Sean Tilley: Welcome to the Decentered adverse eventsPodcast by WeDistribute,
a program that focuses on user empowerment, decentralized communication,
and the future of the internet.
I'm Sean Tilly, acting editor in chief of WeDistribute.
Laurens Hof: Hi, I'm Laurens Hof, and I'm a writer for The Fediverse Report.
Damon Outlaw: Hey guys, I am Damon Outlaw, and I am also
part of the WeDistribute team.
Thank you for listening.
Sean Tilley: Thank you for joining us today.
So, uh, we've got a lot in the can to talk about for, uh, today's podcast.
Uh, our biggest emphasis is going to be publishing and content discovery.
Two of like the biggest problems in decentralized systems, I think, where:
you've got a lot of stuff all over the place, you're not necessarily
all on one server, and it can be kind of hard to figure out, you know,
"how do I discover the good stuff?
How do I get the good stuff to come to me?"
And also, you know, the kind of question that a lot of publishers are
asking is, "how do I create a channel that an audience is interested in?
How do I put stuff out there, and have people receive it, rather
than just shouting into a void?"
So we're going to talk about publishing and I think ,you know,
you guys have definitely seen on the timeline people talking about this.
But, a lot of people are looking for an alternative to Substack these days.
Substack recently got caught in hot water with their statement that they
put out saying that," You know what?
Yeah, we have Nazi content.
We're not going to do anything.
We're not going to hold people accountable and we're not going to
demonetize Nazi blogs on our platform."
Hamish McKenzie, one of the co-founders of Substack said something to that effect.
And so, a lot of people are looking for alternatives.
Uh, and I think, you know, we might have at least three or four within
the Fediverse itself that might serve as a suitable starting point
or at least jumping off point for people to find that alternative.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, I think the interesting part is that SubStack as a
platform is actually really two parts.
There's like, Just pushing an email newsletter out into people's inbox.
But there's also a huge social discovery component to it.
And I think especially on the second part, the Fediverse, there's some really
interesting ideas and platforms that, like, can work towards that direction
and help with social discoverability.
There's, there's for like, for example, the email sending out part.
There's platforms like buttondown.
email and there's Ghost.
They, they work.
They're great.
It's another email for you, which is, which is good helping you out
with sending emails is awesome.
But the, the interesting part, I think, is the, the platforms like, uh, where,
uh, WordPress and, uh, write freely that deliver the social aspect as well.
And I think it's worth diving into how they think about that and how.
How they do the social aspects.
Sean Tilley: Yeah, a hundred percent.
And I think like that's kind of a, an interesting inflection point.
A lot of people when they talk about a newsletter platform,
it's actually like not super clear what they're talking about.
Like what even is a newsletter platform in 2023?
Uh, you know, for example, I've seen Ghost present itself as
that at one time or another.
I've seen, uh, Substack, which is now incorporating microblogging
and a whole lot of other, you know, sort of social centric features.
Like, I think at one point in time, we kind of assumed that a newsletter
was just kind of a syndicated email that was nicely formatted.
Like, you know, you drop something into MailChimp, it gives you a template,
and you send it to a list of people.
But, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, I think the landscape is a
lot more sophisticated nowadays.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, for sure.
There's just so many email newsletters and sub stacks out there.
It's sub stack that made it almost too easy to send out an email,
to send it to start a newsletter.
So now the question is really, how do you get discovered if you need
new content and sub stack is good at that, but I think activity power of
Fediverse can be, there's so much more potential to be even better at that.
Sean Tilley: Yeah, 100%.
And that's why I'm currently very excited about.
Admittedly, some fledgling offerings that we've had, like, you know,
I think the biggest one that, you know, definitely we lean on for We
Distribute is the fact that we have an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress.
Uh, the significance of that is that, you know, we're Maintaining a blog
with a content management system, but when we type up our articles and
format them and put our pictures in them and everything, when we, when we
publish, we're not just publishing to the web, we're also dispatching that
to people's inboxes, both via email, as well as into the Fediverse itself.
Um, I think there still needs to be some love and care taken with the experience.
I think, uh, Macedon not natively supporting articles is kind of a problem,
but I think there are enough options there where if you wanted to basically
like make your website function like a Facebook page or even push out full
articles, uh, in a, in a long note.
You can 100 percent do that and Mastodon can easily consume that
content, people can respond to it from their timeline, and those will
show up as comments in your article.
I think, I think this is sort of the first step that we're seeing.
I would love to see like a dedicated, uh, publishing platform
specifically for the Fediverse.
But I, I can't argue with the fact that like both WordPress and now Drupal,
uh, the other major CMS that kind of powers a third of the web, uh, they both
have activity pub support via plugins.
Yeah, I've been using the ActivityPub plugin from a WordPress
site and a WordPress newsletter as well, and it's really great.
Laurens Hof: I think what made me realize it is that it actually asks quite a bit
of a mind shift of you when you use it.
So much of the way of how you use most websites and sub stacks as well, more
broadly, is the idea of like, how do you get people to go to your website to come
to your place and read your content there.
And that's the part that switches around when you start using the activity
part, uh, activity, but plug in part, because then you send content out and
then you, you don't particularly need people to get on your website anymore.
You just need them to see it in like, in whatever mess, don't know whatever
FedExpress client they're using.
Like your website becomes sort of an.
archive, a home base.
It's nice to have.
It's important to have a home base, but like you want people in the end, most
people hopefully not to read it there.
And I think that's a very different mind shift that.
That I haven't really fully, uh, fully figured out yet
how to make the most of that.
But I think it's bigger than people give it, like, than
people are thinking about so far.
Sean Tilley: Yeah, I mean, like, I think that we're still very much in
the beginning phases of other platforms creating content that's not just
status updates for the Fediverse.
Like, I know that we've had, we've had photo and video for years, but
I think in terms of, like, long form content, um, you know, there's always
been, like, a question, like, from You know, the Mastodon side from like the
Friendica and Hubzilla side, you know, just from any kind of client side server
application, like, Hey, we're getting all this content in from all these places.
Like, how do we make it look right?
And I think like that is kind of the question for the ages for,
you know, Mastodon and all these other platforms to figure out.
It's like, how do we take articles from the web and make them look good within
our own clients, but also make it so that.
You know, it matches with what the publisher wants it to be.
And that's a tough line to straddle, but I think the activity pub plugin
for WordPress is a good start.
What I'm really excited though, about though, is seeing, uh, publisher platforms
like Flipboard really take the initiative and lean into activity pub specifically.
Um, I think this is going to be a transformative thing and how they
implement it is going to be a big deciding factor for probably a lot of
how content is going to be formatted regarding articles and things like that.
Uh, within the ActivityPub standard.
So, like, if Flipboard were to embrace, you know, the article
activity type, they would probably have a good way to determine a
standardized form for publishing.
For publishing an article and having it look right in the browser.
And I think that could be amazing.
I think it could be that, you know, you syndicate from your site to content
hubs like Flipboard, or, you know, maybe, uh, maybe a future version of,
uh, Newsmast or something like that.
They pick up your content and they can read it as if it was native.
And then you have native interactions coming back and forth from both platforms.
So people are definitely interested in.
Being able to discover things as well as being able to share
them and have an audience.
I think when you bring in Federation, that solves a lot of problems.
You're not just trying to build a follower list through email the old way.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, for sure.
I think there's also interesting integrations happening.
Well, to come slightly back towards the publishing side with, um,
a very recent new projects, um, distributed inbox, uh, distributed.
distributed press and the social inbox where you can publish
articles and newsletters, not only to ActivityPub, but to the rest
of the decentralized web as well.
And I think that's a very interesting way of thinking.
Even more broadly of like, you come into really fundamental questions of
what, what even is the Fediverse and boundaries start to get really fuzzy.
And I, I think it's healthy that the boundaries get fuzzy and unclear and
that people are experimenting with this sort of cool new, uh, new features.
Sean Tilley: Wow.
Yeah.
No Distributed Press is really interesting.
I'm looking at their website right now.
And, you know, in addition to ActivityPub, as you said, it looks
like it's using IPFS and Holepunch.
And they're looking at, you know, adding other protocols for distribution
like BitTorrent, which is crazy to me.
I don't think I've seen a whole lot other than maybe PeerTube, a
whole lot of Fediverse platforms experimenting with that.
That's really cool.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of an unexplored space there, and I'm
very interested to see where that goes.
Sean Tilley: 100%.
Um, but like, you know, I think I think platforms like Flipboard
coming into the Fediverse are also a really exciting thing.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Sean Tilley: It's a really interesting time.
You know, Damon, I think brought up to the other day that you can follow ESPN from,
from, from Flipboard on the Fediverse now.
And I know that like for some time we've had like relatively
high-profile, uh, journalism outputs, uh, outlets like The Verge and, um,
Ars Technica and a couple of places.
Like, they have Mastodon accounts.
But like, I think this goes a step further where suddenly you have teams
of people that are not just like setting up a bot to automatically post, but you
have people that are actively managing these accounts and you have like actual
syndication coming from the website and dispatching to some kind of content
hub within the Fediverse, which really hasn't been done before up to this point.
And suddenly like, you know, instead of all the weird niche things that
I'm used to seeing I can follow, you know, George Takei or, uh, you know,
some celebrity if I really wanted to, or I could follow Popular Mechanics
or any kind of news source that like I would expect on a quote unquote
normal mainstream part of the Internet.
Like you can just get it here now, which is crazy.
I never thought in all my years that I'd be able to watch sports on the Fediverse.
Um, but I think, like, the other side of this is that, you know, it's
interesting because it's a bit of a double standard where people are
very excited to see platforms like Medium and Flipboard dipping their
toes in the water and figuring out, like, how do we build an audience and
bring more people into this space?
But I think people get really uncomfortable when it comes to meta and
threads, and I think a lot of people are Still kind of trying to figure
out a, how do they feel about that?
But also they're kind of wringing their hands over what's going to happen.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
I, and I think to grab it back to, to draw like the comparison with a
Flipboard that we just mentioned in here as well, I think in itself, there's.
Uh, really a sense of, well, it most probably says a lot of negative
emotions, uncertain about the feeling of like, Hey, there's a very big
actor coming into like this, what used to be our small niche part of the
internet, which I very much understand.
And I agree with, and I think it's interesting to, uh, hasn't really fully
worked out that idea, idea that it's not just Meta and Threads, it's, like,
other companies like Flipboard as well.
And like the dynamic is not just like threats on the other hand
versus the singular Fediverse.
But it's suddenly, well, now we have Flipboard, who else,
what's going to come up next?
All like different actors talking and thinking and
influencing what the Fediverse is.
And maybe if the Fediverse even is still a singular thing.
Sean Tilley: Yeah, no, I mean, that's been a huge question too is like,
if we take a stance against this, is it going to fragment the network?
That's a big thing that I think a lot of people are
uncomfortable about at the moment.
But on the other hand, like, I think if, uh, I think if Threads were to
actually pull into the station and finish their ActivityPub integration
and start actually federating.
It might just inspire like entities like Automattic to
finish, uh, integrating Tumblr.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Sean Tilley: And it might inspire a lot of other companies like Flickr who
have like been kind of on the fence about maybe implementing ActivityPub.
Like, you could have, like, a dozen different like mainstream platforms
suddenly say, "Hey, you know what?
It does make sense for us to federate because we don't have to do all the
moderation and content management.
Like we can outsource a lot of that."
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Sean Tilley: "And we can focus on just engaging with the entire web rather
than us trying to own all the operations under our house, in our house."
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
I think the fragmentation of the network is probably good?
Like it's, it's I, I've, I've not a hundred percent sure yet on this, on this,
to be honest, but I, I have noticed that there's so many conflicting ideals living
inside the singular Fediverse, plus the idea of like, you run your own server, you
run your own social network, which like, that's the core promise of the Fediverse
and like, you cannot run your new social network, if like, if it actually means
you become part of like this singular coherent vision with one coherent idea
and ideology of what a Fediverse is.
Like, it doesn't work that way
Sean Tilley: and I also think like, The idea that we should maximize, like, the
amount of connections between everybody on the network is an idea that is long
past, like, that is something that comes from the Diaspora days where,
you know, federation wasn't that good, and so people were like, well, if I
maximize the connections, I'll make sure my messages get out, and I don't think
that's really how the Fediverse works nowadays, it's more that people are like,
well, you know, I want to make sure my messages get out to the people I want
to talk to, I am not that interested in, like, my posts and my videos and
my cat pictures going to a Nazi space.
Or, you know, like, something that has a lot of hate speech and racism.
Most people, they just want to have fun on the internet and do their
thing and be part of a space, but they want control over who can see what.
Uh, they post and who can interact with what they post.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Sean Tilley: And I think cutting off certain parts of the network
doesn't break the network.
Like that's the network working as intended.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Strongly agreed.
Somebody the other day posted something on that really resonated with me and We
should learn a very interesting lesson from Bluesky in that Bluesky people really
value the idea of that the network is like this private space on the internet.
And like for lots of people currently on Bluesky, they feel very upset
about the idea that it's going to turn out, uh, become open.
Like they, they are just open it up that you can see all posts now
without the account and even more upset with the idea of federation.
And like, you can.
Criticize the idea of like, Hey, you joined a social network that was very
explicitly intended to do this, which fair, but at the other hand, like,
apparently there's a very significant need and demand for people of like
having that private spot, like that enclosed space on the internet.
And that, that, I think that's a super valuable lesson idea
to take away from Bluesky.
Like,
Sean Tilley: Oh yeah.
Laurens Hof: Hey, why don't we build like we have this easy to plug in software.
Why go with real even more private spaces or semi private spaces on the internet?
Sean Tilley: Yeah, that's kind of funny to me because I think this is a, another
version of what's happened with Mastodon is that people kind of have a set of
preconceived notions about how private something is and then they find out,
Oh, Oh, that's not the case at all.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Sean Tilley: You know, Oh, I thought that posting Unlisted
meant that people couldn't see it.
Or, you know, I thought that posting Followers-Only meant that
only certain people could see it.
And then suddenly.
You know, if you follow someone after they post that, you're going to see it like
there's a lot of weird, uh, expectations.
And I think with Bluesky in particular, the fact that there wasn't a public view
for their, their web interface, uh, that led to some false notions that, oh, even
if I post something public, only Bluesky people will see it like, no, no, you
guys are literally building a global public square using the AT protocol.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Sean Tilley: Like.
That's unavoidable.
It's gonna, it's going to end up at a point where Bluesky posts are going
to be what's embedded in people's articles rather than Twitter or X posts.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, for sure.
Sean Tilley: Like, having a public interface and public
access is going to ensure that.
Laurens Hof: But there's also opportunity there.
Like, if blue, when blue sky is starting to open up, like, and there's still
people that actually want the more private space of the internet, like
build a semi enclosed part of the Fediverse that does that for them,
that offers that like more private.
focused, uh, space.
Sean Tilley: No and I'm excited to see where that goes.
Like, yeah, I think to tie it back to what we were talking about before, I
think Threads coming into the network is going to probably force a lot
of people to do some very important development that we've kind of just
put over to the side for way too long.
Uh, the main thing being.
Privacy controls.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Sean Tilley: Like, privacy controls and being able to filter in or
out connections to other networks based on what their domains are.
I think Dansup was doing some really interesting stuff where a server
could have a policy that filters everything out, but then you could
opt out of that policy and just bring whatever it is you want back in so
that you could see it specifically.
Uh, you know, being able to say like, Hey, our server blocks Threads, but
you can still interact with Threads and follow it yourself on our server.
We're not going to punish you for that.
It's kind of a cool way to have your cake and eat it too.
Historically, it's just been admins telling people who they can connect with.
Damon Outlaw: Yeah.
Yeah.
And then there was also the, uh, pop up.
Um, I saw on the message, uh, and one of the matrix spaces where Mastodon
is going to adopt, uh, a similar strategy as Pixelfed in that regard.
Right.
And so, uh, I think that is, you know, another step in the right direction
to allow users to have the control that they kind of desire in terms of
dictating what their experiences will be.
Laurens Hof: I mean, I kind of love this as a whole take of like, Threads
joining the Threadiverse is good for the reason that it forces us
to do, like, delayed privacy work.
Like, that we should be putting off.
Like, I definitely see that.
I agree.
Sean Tilley: Well, I, I was telling Damon the other day that I think one
of the most ironic parts of developing a grassroots, open source, user centric
network is that a lot of things, um, A lot of the most important parts
don't get developed until well after the fact, like with realizing privacy
or like rate limiting on servers or things like that, we're not really going
to invest much time into it until we realize we're a little bit too late.
We're going to say, oh shit, I should have thought about that like six years
ago, but no one was going to think about it six years ago because it didn't
seem like we were going to get that big that fast with some of the biggest
players on the internet joining in.
The time is now, unfortunately, for better or worse, but we have this opportunity to
say, okay, there's some serious problems with how we've implemented privacy and
user access and permissions controls and, you know, uh, getting hammered
with millions and millions of activities when my server maybe has the CPU power
for a couple dozen people at most.
There are some like high level network architecture changes that we could
make that would actually benefit us.
Because all of this, all of this is happening.
It does not have to be a gloom and doom scenario where we're
just drowning in a bunch of statuses that no one wants to see.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, for sure.
Sean Tilley: I'm feeling pretty optimistic.
I think like the biggest thing is just giving people better
tools and better control.
Uh, I think looking at Bonfire, I'm very excited to see some of their ideas with,
uh, circles and boundaries and user lists.
Uh,
Laurens Hof: it's, it's so nice to go back to like, uh, G plus circles.
Uh,
Sean Tilley: yeah!
I, yeah, I mean, and I feel like we're finally getting something that kind of
resembles Diaspora's aspects, although definitely a little more polished,
um, just having like a way to say:
"I only want to send this message to this group of people or these
two dudes, or, you know, my friend Joe and my, my other friend Jill",
like not everything has to be a DM.
Like sometimes you just want to have access to a couple of
people or a group, um, without it being anything more than that.
And Mastodon has lacked that granularity.
I think like having a way to say that people can't respond to this post or only
people in the receiving group can respond.
Those things are going to be a huge deal.
And honestly, I think it's long overdue.
Damon Outlaw: "There's just going to be this flood of a hundred
million messages and posts".
And like, that's just not how it works.
Right.
And so I think there's also some, uh, things that need to
be cleared up and understood.
In terms of how federation actually works.
Sean Tilley: I mean, I think also part of it is just that we've never had something
like this happen before so we don't really have a lot of use cases to explain like,
you know, I think honestly they are going to see a lot of traffic but it's going to
be through like the the federated timeline not through just like Oh, no, I connected
to one person on Threads, now i'm getting billions of messages from all Threads.
It's going to be like I'm getting messages from that guy, the posts he's
making and the people he's following.
So I'm still getting a lot of traffic.
I'm not getting everything, but I think the point is that it's unproven at this
point as to what it's going to look like.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
I think there's also a part that people haven't really fully taken
into consideration yet, which is super funny, that Threads is going to be
the one to make Federation opt in.
Sean Tilley: Yeah.
Laurens Hof: Where the rest of the Fediverse makes Federation opt out, which.
I have feelings about considering our history with Opt in and
Opt out, but hey, here we are.
And I think it's important for people to not have that idea of like, oh,
my social network's on Threads.
That means I finally get to connect with all of them.
Like, very few people ever opt into any service that's hidden somewhere
in settings, regardless of what it is.
Sean Tilley: Yeah.
Laurens Hof: And I don't think you should assume that's going to be
any different for Federation either.
So like.
Even if they're nice friends, just nice, be a nice people.
It's a friend.
. People forget.
People get whatever confused or bored or whatever, like,
it's a very significant part.
I assume the large majority of people on Threads simply won't opt into this.
Sean Tilley: Yeah, no, I think that's the case.
And I think, I think there's an opportunity where maybe somewhere down the
road, Threads will have a way to present this as this cool, exciting new thing.
You know, hey, you want to follow these websites?
You want to talk to these people?
Like, there's a way to make that feature seem appealing if
they advertise it to people.
But yeah, if you, if it just lives in settings, like only a
handful of people are going to be like, Hey, what the hell is this?
And then click the toggle and then discover there's a whole
internet that they can talk to.
But, you know, on the other hand, this could be also rather clever part of a
slow rollout where they're just, you know, going to focus on the enthusiasts first
before maybe turning it on for everybody.
Laurens Hof: I think, like, Flipboard is going to hope to be the game changer,
like, that's going to be the household name that people are more familiar, more
likely to know than Mastodon is, so maybe the idea of like, hey, you can opt in
on Threads to federate with Flipboard.
Sean Tilley: Yeah, or Medium, if they ever get around to it.
Like, I feel like Flipboard becoming something and maybe Newsmast.
Like, that might inspire, you know, Ghost and Medium and a couple other publishing
content hubs to say, Hey, you know what?
They're doing it.
WordPress is doing it.
Let's just all federate.
At some point, that makes economic sense to them and then suddenly the value
proposition will make sense to users.
Laurens Hof: I agree?
And I, my, my guess very much specifically for Tumblr is that they're just
sort of putting these feelers out.
Like they put it on the back burner again, but not completely to have
like Tumblr integrate with F2F.
And I feel like they're all just looking a little bit like, Hey,
what are the other parties doing?
Sean Tilley: Yeah.
Laurens Hof: What is Threads doing?
Like, is this a successful, is it worth putting in the time and
money and engineering efforts?
And I have a feeling they're just kind of waiting to get an answer.
And if the answer is yes, they're just all going to go for it.
Sean Tilley: Well, and you know, there's been talk in the past of like Tumblr
becoming an open source self hostable platform that does federation and stuff,
and I think that all would be really cool.
But I think the main value proposition for me is that if they do it, I
can get my wife to actually be on the Fediverse without having her to
having her switch to another platform.
Like she can just be on Tumblr and I can interact with her.
So fingers crossed, but you know, it's, it's a long development and Tumblr
is a very old platform at this point.
They've probably inherited a lot of technical debt.
So trying to make a big sweeping change to their architecture,
probably going to take a lot of time.
I think nowadays, like a lot of services probably have more of a playbook to
look at compared to what came before.
Like at the very least, like Threads, you know, they can sit down and say,
you know, Hey, here's the source code for PixelFed and how they did it.
And they can study it and be like, well, this makes sense for us.
Or they can say, you know, actually this thing that Mastodon makes sense for us.
Or they could try something totally bespoke and do compatibility testing.
Like, I think moving forward, that's going to be a really important
thing, is that we're testing against a platform agnostic standard.
Um, just so that it works for everybody, rather than we all just
assume that everything is Mastodon.
Laurens Hof: Yeah.
Finally, I saw a developer network got funding for this, to build
this, uh, this testing suite.
Sean Tilley: Yeah.
Laurens Hof: Like we said, like, this has been a long time in the
making, and way, way overdue.
And it's it's oh my god, it's very exciting.
That's actually happening.
But man, this should have happened so much sooner
Sean Tilley: this should have happened like 10 years ago, which is sad.
But like that's just how it is I think it's really funny though because the
original quote unquote, uh ActivityPub Test Suite Was basically just a
questionnaire that developers filled out.
Like it wasn't an actual testing suite that ran a series of very difficult
tests for a server to perform.
It was just some guy filling out like 20 questions and saying, Oh
it does this, has this feature, here you go, here's the report.
When really we need like an automated test suite that people can, uh, submit
like code builds against like they can have a continuous integration that will,
uh, whenever they put out an update to their code in a repo, it'll run tests and
say, yes, that works with the core suite and then, you know, all these different
projects say, yep, you know, we have a standard thing to test against rather
than something breaking and everyone guessing and trying to figure it out.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Sean Tilley: Well, Lawrence, um, you know, I know that you've been doing
the Last Week in the Fediverse stuff.
Is there any interesting topics that you want to cover?
Laurens Hof: Uh, PeerTube, obviously, well, not obviously, I hosted a live
stream with them like two weeks ago.
It was super fun.
They did their, uh, gave their yearly plans for last year, what
they worked on and what they're going to be working on for 2024..
Sean Tilley: Wow.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, it's pretty big.
They, they're going full ahead on PeerTube.
They got a second developer to work on it.
It's very, very fun to hear them talk about and get a CP who like the product
owner of a PeerTube from PharmaSoft to get like, he's very excited, passionate,
but it's, it's just a small organizations and seeing them make you such a big deal
of like going from one to two developers.
Yeah.
completely understandable, the right choice, but it's, it's really helpful
to put, to make the scale visible and the scale differences visible.
When you talk about Threads and the Fediverse and Mastodon, it's,
it's absolutely unbelievable.
And I think the blog post today, it's very much worth reading.
They go into a little bit more detail as well.
It's like, "Hey, This is why we see PeerTube as an alternative to YouTube
and Twitch, but very much not as a rival simply because like the sense of scale is
enormous and like, um, unbelievably large.
So they can only be an alternative that like focuses on their own values.
So what built what they think is important software and not just try,
try to be the new YouTube, because that comes with so much problems that
they're very much not equipped to handle.
Sean Tilley: You've gotta manage expectations at the end of the day.
Like, and yeah, they're going with being an alternative rather than being
"the alternative" or "the rival" to YouTube, because like YouTube is so big
in terms of how much content it has and the mechanisms it has for paying out
creators and the programs that Google has for discovery and search and indexing
and just all sorts of crazy stuff.
Like, I think like with PeerTube, they're just like, well, we can do
these things, we can federate, we can, you know, have people put things in
object storage, we can make it cheaper and faster and more efficient, but
like at the end of the day, like.
It's a much harder path for PeerTube to figure out like, "Hey,
we're going to convert all of the YouTubers to use our platform."
Like, that's not what they're doing.
Laurens Hof: No, that's not what they're doing at all, which is good.
Sean Tilley: Yeah.
Laurens Hof: I think they still need to lean.
more into like the realization for themselves of like what
it means to be an alternative.
Because one of the one thing, one anecdote from the live stream that
I found by far the most striking is this year, they delivered a
new feature with password protect.
So you can simply set a password for your, all your videos.
Yeah.
And turns out.
Great feature, like awesome.
Specifically a great feature for any sort of crea yeah, creators that has
like a Patreon or whatever, like that has paid subscribers and you wanna
deliver like a locked video only to people to pay you or only to a small
subsect of the population, whatever.
And like, they just built that feature because they thought
Yeah, why not build that feature?
It was on the wishlist somewhere.
Sean Tilley: "That would be cool."
Laurens Hof: without, yeah, it would be cool.
Without realizing that for creators, this is the big thing that makes it like
actually relevant and interesting as an alternative to YouTube, like as something
different that enables new use cases that they currently cannot do with YouTube.
Sean Tilley: Yeah.
Laurens Hof: And Uh, like then the fact that there was unexpected for
from a soft and appear to developers says a lot about me of like, there's
so much potential still of like, Hey, like be this alternative, be
something different, be, be a different form of a video hosting platform.
This speaks to a different audience and well, the fact that it all really happens
by accident is great, but like, I wish, I wish there was even more focus on it.
And it's clear that they are focusing on for the next year.
So who knows how it's going to look like?
Sean Tilley: No, it really seems like they're doubling down on their development
and I'm very excited for them, especially, you know, I run a PeerTube host.
Uh, I am definitely seeing a lot of growth and excitement from people
that are looking for that alternative.
And I think like.
Probably within the next year or so, we're probably going to see a similar
migration towards, uh, to what we saw with Reddit and what we saw with Twitter.
There are a lot of people that are unhappy with YouTube and the
way that things work over there.
And a lot of people, they don't want to have to deal with seeing five different
ads just to watch a 20 second video.
You know, they want to be able to sit down and share what they want to share and not
worry about, you know, monetization, not worry about like programming their video
to look a certain way, say certain things, have a thumbnail that looks a certain way,
because there's not really an algorithm that works in that sense with peer tube.
It's just, it's.
It's a different form of discovery.
And I think people are excited about that.
Yeah.
But what I'm most excited about is that they're finally going to be
working on a mobile app, which sounds like not that big of a deal, but this
has always been a pain point for me because like The browser is fine.
It's fine on the web, but having a dedicated app for a lot of people
makes all the difference in the world.
Being able to take that on the go with you, easily watch
and interact with videos.
Um, that's going to, that's going to put that in the hands of like.
You know, thousands of people that maybe they don't necessarily have a
computer as their internet first device.
Maybe the main way they interact with the web is through mobile clients.
And I think like that could actually be a significant development for just creating
and consuming content from PeerTube.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, like It's kind of a no brainer at this point, if
you want to increase your audience, you do have to have a mobile app.
But I am very curious how this is going to go, because, um, Owncast,
like the, the federated live streaming only service, they built an Apple, like
an iOS app last October or something.
And they could not get it past the Apple approval system, because they
allowed, they had their directory that allows for any sort of stream.
And Apple said like, no, you have to have ownership of every, like, of the
content that you can view in your app.
And well, obviously that's impossible, like in a decentralized,
uh, self hosting system, like that, that's not going to happen.
Sean Tilley: Yeah.
Laurens Hof: So I'll, I'll guess try to get lawyers to, to figure this out.
Uh, Apple, like Apple's approval system is already notorious for like being
opaque and unusable and that them not being able to understand how federated
and like decentralized networks work.
It's no surprise.
Framasoft and PeerTube definitely paid attention to this.
They were very much like, we're going to build an Apple like an iOS app.
We're not guaranteed that the iOS app will actually be released on
the app store, because of Apple.
Sean Tilley: Yeah, it might be that users have to sideload it,
which is itself a funny development because now Apple has to allow that.
Um,
Laurens Hof: yeah.
Sean Tilley: So one way or another, it's like, yeah, there will be an iOS app.
It's just that, yeah, you know, they PeerTube probably will have
to have some asterisks about like,
"Hey, like.
This is just a client.
The client does not come.
It come with a dedicated directory discovery system.
You have to log into a server for that, like maybe that was like kind
of a mistake on Owncast's part is that you know that that discovery mechanism
was part of the service and the app.
Maybe like with, maybe we could have a more Mastodon like situation where it's
like, Hey, this is just a client for posting and reading things like it doesn't
actually come with any content at all.
There's gotta be a way around that.
But yeah, the, the publishing process is just awful for iOS developers and.
It's going to be kind of an ongoing battle for anybody that's
building apps for the Fediverse.
Laurens Hof: Yeah, absolutely.
Progressive web apps, I guess.
Sean Tilley: Well, thank you for tuning in.
You've been listening to the Decentered Podcast by We Distribute, check
out our site at wedistribute.
org.
Follow us on Mastodon or any of the websites that we have listed on our site.
And support us at either patreon.
com slash wedistribute or opencollective dot com slash We Distribute.
My co hosts are Laurens Hof and Damon Outlaw, and you've been the best.
Thank you.