Chris is an early adopter who makes smart observations and has a 10,000-foot view of all the innovation happening on the open social web — not to mention a few ideas of his own.
When you’re building an open source community you’re a part of a collective effort with a common goal. In the fediverse, there are early adopters doing a lot of the heavy lifting now. They’re the voices you want to follow to make sense of the place.
One such person is Chris Trottier. Chris describes himself as a “fediverse enthusiast” (he’s also passionate about video games). He’s a sage presence who makes smart observations and has a 10,000-foot view of all the innovation happening on the open social web — not to mention a few ideas of his own.
Highlights of this conversation:
Services mentioned in this episode include:
Friendica - https://friendi.ca/ - a decentralized social network
Misskey - https://misskey-hub.net/en/ - a microblogging platform
Akkoma - https://akkoma.social/ - “sorta like the child of Twitter and email”
Macstodon - https://github.com/smallsco/macstodon - a Mastodon client for Classic Mac OS
DOStodon - https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon - a Mastodon client for MS-DOS
Amidon - https://github.com/BlitterStudio/amidon - a Mastodon client for Amiga computers
Sora - https://mszpro.com/sorasns - a futuristic iOS app for Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey; uses local machine learning to rank posts and feature contents to you
Bluesky Firehose - https://firesky.tv/ - republishes every new post/reply from the Bluesky firehose in real-time
Castling Club - https://castling.club/ - chess game built on top of ActivityPub
🔎 You can find Chris in the fediverse at @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @mike@flipboard.com
💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
When you're in an open source community, you're part of a collective effort with a common goal. In the fediverse, there are early adopters who are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're the voices you want to follow to make sense of this place.
Who's an example of this? Why does he believe in the fediverse? What innovation is he seeing there?
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement, someone who sees the fediverse’s tremendous potential and understands that this could be the internet's next wave.
Today, Mike's talking to Chris Trottier. Chris describes himself as a fediverse enthusiast. He's a sage voice with smart perspectives and observations. He's got a 10,000 foot view of all the innovation happening here and a few ideas of his own.
We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Chris Trottier, welcome to Dot Social.
Chris Trottier:
Hey, glad you. Glad you have me,
Mike McCue:
Chris, how did you get involved in the fediverse to begin with? Why is it such an appealing space for you?
Chris Trottier:
Okay, so my personal background is that I started kind of in the first wave of social media. I will call it the Open Social, the original Open Social wave. I was an early Hootsuite employee, employee number eight, in fact, I love it, and we really benefited from the fact that Twitter had an open API. Uh, Facebook had an open API. And if you had a good idea, you could just go ahead and build it, and, you know, maybe even make a living off of it too, right? Um, well, the API wasn't as open as it used to be, right? Let's just be blunt. There were a few corporate things that happened. I understand why they happened. I understand where the Twitter execs were coming from. But the end effect was that Open Social was debt, right? We moved from Okay. Twitter is the company maintaining the pipes to now. Twitter is a content gatekeeper. They all became content gatekeepers at the end of the day.
Mike McCue:
In fact, I was on the board of Twitter at the time when this was playing out, and it is what caused me to decide to leave the board of Twitter, because Flipboard actually relied heavily on the Twitter API. In fact, I think we were probably one of, if not the most significant users of that API, and so I had to, you know, first of all, obviously didn't agree with that particular direction, but in leaving the board, it would at least enable me to negotiate a deal with Twitter without having a conflict of interest. So it was, it was a big moment, and it is unfortunate. It was an unfortunate moment. Jack tried to, kind of, like turn that back around when Jack became the CEO. But obviously, as we know, you know, that didn't last forever. When Elon got back, he couldn't do it.
Chris Trottier:
He couldn't do it because when, when you're in the I can't speak to where he was at. I was not Jack, but from everything that I've read about Jack, right, when you are in that position of responsibility and you have a duty to maximize shareholder value, right, you can't just say, Oh, hey, we're going to remove the, you know, our source of revenue that has kept our company afloat for all these years, right? You know that they had somewhere like 50 to 60% of their workforce that was just interacting with brands and make trying to make Twitter appealing to brands, and that is just impossible to do right when you're, you know, when you're also, at the same time trying to be even for free speech, that is, that is a, you know, very clearly, a massive conflict now with Twitter, with X. So when you were at Hootsuite, you saw these APIs starting to get disconnected from the experience, I guess, right, that. I mean, that was pretty fundamental to the Hootsuite experience, yeah. I mean, we, we were going after a client base at Twitter wasn't going after, we were going after brand managers who had to communicate across multiple channels. We wanted to be social media Switzerland, yeah. But the thing, the thing is, is that when you're like that, when you depend upon somebody else's API, well, you have to walk a very fine line. Let's put it that way. And I think, 20, yeah, 2015 2015. Is when I left Hootsuite, and when I, when I left Hootsuite, thought that social media had changed for the worst.
A lot of folks, and I think I mentioned this to you a few times, a lot of folks who come to the fediverse, they don't know they're coming to the fediverse. They think they're coming to Mastodon, right, right? They're looking for that Twitter alternative. But then what happens is suddenly they see a whole bunch of people who go, Well, I've never used Mastodon. I'm on Frendica. I'm on Miskey, you know, I'm on, I'm on Akkoma. And then they realize, hey, these people are doing things that, you know we were not we didn't know was possible. And then the whole world opens up. They start to see the potential. And that's really what's exciting to me, too.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I you know that that mirrors the journey that I had when I joined Mastodon in November 2022 I think when a lot of other people I was part of that Twitter wave. I was a big fan of Twitter. Obviously, I was a huge user of Twitter. I really liked the old Twitter and but when I saw Elon post that story, that conspiracy theory about Nancy Pelosi husband, it was absolutely, you know, horrifying. And at that point, I was immediately like, I am not going to be part of this anymore. And started reading about, what are the alternatives? And of course, Mastodon, there were a few alternatives that were mentioned at the time, all of which are gone, except for Mastodon, because those those guys did not, you know, those other networks, you know, didn't embrace an open standard for social media. They, they, you know, ultimately, just try to do their own thing and their own isolated island and and so I remember joining Mastodon, and I didn't really know much about how it worked, but I loved the community right out of the gate. It was such a much more intimate kind of conversational community. And I noticed when I would post something, even I had just a, you know, small number of followers, I'd get, like, 10 times the engagement for my posts. And I really felt like, you know, that was a big aha moment for me. Was like, I felt like I could just actually interact with people in a friendly way in Mastodon, whereas Twitter, it was much more of a broadcast kind of performative kind of experience, right? And then what was really interesting was I started to see a read about Pixelfed, and I was like, Oh, that's interesting. What's, what's up with Pixelfed? And then I started to, then realize, oh, wait a minute, there's this protocol called ActivityPub that's powering these things, and these things can talk to each other. And then, and then I, you know, read up a lot about, you know, the sort of history of these different projects and the concept of the fediverse. And for me, it was like the day I saw the web, the World Wide Web. I remember when I first saw NCSA Mosaic, and it was this like lightbulb moment. It was just like I could never see the world in any other way after that, right? It's like, it is like that. It's like I saw the world one way before Mastodon and another way, after Mastodon, and the realization of what the fevers was to me, was, like, amazing. And, yeah, I get that sense, like, that's exactly how it went for you, right?
Chris Trottier:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I had a similar experience as you, yeah, when I was a kid, very, very young, eight years old, my family took us to the University of Western Washington, or University of Washington. I forget which one and we I showed up at the library, and a terminal was this app called Pine, and I remember typing something in and with that slow, 1200 bowed modem, I could see the words coming down, and I thought, this is just the most amazing thing, right? And to this day, I've been still looking for that experience, right? Because it was just amazing to me to be able to talk to somebody from Australia in a matter of minutes, right? Like that was always the promise of social to me, was that human to human connection spread across the world, yeah, but at some point, what happened, just because of the realities of having to monetize? I'm not against monetization by all means. I think people have to make a living, but the realities of monetization are, is that once you hit upon a certain model, right? In Twitter's case, it was, it was trying to appeal to brand advertisers. Um, well, brands don't necessarily like everything that's being sent through the pipes, like, let's be honest, do they? Really want to to to, you know, do it? Do they want to hear about the boring stuff, right? Like, like going to the gym, or what TV show you've watched friends needs to sell soda. They need to sell Oscar Mayer weiners, right? And that's where the conflict came in, into play, I feel, anyways, that was, that was, I think Twitter's Original Sin. I actually think I read a interview where Jack Dorsey himself said this, the original sin of Twitter was that they didn't build an open protocol. They say we always envisioned that Twitter would be an open platform for people to to have these personal conversations. But in time, that was just the there was a rug pull.
Mike McCue:
And when you're a public company and you're trying to put numbers up every quarter, you know, you gravitate to the things that are the most obvious, which is, it's an app, and this app has, you know, ads and we need to get as many people to use the app and not be outside the app as possible. And that model, I think, has led to many of the challenges that we see, not, you know, not just with Twitter, but many, many other products. You know, the “enshitification” of these products, as Cory Doctorow says, right? So the thing that I think is such an aha moment for the fediverse, for me, was like, is actually about being open and connecting with everything else, and not trying to get people to just stay on your thing all the time. And the more you build an experience that's genuinely connecting people and experiences and content together in ways that anyone can, you know, sort of configure however they want it to be is like, then you'll be successful. I think enough people have been burned now to know that like joining another billionaire’s, private, closed network isn't actually a good idea. Joining something that is actually bigger than Mastodon, bigger than any one thing is all connected in this open way is a fundamentally better approach for social media.
Chris Trottier:
It's interesting that you say that, because when I consider how much money Elon Musk paid to own Twitter, $42 billion at the end of the year, right? Yeah, a lot, a lot, a lot of money. And then I think to myself, How much money does it cost for me to run my own server, right? I have my own server, atomicpoet.org I have about 15,000 followers on atomicpoet.org. I follow 400 people. I receive a lot of content. I talk to most of who I want to talk to. I receive communication from Threads. I can receive communication from Bluesky. Yeah, it costs me, and I'm not joking with you here, $20 a month.
Mike McCue:
That's amazing
Chris Trottier:
$20 a month. And it is just, it is wild, completely wild.
Mike McCue:
So is that a Mastodon instance that you're running, or a different kind of is it? Was it Akkoma?
Chris Trottier:
Yeah, it's Akkoma. I could have. I could have done Mastodon. I absolutely could have.
Mike McCue:
What's the difference for people who don't know the difference between these things? What is Akkoma?
Chris Trottier:
Well, Akkoma is similar to Mastodon, but it requires much less resources. You could run Akkoma on a Raspberry Pi, if you want to, right? You could just plug it into your wall, not pay a dime if you, if you want, just the price of the hardware, you could have a working fediverse server.
Mike McCue:
And what makes it run with such few resources? What's the difference?
Chris Trottier:
Akkoma’s backend is, is based upon Elixir, and I believe Mastodon, it might be running on Ruby on Rails. I'm not sure, that's what I think. Think it is not a big deal if you have a lot of resources, if you have a lot of resources, and you're a big company, I totally understand why somebody would use Mastodon, because it is, you know, it is the standards right now for the fediverse, right? Yeah. But if you're a small guy and you want to get up and going on the cheap and do so, like, in a matter of minutes. I'm telling you the truth, by the way, Mike, I got my Akkoma up with my Akkoma server up within five minutes.
Mike McCue:
Really?
Chris Trottier:
Yes. Five minutes.
Mike McCue:
Is that because you are an engineer and you know how to, you know, work with code or, or is it just, it's just that easy to set up for, like, administrators?
Chris Trottier:
Well, I mean, okay, so if you are an administrator, it is fairly easy to set up. But, um, I’m working with a fellow named Charles Krempeaux, and he and I worked, we've been working on a project called Spacehost, which is a fully managed fediverse server. And we've just optimized everything. We've optimized we we host multiple services, Mastodon, Akkoma, Frendica, right? Castopod, I think we, we host something like 10 services right now, 10 different fediverse services, and all you have to do is is click on the server you want, the hardware you want. Five minutes, it's up.
Mike McCue:
You can use this now? This is something that people can actually try?
Chris Trottier:
Yeah, well, we're going into open beta very soon. I might as well just go ahead and tell you, yeah, we're going to be open, open beta. We're going to be up and running. We just actually told our mailing list that were you know that you could go ahead and get started. So if you have a dream and you want to get it going, it is completely doable, right?
I don't think that we're the first to do fully managed hosting, but we're definitely the first with so many with such a variety of different options.
Mike McCue:
What is your take on PeerTube?
Chris Trottier:
I think PeerTube has a lot of potential. I think like everything else, it's all about scale. It's a chicken and the egg problem is that you need enough scale, enough people, to be on it, to use it, for it to be viable to to most people, um, because right now, unfortunately, unfortunately, it is just really hard to, uh, start up a PeerTube server, serve it out, uh, and do so on the cheap, right? It's not like Mastodon. Mastodon, you're dealing with text, PeerTube video, and you can't avoid that. But in defense of PeerTube, one of the things I love about it is you have projects like Blender, the free and open source 3D engine rendering engine. They have, they have their own PeerTube server, and you can follow them on Mastodon or Friendica or Akkoma and receive new animations, short films made by Blender themselves, right? It looks in your feed like a Mastodon message. Yeah, right, but it's completely amazing.
Mike McCue:
We've been using PeerTube for Flipboard. If you go to Flipboard dot video, you know, we stood up a PeerTube instance to experiment with this and learn about it. And I have to tell you, I'm blown away by how effective it's been for us. This podcast will be on PeerTube. People are probably looking at it right now, on PeerTube. It the integration with Mastodon is absolutely fantastic. You know what I love is that it's this kind of seamless discovery loop, you know, for people on Mastodon can can click over see the PeerTube video, you know, play right inside of Mastodon, and it's better than YouTube because it's connected to, you know, our social graph, and so it's just inherently better for discovery, than, than than using YouTube. When people comment on the PeerTube video on PeerTube, I can see that, you know, reflected back in Mastodon. It's really, it's, it's really the way things should work.
Chris Trottier:
I agree. I think you know who else would agree with you. I think a lot of YouTubers, yeah, who, unfortunately, there are so many YouTubers I know who have tried to leave YouTube because they don't like being at the mercy of YouTube's algorithm, and one day, exactly their livelihood taken from beneath them.
Mike McCue:
That's right. That's right, coming back to your for you, the for you algorithm, right? You know, for YouTube, if you, if you want to be a serious creator on YouTube, you chase that algorithm and, and that algorithm is constantly moving target and and you end up having to change how you are as a creator, you know, now, nowadays you have to make YouTube Shorts if you want to, you know, get people to see your your videos on YouTube. Just because people are subscribing to you does not mean that they're going to see your videos. And that's really bizarre, I think, whereas, yeah, with Mastodon and PeerTube, you hit follow, and it works, you see the videos that you intended to see based on the follow.
Chris Trottier:
Yeah, that's, that's the one thing that I really love about the fediverse, is that you can have that experience that you want. There is a an app that I'm a big fan of. It's called Sora. It's a third party client. It works for a number of different services, Mastodon, Akkoma, right? Misskey, all of them, but it's got something killer, which is it allows you to choose your own algorithm. Locally. You can decide.
Mike McCue:
What's an example of that, what? How does that? How does it work?
Chris Trottier:
Well, okay, so it's, it's got these different options that that basically ask you, well, what kind of feed Do you want? It asks you questions such as, do you want photography, right? Are there, you know, are there certain kind of hashtags? It asks about language. It asks about a whole bunch of factors, right? And then on the client side, on your phone, it, it builds that feed that you want to see, yeah, right? Which is absolutely amazing to me. And they, they decided that one time, I think last month, they decided, hey, we're going to, we're going to do kind of a TikTok thing too, right? So now they, they've taken, you know, Mastodon, and they've, and they've, they've, they've given it almost kind of a TikTok feel to it, right, which is absolutely amazing, right? That you that you could do this all on your phone.You know, I'm telling, I'm I'm telling you these, these phones, these phones, they're almost like nuclear reactors with the amount of power they have.
Mike McCue:
Right. Exactly. And, you know, that's the thing that I think is such an exciting aspect of the fediverse. You know, the the when I joined the fediverse, it was because I was running from something, I was running from Twitter, right? And looking to still do social media. But I do think there's going to be another wave of growth that's going to be people running to something, right? You're going to see these new kinds of experiences. I mean, just in our conversation here, we've touched on, I don't know, seven or eight different projects run by different people, all using ActivityPub to have a completely different take on either the front end or the back end and how social media works. And this is just the beginning. I mean, I I'm incredibly excited to see, you know, there's a there's a fantastic front end called FanP. That's a fantastic user experience. I'm also a big fan of Elk. I love the fact that I can just log in with my Mastodon account and then have a completely different kind of user experience that's a little bit more sort of Twitter, like, it's kind of a, it's like a better design version of Twitter. And then I love ivory. I use ivory a lot. I love the Mastodon clients. Mastodon Android clients, quite good. And I use the web interfaces. I like the more advanced Mastodon web interface with the multiple columns. It just so it's so refreshing that I'm just not locked into one particular kind of user experience.
Chris Trottier:
Well, I what I think is amazing is even going further with that. It always seems to me like me like Mastodon and the fediverse have almost become like the Doom of social media. There's a saying about Doom that it it runs on any hardware, right? They've got Doom running on a lawnmower, for example, during the video game.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, Doom the video game.
Chris Trottier:
So all sorts of hardware, it's not supposed to even calculators. Now, you could say that about Mastodon itself. There are apps such as Mac-stodon that run on classic Mac, right? There is Dostodon, which runs on DOS.
Mike McCue:
Really?! There's a DOS version of Mastodon?!
Chris Trottier:
That's right.
Mike McCue:
Oh, my God, that's awesome.
Chris Trottier:
That's right, that's right. And then one one day, I remember, I was showing off all these different clients to people with with screenshots. And I was saying, you know, I really wish there was an Amiga client. Literally, within a couple of days, somebody released an Amiga version.
Mike McCue:
That's amazing.
Chris Trottier:
I'm telling you the truth, right? Telling you the truth. So I absolutely believe that there will come a day when somebody puts a Mastodon client on a calculator, right, on a lawnmower. I So, yeah, I think that's great.
Mike McCue:
This innovation that is happening across the front end and the back end is happening at a pace that's way faster than it could be happening in any one company, right? Yeah. Yeah, it, and that's, that's super exciting. It's, it's makes me wonder, you know, like in about a year's time, how much you know, will we be in a place where there's, like, fundamentally new kinds of social media experiences, right? Not just kind of takeoffs on Twitter, but like, completely new approaches to social media built on ActivityPub.
Chris Trottier:
Yeah, I think it's funny that you say this, because I think that there is a I think the biggest gift that Elon Musk gave the fediverse was pulling API access from Twitter, right? The biggest, the biggest gift, the thing is, is that developers do the things they do not just to make money or to make users happy. They do it because they have an itch that they really need to scratch and they want to make something, right. I've seen this over and over with even like the most obscure hardware. There is something out there called the PICO-8 that has never even existed physically. And there's a huge development community around this whole thing. And that's the same deal with once you get into standards and open APIs and all the rest. You have people going, well, I want to make something. I don't want to re make the wheel over and over and over again. I might as well piggyback on something that already exists. And they do, right? That's why all this innovation with with with the fediverse is happening right now. Simply because developers sit around, they go, Hey, I would like to make a, a, I would like to make it, you know, a Tumblr app, for example, a Tumblr tumbler clone. They go ahead and do so that exists for the fediverse.
Mike McCue:
Where do you discover these where what do you look at? What's your sort of way of keeping track of all these cool new apps that people are working on?
Chris Trottier:
There used to be a site. It's not updated so often anymore. We're called the Federation dot info that shows not just the apps, but the protocols in use. And I just, I just visit those see what's up.
There's another site called Fedi dB, which is made by the same fellow who builds Pixelfed,
Mike McCue:
Yep. Dan.
Chris Trottier:
Right, Dan. Sometimes I get people who just reach out to me because I have a feed that I curate called fediverse news, and they, they just put it out there. They say, Oh, hey, I've, I've just, you know, put something, put something out right?
I mean, the funny thing about this is, even though, with all this innovation, there's a bunch of stuff I would want to see, I would love to build, if I had time to build it, right?
Mike McCue:
What are some of those things?
Chris Trottier:
I mean, a lot of it might sound, you know, very niche, but that's okay. I would love something, for example, that would broadcast new restaurant menus. Oh, right. Wouldn't that be wouldn't that be great? You got new updates on what your local restaurant had in your area, right? Wouldn't that be cool? That would be amazing. I think about things like games, for example, like, let's play Hangman, right? You know? Like, like, like, each person has their own new, new turn, right? They guess. They guess the letter you got, hang Hangman, right there you could do games, right? I think about far, far, far out there stuff. I know somebody's building this. But I also think virtual reality. How amazing would it be to do an action in, let's say, a virtual reality environment? And you know, the problem with virtual reality is it's really hard to spectate. You can't you have to put on a headset to go into a virtual reality environment. But what if you could broadcast things that happen and go on through ActivityPub? Wouldn't that be amazing?
Mike McCue:
I think, you know, one of the things that's really powerful about ActivityPub is, you know, it's not just a communication protocol, but you know what it effectively does is it creates a social graph when people are following each other. And so then now you have effectively a community. And I could imagine going into a virtual reality realm where, like, the people you saw, like, I actually saw you in in the metaverse, right? And you could actually see each other and like, I know, oh, there's Chris, right? And I could see Evan Prodromou and interact with him, and, you know, and like, that whole thing I think, is missing because virtual reality just doesn't have that. Like there is no real community. Maybe now people, you know, I guess you have gamers who have communities, certainly, but, but for like, normal kinds of communities that you have in the real world or online, like, you know, in Mastodon, for example, there isn't a way to bring those with you into these 3D worlds.
Chris Trottier:
The biggest problem I find with with typical VC services is it is they don't address the problem of survivability. They address scale. The VCs and startups great at addressing scale, just the phenomenal at it. But the promise is survivability. You don't know when something you put out there, if it's going to exist within decades, right? That that's the truth. All those AOL chat rooms gone. AIM, gone, right? MySpace, MySpace had a problem. It still exists, but MySpace had a problem where, where there was some sort of data outage, like five years ago, yeah, and so much history is gone like that. But when you look at at email, email came at it, what year 1973, 1973, it is not only survived, it's it's the biggest social network in the world that exists in the world, right? Right? Yeah. It's more than 50 years old now, and isn't that incredible, right?
Mike McCue:
Oh, yeah. And I can go back and search through my email from like, 20 years ago. It's amazing.
Chris Trottier:
Yeah, yeah. We know. We know that email is going to survive like we complain about. We could say, oh, it doesn't do this, that, or whatever, as good as the newer services, right? But it survives. And we you know, email is not unique when it comes to this whole thing. There was a service called Finger, which was like the Twitter of the 1970s, right? It still survives. You could still use Finger, right? Right now. You could, you go on to DOS. You could Finger a an address, and you will get recent, recent messages back, right? We could go further, Usenet. Usenet still exists. Not as many people use it as as it used to, right. Usenet used to be the internet, but still, it still survives. So I think, if we're thinking about terms, terms of social media, I'd say social media is actually older than the inter than the World Wide Web. It is. It's by two decades. Two decades, social media is older than the World Wide Web, right?
There have been different webs of social media. The first was email Finger all that second was the AOL style chat rooms, MySpace, all, all that Twitter, that was what the very VC driven social media, and what I think the next, the next wave of social it's going to solve both problems. It will solve the fact that that you know that email, for example, has got survivability, sometimes it has trouble with scale, right? Twitter, great scale, problems with survivability. And that's where ActivityPub solves all the problems.
Mike McCue:
Exactly, yeah, and survivability, not just of the service, but of the person's social graph, right? Like that's the thing that is so critical, right? As you get people following you, you know, over the years, you know being able to host in one in any number of different places, and have those people see the things you're posting, whether it's a podcast or a video or article or, you know, you know, some interesting insight conversation. That, to me, is the thing that really is important to survive, especially because, you know, when you can then try out one of these cool new experiences, like something like in the VisionPro, you just log in with your fediverse account, and it just works, right? You have your whole community right there in a completely different experience. And you can post something, and people can see that you're posting from this cool new app, you know, on the VisionPro, so it's, it is a, it's a, it's really that's never happened before, except for, to your point, email, like, I always have my contact database, and I never, you know, I back it up. I guess I don't ever worry about losing it. I never fear that someone will, you know, effectively buy the company that has my date of my contacts and then shut it down. Right? So, so it's, you really need these connections to people to be persistent, and, as you say, survivable. And today they're not, and they're and they're actually also, not only are they not survivable outside of ActivityPub, but also they're siloed, right? So you have fragmented, right? It was like, it's like, oh, you can only call these people on this cell phone, and you need this other phone here to call those people. Like, that's actually how you know it works today. You know, it's crazy.
Chris Trottier:
I think, I think the truth of the matter is that we live in a world in which amazing things happen, not just because standards exist, but because, but because somebody out there said, I'm going to let anybody use this, because something amazing can be built, right, right, right? That was the internet. That's the whole story of the internet, right? But at some point, once again, there was an AOL thinking, that AOL thinking that crawled into people's brains, yeah, and that's the thing that I hope that ActivityPub and the fediverse, yeah. You know, we can go back to the idea that, hey, with this stuff that's open, we could, we could build amazing stuff. And we, we really have a debt. I feel like we have a debt to now hundreds and hundreds of years of people letting this stuff exist, put it out there. They made it. And there's something to be said about that, right? All the innovations.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And one of the, one of the things that I remember back when Facebook had the open social graph for a hot second, and there was already some, very quickly, some significant innovation happened. There was Farmville and Zynga happened, right? There was Spotify, right? Spotify would never have existed had it not been for the open social graph that Facebook started, right? And then, of course, Facebook famously shut that down. And then all that innovation just kind of went to the wayside. But even just in that glimpse, that period where it was like, Hey, we're going to have this social graph that you can rely on that's common between all these different apps, immediately there was, like, you know, really significant apps and experimentations that became actually some pretty big companies in the process. And I think, I think that, like, you know, ActivityPub is that, but, like, it's not going to get shut off, it's just going to be on and it's going to get better, and it's, it's really your point about games. Like, you know, that is a whole area that has yet to be touched yet on ActivityPub, as far as I can tell. But you know, everything from Twitch to multiplayer games to board game, you know, kind of crosswords, you know, Wordle, you know, those kinds of things are like, it's perfect.
In fact, I remember seeing somebody doing a chess game on ActivityPub recently they demoed at FediForum. I'll put that in the show notes too, that that was a fantastic example of, like, yeah, you know, Chris, you and I should play a game of chess together, right? Like, that's awesome, right? Again, you had you bring your communities with you to the gaming experiences, to communications, you know, other Yeah, it's, it's, it's really exciting to see how ActivityPub is going to unlock all this innovation.
Chris Trottier:
Yeah, at the end of the day, I feel like, I feel like the fediverse is the story right now. Of of we're all kind of leaving the city of big social you know, people who are in New York City, right? New York seems like a big place. But the funny thing is, is that is that New York State, most of New York State is wilderness and mountains. This is almost like leaving New York City and experiencing that, that countryside, yeah, you know, yeah, that's, that's ActivityPub, exactly.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, that's, I love that analogy, you know. And I do think it's important for people to know that the fediverse is not Mastodon. It is, it is Mastodon is an example of what can happen in the fediverse. But there's so much richness, and there's so much more happening, you know, with all these really cool projects, and there's just more happening every day and and I think that's you know, for developers, for any entrepreneur, it is, it's such a fertile ground to innovate and create something totally new, because you don't have to go build the whole social graph yourself. And people can sign up and just bring their social graph with them. And you know, as a developer, you can focus on the things that you really care about. Maybe it's like, awesome, you know, video editing or photo filters or some really cool game you want to do, you don't have to go build the whole social layer.
Chris Trottier:
When you look at ActivityPub in the fediverse, you know, like, where do you where do you see this whole thing going yourself?
Mike McCue:
Well, um, I think we're gonna have these like phases, right? You were in the, what do they call it? This sort of pre-Cambrian phase, where it was, like, all this sort of like, you know, the seeds of these ideas that then later led to ActivityPub, and then all these cool, sort of small projects, and then you have one large one with Mastodon. And these projects has you, as you pointed out, have been like these, like sort of replicas of these closed systems. And I think what we're starting to see very in really, it's really exciting me, I was we're now starting to see these new kinds of projects that reimagine social media, the user experience of social media itself. How does social media help people think more deeply? How do we use a way, you know, social media in a way where it's really about connecting um ideas together. Um, right that I think that there's some opportunities to kind of rethink the architecture of social media, you know, like, for example, custom feeds, I think is a phenomenal step forward that will yield a tremendous amount of new innovation, um, not just in what you see in the feed, but how the whole user experience works, that could lead to these more deep experiences versus these kind of passing the time experiences.
So, like, that's, that's the type of stuff I'm really excited about, that there's, there's going to be, you know, an opportunity to really take a big step back and say, All right, we have ActivityPub, we've got a follow graph that's common. We've got content that's being linked in here. Now. Now what, right, like, where do we go from here? And I really feel like, you know, for me and what I'm working on, you know, with our product team, I'm we're constantly asking those questions. And I think that, you know, the course of the next 12 months or so is going to see some incredible new types of products, not just from us, but from others as well, that are going to start to, you know, advance, sort of the state of the art of how people are connected and why.
Chris Trottier:
I would agree with you. I would, I would say the thing that kind of holds me back is, I wish there
were more options for topics, right? A lot of people say, okay, hashtags, but the problem with is that a hashtags can be, they can be seized by anybody at any moment, right? And that is a problem. And the second problem with hashtags is, well, you know, some, some, okay, I'll give you an example, right? A year ago, I was talking about apples. I love apples, right? I was talking about my favorite apples, Granny Smith, Cosmic Crisp. And then I was talking about, about the apple that I that I absolutely love, okay, the Macintosh, not like Macintosh apples. And I said that. I said Macintosh max, max are the absolute worst the I don't understand why anybody, why they still exist. And what happened? It was the funniest thing. A whole bunch of people entered the fray defending the Mac. I'm like, what? Why are you defending? Why are you defending this terrible, you know, Apple, and what I've discovered was they were not defending apples. They didn't care about apples. They were defending Apple Macintosh computers, right? Um, so you get these things on social media, where? Where this? Where this happens quite often, right? With the fediverse, it's not topical enough for my liking. There's there's Reddit clones, don't get me wrong, there's Reddit clones, but those, those are really hard to to navigate.
Mike McCue:
They just are, yeah, yeah…Reddit, Reddit itself has always been hard to navigate, right? You've got a gazillion subreddits, and you just don't know which one is the best one.
Chris Trottier:
And yeah, but, but I also find myself even even with Reddit, right? I find myself that I wish I could go deep into a topic, right? Because when I go on to Reddit, I always see the same things again and again and again. People just that are new to the topic. They revisit it, and it just becomes this eternal September of people not really getting deep into things I want. I want to see the nerds come out and I Let's just see the nerds get really, really deep into things.
Mike McCue:
Chris, you know, I want to just say thank you for the kind of being that sage advisor to so many different people, including me in the fediverse, especially as things really heated up. You know, you're, you're, you know, sort of just encyclopedic knowledge of all the different things that have been happening in the fediverse, the history of the fediverse, where it's going, I just think, is, like a huge resource. And I'm so glad to have had a chance to talk to you and get other people to get a chance to hear from you. We've got this is probably the Dot Social episode that will have the most show notes we've ever had, because we're going to list all these projects and help everybody understand just the sort of diversity of ideas that are happening right now. I'm sure you know, if we check in a year from now, that list will be, like, 20 times longer. So it's an exciting time, and I really thank you for you know the work you've been doing in the fediverse to help evangelize it and help people out.
Well, thanks so much for listening. You can find Chris at atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org
You can follow Mike on Mastodon at Mike at Flipboard dot social, and at mike@flipboard.com
Big thank you to our editors, Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up via the link in this episode’s description.
Until next time, see you in the fediverse!