though yeah for the
01:11:10
sake of my notifications please thank you all right
01:11:17
well and if you don't know now you know you've heard the song before I know for sure okay yeah for sure I don't really
01:11:26
you don't know what I don't think I know that song oh my goodness is it biggie
01:11:31
never heard hip biggy biggy biggy I think you're Jing oh no I do know that
01:11:37
song okay well you heard the line me you've heard the I feel like I've heard the line
01:11:43
being said I just don't know what the song is David take us out come on biggie don't you wait never mind Marquez take
01:11:48
us out I bet you can't wait to Federate and if you don't know now you
01:11:53
know that's the Fed this has been a bonus episode thank you for joining us on this Winding Road you
01:11:59
now know more about it than you ever thought you would me too it's great hopefully we're all feriz Federated
01:12:05
Federated FedEd together FedEd catch you guys in the next episode on regularly scheduled
01:12:11
programming peace [Music]
01:12:30
these are these guys are now fed of verst
