This is a pretty fun experience and a pretty fun unique opportunity for both me, the panelists,
and I guess everybody here. We Distribute is a news publication, it's really just a blog, that I
started by myself to cover the developments and evolution of the Fediverse. It's been around
longer than I'd care to admit, and it's been through several evolutionary phases. We
regularly host a podcast, we interview creators within the space, people building platforms,
asking about their history, their experience, and what their vision is for the network. Joining
me today are the panelists that I'll spoke today. So I just kind of want to open up a conversation, you
know, generally with our podcast, it's a pretty relaxed vibe. We're not here to put anyone in the
hot seat, not even you, Evan. What we're really looking to do is to have a natural, organic
conversation that, you know, reflects what's top of mind for everybody and what's going on. So I
guess I just want to start off with, if everyone could reintroduce themselves, starting with
Boris. Hi, my name is Boris Mann. Oh yeah. Hi, my name is Boris Mann in microphone version. I live
here in Vancouver, have been a technologist building on open source and open systems and
connecting people for the last 20 plus years. I have two main things that I'm working on right now.
One is with the industrial research lab, Inc and switch, working on local first and encryption and
malleable software. And two is working on growing the atmosphere ecosystem, the community growth
around AT Protocol that is not Bluesky. I'm Anuj Ahooja, I'm based out of Seattle, and
currently my focus is on how to make all of this protocol stuff make sense to normal people who
don't care about the stuff in the first place. I'm the executive director and CEO of A New Social,
where we're building services and tools around that. And I'm also writing on my blog. My name is
Evan Prodromou. I am co-author and maintainer of ActivityPub and research director at the Social
Web Foundation. You just heard from me, but Janet Vertesi at Princeton University, sociologist of
technology and a conscientious objector. Chris Alemany, I guess head president, whatever of The
Society of Open Social Servers at British Columbia, socialbc.ca. I'm also a technician at
Vancouver-Island University and a recovering politician. I'm a Johannes Ernst, I'm wearing a
whole bunch of hats. I've been involved in this space for something like over 20 years starting
with user controlled identity, something we sort of lost over the 20 years rather than gained. I'm
currently running FediForum, which is an online conference, which I failed to announce in the
announcements section today because I wasn't here yet. Next one coming up in October. It's not on
the website yet. Then I have a startup called the Dazzle Labs that builds some stuff around this.
I've been helping put a Ferri4 development network together. I've been writing a thing
called FediTest, which is a test suite for the Fediverse. I'm now apparently helping putting
the activitypub.rocks website on a standing that is not several stone ages out of date. If you have an
opinion, how do we should be talked to the world about ActivityPub because that's the landing
page for when you read the spec. Please join our GitHub and leave your issues in your pull request.
Thank you. Cool. Well, thank you all for being here. This is super cool to be able to actually talk
to you all in tandem up on a stage like this. Normally we'd probably be in like a zoom call or
something like that. Thank you very much. I kind of want to open with just a general conversation
about where we feel the network is at today. Its strengths, its weaknesses. I think sometimes we
look at the network and there's like a huge burst of activity, like a crazy amount of things are
happening with new platforms or new concepts or even just new ways of doing things. There's all
kinds of really cool apps on the network. I think sometimes too there are lulls and people are like,
I'm not really sure if anything's happening here. I just kind of want to speak to where our heads at
regarding how the network is in 2025. Yeah. I absolutely think that we have periods of surges,
right? So when Elon Musk bought X, that was a time of huge surge, a lot of activity happening, a lot of
announcements happening and then last fall, after the election, there was another surge of
activity, probably more in the Bluesky space or as I like to call it, Bluesky plus AT Proto, which some
people... Okay, Richard Stallman. But I think like it can feel and right now we are in a lull,
right? There is not as much frenetic activity happening now. I think it's important to remember
that when we're in those moments of frenetic activity, we're like, I wish there was time to
actually build, I wish there was time to organize, I wish there was time to plan. This is that time,
right? This is our time like fisher people repairing their nets, ready for the next surge,
right? We need to be doing the work right now to be building, building the organizations, building
the groups. So when the next opportunity comes up, we're better able to take advantage of it. I
totally disagree. Oh, okay. There's a ton of stuff happening, but it's usually stuff that doesn't
come into these spaces. Is anyone in the room having discussions with their friends and family
about what services they might use? Is some of the stuff that's happening in the world raising
questions about where you're buying your food or where you're getting your information? That's
all happening right now. So the other half of this is thinking about what our approach to this is,
having been around for a while and gotten more or less excited and more or less burnt out of some of
these topics over a couple of decades now. I was reminded by someone that this is in fact the work of
lifetimes. I believe that we are still, The Sovereign Tech Fund in Europe does a really good
job of talking about sewers and aqueducts and infrastructure, none of which one gets
particularly upset about if it takes a while to get built out. And I was reminded again recently by
someone who said this to me, who's like, you know this is going to take more time. And so I think the
question becomes of who else do you recruit? What are the small things that you do? How do you change
minds? How do you get better at explaining? So the work doesn't stop, but we hand it off, we have a
different focus on different things, and we have to get out of the mindset that any one of us can do it
alone, which is I think a consistent message that we've had. Yeah, I mean, I think what's kind of
interesting is especially in decentralized spaces, is you see a lot of like reproduction of
efforts amongst different people, or sometimes alternatively you'll see one person see not a lot
going on and they decide to take it upon themselves. I think sometimes like
crystallizing that into like an institutional effort as well as a community effort is very much a
challenge. You know, I think IFTAS is a great example of one person saying "I'm going to take
this on myself and try to figure out how to do trust and safety for a decentralized network", that can
that's very challenging and even just coordinating individual people together to
figure out how to make the thing work is no small effort. Can I add to that? I think I agree with
piggyback on what Boris was saying, which is that because we're also in a period of tremendous
economic uncertainty and political uncertainty, and a lot of people in the tech
industry who would otherwise rely on their six-figure jobs and then you know come home and
code for whatever it is they want to do as a passion project on the side, no longer have that income
coming in or no longer have that job security. Certainly among many of the organizations I've
seen like the layoffs across not only the private and also the public tech sectors, NASA being the
original public interest tech company organization, we're seeing like dramatic
reorganizations and that also means a reorganization of how we've typically
considered the work needs to get done in the open source community. And some organizations have
made the leap more successfully to nonprofits that are self-sustaining or to small businesses
or B-corps et cetera, but I think we're going to see a lot more experimentation in this space, not just
with the technical tools, but with the kind of organizational and economic arrangements
behind them that are going to enable some form of longevity or enable people to work on these
projects that they care about. Yeah, and I mean I think that's very much a concern for the given
moment with our network. To put it mildly, I think a large part of the Fediverse is predicated on free
labor in one way or another, whether it's open source development, whether it's running
servers and infrastructure, whether it's, you know, moderation itself is like its own can of
worms. And so I think like I've said this expression before, it's a little distasteful,
but it does often feel sometimes as though we're all begging for change out of the same collection
bin. And I think like one thing I would really love to see is a proper economy or proper monetization
to the point that we can actually support people to do the things they want to do full time. Yeah, just
to build on a little bit what others have said, I think we're kind of coming I think to an inflection
point socially, globally. And like Evan said, you know, it's really about trying to build these
tools. I mean there's so many people in the room here that are building utilities and tools that
can facilitate this stuff. And it's about meeting that moment. And there will be multiple moments.
But I think in general, you know, we are seeing people looking for those changes, those
different platforms or those different ways to be able to connect with people because the current
systems are essentially breaking down. They're breaking down under their own weight. So people
will flee. We've seen that already. And I think we just have to be ready for them as much as we can.
Yeah. And I mean that can definitely be a challenge. I think a good example to point back to
is when people started protesting Reddit over the spez changeover and Reddit trying to take things
private and the Apollo app being taken off. A lot of people suddenly surged into Lemmy communities as
an alternative. On the one hand, it's like super cool to see because like, hey, suddenly very small
communities are surging with users that are excited to talk and engage and connect with each
other. But at the same time, like sometimes these communities were started by people that like
didn't really anticipate having more than 100 users. And so I think from the instance admin's
perspective, that is very much a real challenge to figure out how do I keep the lights on? I want to add
one thing to this, which is that we often do not acknowledge just out how audacious this project
is that we are embarking on. Is something generally new and that's contrasted to something
that the way the technology world usually works. There's a playbook for technology companies. You
have some new technology. You patented or you get control in some fashion. And then you put it on the
market, you sell it, you sign up partners. There's a playbook to this, how this works, right? None of
this playbook applies here because if we applied it, we would end up in all the places that we don't
want to end up. So there has to be a very different playbook, which is one where we work with more
people outside of our organizations rather than inside of our organizations. And there is no
manager, you know, imagine for a second if there is a technical problem at a big social media platform
and it's an architecture problem. And what happens is, well, the chief architect listens to a
bunch of alternatives and says, we shall use alternative 3D and by next Monday you all
implement this. And if the guy is any good, it will work. Okay. How do we do this here? We don't have the
slightest idea. There is no chief architect and there cannot be a chief architect. We don't want to
have a chief architect. So there's organizational structures we have to build. And I
think, going back to your original question for this round here, where are we? I think we are about
as far as we could have gone by a bunch of people, mostly geeks working mostly independently of
each other based on some group chats and some shared specs. But in order to move forward, we need
to have more organizational innovation that enables them to deliver more value, more
synchronized and coordinated value to people who appreciate the value without centralizing it.
And to my knowledge, I'm not a sociologist, but there is probably not that many templates in the
world where we say this is what has ever happened. Maybe the Civil Rights Movement or something like
that. I mean, do you want the answer to that? There's a question? I mean, yeah, sure. There's a
whole field. But that's another problem actually that we're going to encounter. And it's very
similar to the problems of hyperscaling also. Once the five people in a room and like they get an
investment portfolio, they have thrown at them and all of a sudden it's 500 people or 1,000 people
with eight global offices. And that's why Pinterest kind of stalled out. But we see this
problem actually in social movements as well, particularly because a lot of those movements
want to adopt a kind of political framework at the same time, which I see in open source and a lot of
these communities too. We want to build these tools to federate, to create this sort of
federated structure in which there can be no overlord. And we also want to have a social
structure that mirrors that. And this is precisely the problem that confronted the civil
rights groups as well. There's a great book about it called "Freedom is an Endless Meeting", which
if that sounds like familiar. It doesn't sound like freedom. I mean, so we do study this and it
isn't an issue because you have to be able to move people to, there are organizational structures
that work better and worse for decision making at different kinds of scales. And this is one of the
things I've observed with NASA teams as well. Like when is kind of the limit of being able to do full
governance by consensus and when you need to move to more organizational structure. We saw this as a
difficulty with Wikipedia as well once they started adding Archons. So we know that you have to
make changes to the organization as you scale. We also know that those changes may be antithetical
to the politics of the technology. And we also know that the way you organize your team predicts the
kind of technology you build because of Conway's Law, right? I wrote a book about that too. So like
the way you've organized that team will then get built into the system. So those are the problems we
keep coming up against and they're classic problems. There isn't a single obvious solution,
but I think the first solution is to realize we're in this spot that like everyone gets into this
spot. And so we have a couple of different options for moving ahead and we're going to have to make a
decision as a group about which way we do that. And that's a great lead into my next question,
although it's a little bit vague. There's one more segue in here. So, SNAP, SNAP, SNAP, yes, yes, yes.
Simon Wardley has a framework called Wardley Maps that actually maps stages of technology and that
you need different organizational structures for these different things. So definitely check
that out. I'd say the other thing is that the open source movement is dead. It's dead. I'd say that
very bombastically on purpose for a different thing like that. I've felt relatively unmoored
for a period of time because that's what I came up in. Protocols is a slightly different thing. We
see lots of these things where there is protocol work to be done. And then there's benevolent
dictator for life on a piece of code implementation. And then you're like, oh, it's
governance all the way down. And then somewhere there's the operator model of running the piece of
software. All of these things exist simultaneously, including that the operator
model actually needs to be closer to like, we have a checklist, no one loses their account. Those are
the other things like that. But if you want to do new things, you need the bespoke model of try stuff.
And all of these things exist simultaneously. So I just want to again say this is we're not
acknowledging the social movement or the organizational techniques from people who are
rooted in working with technology. And that the platforms themselves are platforms for movement
making and communication and everything else like that. So I'd like to offer the D-Web
principles as something to look at. I help run a local DWeb node along with Emily McGill. And if you
go to getdweb.net slash principles, read them. They don't talk a lot about technology, but they
say things like distributed benefits for all. I'm like, that sounds like open source. Human agency
over technology, yes. And then it has a bunch of other things around climate change and other
things like that. So I encourage everyone to actually upgrade our principles and do a slightly
different framing than whether it's in PHP or not. I already have a microphone. Taking this sort of
acknowledgement of where we're at, and I don't want to just focus on the negative here because I
think there's a lot of positive things here too. Where do we want to go as far as the Fediverse, as far
as development, as far as the future of the Social Web? Obviously, some element brought all of us
together here to meet today, and we all have different distinct visions that may or may not
click together. What is your vision of where we want to go? I think bigger. I think a bigger network
with more people. We're talking about bringing joy and that joy is connecting with people that we
care about, that we know our friends, our family, our neighbors, our colleagues. I recognize that
there are many people on the Fediverse for whom the Fediverse is a refuge. It is a place that they can be
away from friends, family, colleagues, neighbors. But for others of us, bringing our
communities to the Fediverse or connecting the Fediverse to our communities is the next step in
joy. If we think this is important, it is a responsibility. We can't just say tough shit for
everybody else. If you're not here, you're losing out. I think that we do have, it's sounding a little
messianic, but I do think that we have some responsibility to help people find the kind of
freedom that we want for ourselves. Yeah. So for me, I think one of the, I don't want to say biggest
issues, but I think one of the biggest things that's holding us back is the fact that there's,
even though we have a bunch of instances and different clients and everything, everything
kind of looks and works the same and doesn't have its own personality or its own niche solutions.
Everything kind of takes the same shape. And the way that I think this should be working and the way I
think you capture different communities like that have specific needs is not just, you know,
like thousands of Mastodon instances. It's niche software that solves specific problems for
specific groups of people and connects to the greater network regardless of the software that
they're using. And so I think the place that we're at where there's just a lot of different servers
that just look exactly the same and act the same and do the exact same things, make it very hard for
someone to come in because they look at the landscape and they're like, what community do I
belong in and does this server make sense for me? And I think most users don't want to think like
that. I think most of them just want to look at this app or this specific client or this specific piece
of software works exactly the way that I need to do it in the way that I want to share. We're consume
things and they can pick that specific piece of software to tap into the network. And I feel like
we're just not doing a good job of that. We're building, we're consistently building
generalized software for everyone that works for everyone so we can capture like the next billion
people when those billion people should be separated in different niche software that works
specifically for them. So that's where I'm hoping this is going is not like 50 other things that look
like Mastodon or Bluesky or Twitter, but things that work like specifically for a certain group
and just focus on that group and perfect it for that group of people is where I'm hoping this goes. I
like that. I want to add to this. So imagine for a second if you can, there are social media as we know
it hasn't been invented. And you come up with this idea and you say, oh, you know, we could connect
people somehow they can do stuff together. How likely is it that you would come up with Twitter?
And the answer is basically zero. At least every time I asked this question, nobody's ever said
that this is very obviously the right answer to where we connect with people. The reason why we
have, what we have in social media is for one reason, one reason only, which is an excellent
medium to show you lots of ads. That's the only reason why we have these feeds the way they are. So,
Jaz here is not believing me, but I will debate you later. Okay. So, secondly, now we have enough
infrastructure where innovating in social software is much, much simpler than if you had to
start from scratch. For one, you can piggyback on existing network. Now is an incredible
opportunity for people who are not so much technologists, also we still need those, but
people who care about groups and what they do together to say, what's the ideal software we can
think of to support this kind of group and build it on that. And I think there is for the
entrepreneurial people among us, including the ones that want to make big bucks, there is an
incredible opportunity here. Personally, I'm not opposed to somebody make big bucks to creating
some amazing technology for supporting a particular kind of group that is under supported
today. If these people are willing to give them lots of money because there's so much more
productive, for example. So, there is one thing we often don't talk about in this space is just how
many amazing entrepreneurial, both non-profit and for-profit opportunities are, and we need to
actually get the entrepreneurs into the space. I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, almost
nobody has heard anything about the opportunities that exist for startup around
here. Everybody talks about AI and I really don't understand why we need the 10,000th startup doing
something in AI that may not actually ever work. But there's so much opportunity around here. So,
bring all of your entrepreneurial friends, not all of them have to become overlords. Only some of
them. I think it's the innovation piece that really excites me. I see this coming out, if it
comes out positively, what it will do, much like the browser wars of the late 90s, 2000s. Finally,
there was sort of a piece and innovation started to happen. And that was when the entrepreneurs
started to really build things that they thought people might be interested in, and then we ended up
with what we ended up with. But as long as we can create those spaces and those technologies and
those utilities, then we're able to build upon something that makes sense from the base level,
from the protocol level. But we can really give it to the innovators to do that. And that's what will
bring us to the ultimate end goal of ensuring that people have a place to come to and find use in
ActivityPub or AT Proto or the FedEverse or whatever you end up calling it. That won't matter
because it'll just be about whatever innovative use comes out to the public. That's a fair point. I
think also, personally I'd like to see Big Tech tumble. There's a bunch of those companies that
say, hey, with the fire of a thousand suns, we'll never use their products again. But the thing
that's so interesting for me about FedE and about ActivityPub and the AT Protocol and so on is that
they enable a kind of scale that doesn't require platformization, doesn't require capture. So
actually, despite the fact that it's growing, it's not one system that's growing. It's that the
protocol is being used in lots of different places and that there's an incredible number of mastodon
servers out there now that you could join or pixel-fed or whatever else. So what I think is
interesting about that is it allows more smaller communities control over their data and where it
goes. But what we haven't given people are the tools to understand how to exert that control. And
I know this because in commercial social networks, the problem of moderation is a solved
problem because it's a displaced problem. It is somebody's job in some African country somewhere
or in the Philippines to look at pictures of people getting beheaded so you don't have to. It is
somebody else's job to clean up after the racist and sexist comments so you don't have to see them.
And so when everyone flooded over to mastodon, they were like, wait a minute, this place is
racist. A lot of that had to do with the fact that, A, they expected a kind of cleanup operation like
what happens in these other systems where that dirty work is displaced out of sight and out of
mind. Now that doesn't mean that we don't have to deal with moderation, we don't have to deal with
racism or sexism on these systems. We do. But we have to think about that as a social problem and not
just as a technical problem because the magic of these commercial systems is that it makes it seem
like it's a technical problem you can solve. But these are social problems that technologies can
only provide a bandaid for or displace. So when I think about how we grow this network or how we grow
this community or how we move to the next billions and billions and give more people control over
their data and take the power back from those companies, in order to do that, we need to let
people know or teach people how to self-govern because that is a property that they have
forgotten. And especially if you look at places like the United States where I've lived for the
last 25 years, thank you. You know, I've lived somewhere where the social contract is so frayed
that people don't know how to do that work anymore. They don't know how to do that work anymore. And I
also, you know, in some of the work I'm doing on remote collaboration and things that happened
during the pandemic, we noticed that a lot of organizations that did try that were governance,
community governance oriented, that had to transition online really struggled. And they
eventually fell back into the sort of benevolent dictator for life, you know, thing, which is just a
sort of quick and easy way of solving the fact that actually consensus online is hard. Consensus
period is hard, but doing it online is especially hard. And so if we don't develop the kind of social
tools and enable that to spread, I don't want to say scale because I don't think that's a scale
problem. It really is a spreading problem. Then we're not going to have the kinds of communities,
we're not going to be seeding the kinds of communities that will be vibrant and the kinds of
places where people find joy, or the kinds of people, places where people find purpose in
caring for each other and their communities and their social systems. That's an amazing answer.
Thank you. So I think when we look at the network, it's kind of a funny thing, right? Like we see the
potential of what could be, you know, I think for a lot of us the value proposition is not just, you
know, a fun little space to talk with your friends. It's almost more of a social movement in the sense
that we could single-handedly or multi-handedly, I guess, if we stand hand in hand,
transform the face of the internet. And that sounds like a Don Quixote tilting at windmills
kind of thing, but I think like we have the opportunity and the intellect and the skills and
the creativity to build something on the Web that is 100% new. Building on some of the old lessons
that came before. What is Fediverse that drew you to it? What is something that excited you about it?
And what is something you hope to see in the network someday? So what I saw was a system that in fact
modeled the networks that were starting to merge already. So I have been doing remote
collaboration for 22 years now. I got connected to the concept of open source, which lived on mailing
lists, etc. We went through lots of different things. And then, so I had been living in this kind
of networked org model that is now becoming clear, especially post pandemic of like, and it's like,
Oh, right, like that's actually right. This is how this should work. And that this connective tissue
of different locus of control or interoperating and other things like that. So I think that's the
model that is then there. At the same time, I think we've regressed in learning how to do some of these
things again, because you've been disintermediated by the commercial platforms in
different ways. Some of the work that I've had to do locally in Vancouver, in BC, in Canada is to teach
people that not all software is built in Silicon Valley. And then the next bit of teaching, you can
build your own software. What does it mean as a group, as a city, as a province, as a country?
Canada has some challenges. Anything built by the Canadian government. Does anyone know what the
name of the license is? So in the US, it's all public domain, which is why we have amazing NASA images.
Does anyone know the name of the license? Kings copyright. Used to be Queens. We're on Kings right
now, right? So we have an extra challenge in Canada where we're like, ah, so our money, we paid for it.
And then you're like, no, it's the government. So I'm like, ah, how do I explain to you that Canada is
an amazing powerhouse of open source software that you literally are like, yeah, that's zero.
Oops. So I'm just going to keep coming back to a bunch of these like, you're probably right.
You're not crazy for thinking that things seem off. Like tell your friends and, you know,
literally can you get your, I love your entire pitch. I think there's overlap with the web and a
bunch of other things like that, right? Where I'm like, can you convince a small group of people
around you to not use Google, like pick something, right? Like, like we can. We literally can do that
now. We have some of these tools that are hostable enough, usable enough and so on. And we just kind of
got to get on with it and then be like, people are like, well, I want this to be better. Guess what?
You have agency. Write a $500 check. And the young new grad who needs work hand him $500 and we'll make
it a little bit better. It's a telephone, a game of telephone. I mean, microphone. So I like reading
science fiction and one of the persistent sort of things that happens in certain stories is when the
evil overlord is overthrown and the revolutionary forces to mean well go out to the
serves and tell them all these things that are going to happen. And these are the things they can
now do to serve react with incomprehension because they have never thought along these lines
what I could be educated. I could not go to the overseer. And this seems like this is dangerous.
How can I possibly get together with other people and figure out what to do about this field? In many
ways. So this is one of the things about science fiction is because it can sort of put a light on
these kinds of situations. And in many cases, I think we have been educated and we continue to be
educated worse and worse to be more and more passive instead of actually having agency. I went
to one of these Tesla Takedown protests the other day and I'm talking to people and everybody by and
large says, what's the plan? And I am an unconference guy. I run one for one. I say, why are
you waiting for somebody? Have a plan. You have plenty of brains. You talk to the next guy over
there and you figure out what you're going to do next week. It generally is met with
incomprehension. We have been training this out of people and we need to get back to this one. And
that is not just a technology and social media problem. That's a problem on all sets of society.
And I think politics in a way is in the US particularly but probably everywhere is
basically the politics we have as a consequence of this. So I think if we teach people, starting with
our kids, that you have just as much agency as the next guy. The next guy who seems to have more is just
because they went after and you didn't. Basically, you have agency. Do things. And then
once the mindset flips, I can do things with my friends. Then all these things have to double
over. But of course the forces who are discouraging agencies are the same people who
would like everybody to be compliant because otherwise how could the overload get whatever the
overload wants if you weren't complied? There's two things that I came to a realization of when I was
a city councillor. The two overarching issues in the world that at least in my perception, one
climate change which obviously is existential. And the second one was decolonization and
decolonization of all of our systems. And I think that's essentially what made me sort of have that
aha moment when I joined Mastodon and realized what ActivityPub was about. This was the
decolonization of social media and it's the decolonization of being able to connect socially
across this thing that we built called the Internet and really gain our agency back. So
that's kind of what drives me is being able to create these communities again. You do have to
convince people that yes, there is an Internet outside of Facebook. Literally people just think
that the Internet is Facebook because that's what they open up on their phone. That's what they open
up on their computer every day. There was even a time where Facebook was providing free Internet
access and Facebook was the Internet to that group of people. Yeah, literally becomes the Internet
for people. So we're trying to rest that back. It's not easy. But I think that's the main thing is as
long as we can create those spaces and show people that there is an alternative, then we can
decolonize those spaces. So I was a sysop in the 90s. I ran my high school BBS and just because
anyone was doing it. I feel like all I did today was talk about how old I am. But yeah, so and when I found
when I joined the Fediverse was like, oh, this is what that was like to be on those BBS is and you're
there with other people and you can hang out in your own little crew and you could like play Space
Invaders games with like the friends in your class and then you can talk to other people. And these
spaces felt comfortable. They felt local. They felt like we belonged and there was that kind of
connection. So I loved that when I first moved to the Fediverse and also because then I get to own my
own data. I get to say where my data goes and it's not enriching anyone else. And if I get online and I'm
upset about something Elon is doing and I toot about it, I'm not enriching him by tweeting about
it and everyone being like raw. Yeah, I hate that too. You know, like we built enraged machines. I
mean, Tristan Harris gave that talk. What was it like in 2017? Where he's like the only measurable
relationship between emotion and engagement on site is outrage. That's it. All that Facebook
experiment stuff that my friends ran where they were like, oh, do you feel happier when you look at
other happy things? No, you don't. You just feel more outraged. And that's more like so we built an
outrage machine. So the second thing was off versus like a BBS. This is great. And secondly, I
feel like I am home and I don't have to be outraged all the time. And the third thing I loved about the
Fediverse, these are all things I want to see continue is it's not monetized, even though like
we need a monetization strategy to make sure people can work on it and so on. But like the whole
purpose of so many of these tech sites now is just to make other people money. It's not even so that it
works. Okay, so those of us who come from a certain generation of engineers or software engineers,
you'd want to build a thing that like does a thing. It does what it says on the tin. And if it doesn't say
what it doesn't it doesn't do what it says on the tin yet, you're like, oh, just wait a minute, we have a
plan for it. No, no. So my friend Ben Shestakofsky, who's at Penn, just wrote this great book "Behind
The Startup", and he was embedded with a startup in Silicon Valley. There was an AI startup. And their
investors were like, well, you have to meet these growth targets. Okay, so what that meant is all
their software engineers had to scale up the team. So all the software engineers were in interviews
with new engineers all the time, so much that they didn't have time to write the software. So instead
what they did is hired a crew of people in the Philippines through an outsourcing agency to be
the AI behind the scenes. It did the matching between people as they came to the site. And then
because that was a little bit glitchy and didn't totally work very well, they hired a bunch of other
people, mostly middle-aged women in Nevada through a call center. I am not making this up to
like, you could call them if you were having trouble interacting with the website, which
wasn't an AI. It was actually people in the Philippines who were pretending to do the AI while
the people in San Francisco were too busy interviewing. And this is how they became a
billion-dollar unicorn. It never worked. It never worked by any technical standards. Now I
work with people at NASA who have to make a thing land on Mars perfectly at the first time. And then
here we are watching like Starship blow up for the 11th time. They're like, oh, we'll get to orbit
eventually. You know where it's just, you know, keep the money going, right? There's a different
monetization strategy going on around these everyday commercialized tools because they're
investment vehicles. So we do need to find a way to keep the Fediverse sustained. We need a way to keep
it weird. We need a way to keep our identities fragmented. The fact that I can have one group to
talk about this and another server to talk about that, those things don't have to come together in
anyone's grand identity database is actually, I think, a plus in my book. But what we have to make
sure that we don't do is produce the kinds of systems that become so torqued they are
unrecognizable in terms of their aims because we have created these monstrous organizations
behind them whose only job is to make money for investors. That doesn't mean I think there isn't a
role for profit generation in the industry. It doesn't mean that I don't think that there's other
ways in which we can, you know, have profitable industries. But it does mean that I would like to
see technology work by people, for people again, and have that be embedded in the social context
that it has to be responsible to and not to some investment vehicle. One of the questions was what
brought you to the Fediverse. For me, it was a long journey, but it started when I was this naive
computer science student in college. I was blogging about tech. I cared deeply about
Android. As I mentioned, I used to be an Android developer and open source and all this kind of
stuff. But because I was an Android developer, I was using a lot of Google products, including
Google Plus. And there, because I was blogging and I was communicating with a lot of people, I had like
a huge set of communities there. I think I had like 150,000 followers, various communities from
tech to hip hop to basketball. Do you name it? Every interest that I'd ever had was on Google Plus for
the first few months. And then over time, because that network effect didn't really happen on that
site, it started to dwindle and then eventually Google did the Google thing and they shut the whole
thing down. And there was this moment back then, I didn't have the vocabulary for it, but there was
this moment where I was like, why can't I just go to Twitter with these same people? Like, why can't
this be easier for me to go? And by the way, this is why Bounce exists. Because there was that moment
where I was like, why can't I just go and take these people that I care about and care about me? And
we've been communicating for the last like three years. I'm going to lose them. And I didn't have the
vocabulary back then. And I'd literally given up on social media. Like, I was on Twitter here and
there. I used to obviously like Facebook, Instagram, whatever, but I wasn't active on
anything. And it wasn't until, you know, I learned about Activity Pub and AT Proto and Nostra where I
was like, oh, there is a vocabulary for this. And there are smart people trying to solve these exact
problems. And I think that's what brought me here is like, I never want to lose my people again. And
that's, you know, that's why I'm here. I relate to that a lot. It's kind of funny because for me, I was a
MySpace user back in, you know, 2006, 2007. And during that time, a lot of people were moving over
to Facebook. And it was kind of this weird realization that half of my social graph was
straggled across two different websites. It struck me then like how odd it was that neither one
could follow or interact with each other. And we didn't really have a way to describe that at the
time. It was just a factor of nature. Yeah, but it's funny to think that like, this is less of a problem
today in the sense of what we do have available for, you know, an open social web. And it's kind of funny
that nevertheless, we have these master silos that the effect is still the same. There was a time
at the beginning of the web, beginning of the internet, where it was framed very negatively
compared to other parts of society. Right. So, you know, we've talked about new media, new media as in
contrast to newspapers or television or radio, etc. And somewhere in there, we stopped comparing
the internet to those old media because those old media disappeared or they became part of the
internet. And I think there is a point, one thing that I want for the Fediverse is we get to the point
where we stop comparing it to big talk to other kinds of social networks, because we've either
absorbed them or outgrown them. Right. And that is, I know that feels really hard to believe that it
could happen, right, that will ever be anything except, I mean, we can grow beyond a protest
movement to a building movement to something bigger than just being angry at other stuff. And I
believe that we can go beyond framing ourselves as not that and become this. And I think that we'll get
there and that's what I'm looking forward to in the Fediverse. Hell yeah. As I think Christine said
this at FediForum is like, "We can't win without joy." I think those are the, right? It's like that.
That's exactly it. Right now, we're trying to find people from anger of like, don't you hate Twitter?
Don't you hate Elon? Don't you hate Mark Zuckerberg? And it's like, no, maybe yeah,
leading with joy is the future of what we're trying to build. I think with that in mind, you know,
what's something on the Fediverse that gives you joy, whether it's an app or an experience or a
community? What is something that gives you joy, Anush? Something that gives me joy. On the
Fediverse. For me, it's, I think I mentioned this in my presentation where I randomly started a
Pixelfed account just for like my hip-hop finals. And it turns out like, there's actually like a
community for that. Like I didn't realize people would give a shit about that. And it turns out, not
just on Pixelfed or the Fediverse, but also on Bluesky. And it was like, you know, I'm not like big
on that stuff. But the fact that I could find a community about such a niche thing in what seems
like a small place just kind of made me really happy because it's an outlet that I didn't think I could
have. And that's like one of many ways, but that one very specifically because it's something that I
enjoy talking to people about and not a lot of people in my personal life like to talk about it.
And so like when I post it online and people start talking to me about it, it feels nice and gives me
that like. More fuzzy for you. Yeah, it's like, wow, I can have these conversations with people in
like a much more meaningful way than just like posting it on Bluesky or Mastodon and nobody
replying to it. And it's like, no, there's a community here that I can actually engage with
here. But many other reasons, but that's like one that really stands out to me because I was not
expecting that to be a thing. That's really cool. So yeah. Yeah. So the thing that gives and this is
sort of one of our moved but I see so much possibilities. The thing I love is all these
things that I could at least come up with a dozen projects that are worthwhile doing in one way or
another. So it's not joy of thing but joy of expectation of thing. And let me let me throw in one
building on what you said earlier about the remote owners or investors. I want to, there's something
we rarely think about and it has implications. Imagine for us, we tend to complain about venture
capitalists and what they do to companies, right? But look at where the money comes from venture
capital. It very often comes, for example, from big pension funds, right? And they have to return a
large amount of return on investment to take the money from the pension fund. Where does the
pension fund come in to get its money from? It gets it from people like you and me who have retirement
savings. So here, consider this. Here I am. I am putting my money in my retirement fund and I hope to
have a high return on investment so I can retire the result of which that it gets into venture capital.
The result of which is that they're doing surveillance capitalism screwing me in the
process. How does this make any sense? Wouldn't it would much more sense if I could decide where the
trade-off is? Yeah, you can have a bit more surveillance capitalism if I can retire better or
a little less surveillance capitalism so I cannot retire as well. The loop between the loop that we
have here between action and consequences is way too long. Now coming back to the excitement, it
would be so nice if we could shorten that loop. If I wasn't an investor in my own social media
experience by way of so many pension funds and so many intermediate funds that where my intent is
completely subverted and inverted, what if I could be an owner directly in some fashion? And so I
think one thing we should really, really try to figure out is new ownership models. I much rather
be an owner in Bluesky directly, for example, as a user than being an owner of a fraction of a pension
fund which then ultimately invests in an investor that may or may not push Bluesky to do something
everyone like. And there is some people who have been trying to do this. I think that experiments by
and large haven't really worked out, but these experiments are totally useful and it would be so
exciting if we cut out a whole bunch of middlemen's to subvert what we actually want. Because we
wouldn't have to fight the venture capital pushes if it was actual ownership as a way to shareholder
cooperation is supposed to be in the first place. Yeah, I think I always have my eye on the financial
collapse, right, because that's when the shift happened. That's when the banks collapsed when
when all of that happened, that's when the programmers moved in. That's when everyone moved
from Wall Street over to the Valley and that's where the investment vehicles came from. That's
where we get the big data economy. But the thing that brings me the most joy on the Fediverse is that
it's unalgorithmically mediated. I just have a direct experience of other people's lives and
experience. I love the little tab you can go to and mask it on and pixel fed and stuff where you can just
see what's happening around the world right now, everywhere, everywhere. You know, and like
someone's getting up and going to work in Japan, someone's having a beer in Amsterdam, someone's
taking a nice picture of the bird outside their window in New York or something like that for me is
this beautiful, unmediated, unalgorithmized experience because I can't get that anymore if I'd
stayed on commercial social media. It wouldn't give me any of that. It would decide beforehand if I
like Japanese cafes and maybe I'd like to see more of them or if I looked at one of them, maybe I'd like
to see 822 more after that, right? I would get stuck in a loop of endless Japanese cafes that I'd never
have a way to get out, which is, you know, that'd be kind of nice in some ways, but maybe not. I'd never
get to see the guy having a beer in Amsterdam and so what I love about it, what brings me the most joy is
that ability to move seamlessly between here's what's happening around the world, it's like a
global view and in everyone's languages that you can translate right there. Here's what's
happening on my server, which is full of other people who are like-minded and they're all
hacking stuff just like me. So that's the part I love. But I have to say, over the last 10 years or so,
I've cultivated a tech stack that does nothing but bring me joy. And so I kind of live in this blissful
world where I have Linux on my phone and it doesn't listen to me, I never get ads for things that I've
said out loud. I live in this totally bizarre space that nobody else seems to inhabit, but it means
that I still love tech and I still love my stuff, but I'm getting accused all the time of being the
person who hates technology. Well, actually it's not really it, it's just that I've managed to find a
whole world that is joyful. So I can say that having that experience, a blissful experience, of
getting to be in a place where the algorithms aren't telling you what to do or what to think. No
one's there to enrage you, that Japanese cafe isn't there to enrage you, it's not trying to sell
you more coffee, it's not trying to make money for somebody else. If you like it, nothing else
happens, nobody gets any richer, just someone in Japan is like, oh cool, someone liked my coffee.
That to me is a kind of unmediated, direct, human to human powerful experience and I love that about
Fediverse. Oh yeah. Just on the topic of chronological feeds, 100% agree, like it's
phenomenal. In fact, just to kind of counterbalance that on the blue sky side, there's
a way that you can just get your mutuals in one feed and that is how I always enter blue sky. I look at my
mutuals feed, I scroll through that, I see what people who interact with me and I interact with
them, like just them for a little while and it is some of the most peaceful stuff. It's like one of
the best ways to kind of enter the social media thing. The other thing that brings me a lot of joy,
kind of to counterbalance the chronological stuff is FANPEI. It's a mastodon client and they
have this feature called catch up, where you can say between like the last one to 12 hours show me
everything, everyone has posted and organized it in a way which is really easy to catch up on. And the
cool thing about that is it saves all the catch up stuff. So like once you've done it, once it kind of
stores it away and you can come back to it later. So you can choose what you want to catch up on at a
specific time in the future or what you want to catch up on right now. And I actually like I don't
know how to use mastodon in any other way than using that catch up feature because in the morning I will
just run a catch up feature for the last 12 hours. I'll go through a bunch of my friends or like things
that I care about. I'll put it away in the afternoon while I'm having lunch. I'll go to the news
profiles and I'll be like, okay, now I'm ready for the news and I'm going to like go through the news
channels. And it's just been like a really great way to separate my mastodon experience between
things that I care about at certain times. Of course, I'm an addict so I always have my mastodon
feed running on my laptop. But whenever I'm like ready to catch up, it's a very different state.
It's almost like reading the newspaper but very specific things at specific times and it's kind of
awesome. It brings me a ton of...fantasy brings me so much joy. Just talking about joy, I have to give a
shout out to like when I discovered hashtags on mastodon and mastodon and cat-sodon and balloon
scrolling. You can just do that stuff all day and it leaves you nothing but it's literally just pure
joy. It's happiness. And to add to the happiness, I went out hiking with the family a couple weeks ago
and it was a Sunday. And I started going through all like the day of the hashtags that there are and my
kids were just rolling their eyeballs at me. And it was a beautiful thing. If you can make your
teenagers just question your existence a little bit more, surely we're doing something right.
I'll keep it short. Hashtag good lunch. It's always lunch somewhere. It's an amazing hashtag.
I love that for you if you haven't been along there yet. And the other thing is that goes a little into
owning your text hack and honing it over time. Twitter. I was there very early. I don't want us to
actually forget that we actually got joy from a lot of these systems over time in different ways. A lot
of the stuff that Evan has worked on, identica and other stuff like that. There's people that keep
connecting around that. So it's like the people on the other side of those things have always been
amazing. And then Tweetbot came along and it added a bunch of features before Twitter had it. And then
it was like, oh God, this is my emotional support 5000 word mute list. Not a joke. So I'm out in the
world rebuilding my mute list to control my experience. It's an example of something that
works across platforms for words and hashtags and stuff like that. So I think that's maybe something
like, can we do a reclaimer session on all together, coming together and be like, do you know
how these tools on your favorite client work or you're excitedly going like, well, this is how I do
it. Basically you're telling me that and I'm like, I need to switch to that version. So yeah, that's
what I got. All of you are on the other side of these tiny rectangular screens. So that's a lot of joy. I
think we have time maybe for one more question. Very, very quick. Three minutes. What's the
number one feature you'd like to see on the Fediverse become like a widespread thing?
Working with Anuj and Bridgie and everyone else on this panel to get cross protocol groups working.
Yes. Yeah, Boris stole mine so. I mean we could do that. We can make that happen. My number one thing,
which I've mentioned a couple of times is ActivityPub API. Yes, we need the clients leading
the leading the innovation and it needs to happen yesterday. 100%. More people discovering the joy
that is fatty more people having the tools socially and technically to engage and bring it to
more people again. I don't know if this is controversial or not, but I'm going to say and the
tyranny of any kind of word character limit if it's 10 words or if it's 2000 words or if it's 10,000
words, just just make it all look like we can actually interact with it. For me, it's
independent identity so I can bring like my personal homepage or something say that's me and I
can be the same guy all over the web. And when I meet you, I can meet you on some obscure site that we both
didn't know we were going to in a good like it's just here. Let's do something together. All right.
Well, I think that about wraps it up. Thank you all for joining us today and thank you all panels for
offering so many insights and sharing your heart, your soul and your minds. Please check out
WeDistribute.org, that's my news organization dedicated to covering the evolution and growth of
not just the Social Web and the Fediverse, Bluesky, and Nostr. You know, there's so many
amazing developments happening every single day. I'm just one person and can only write so much,
but it really would help me out if more people could put their eyeballs in the page now and then. Thank
you.