Flipboard CEO Mike McCue talks to Evan Prodromou, one of the co-authors of ActivityPub. What does this protocol unlock for product builders and entrepreneurs, and why does it matter?
There was a time where people couldn’t email each other unless they were using the same email client. That changed when developers came up with a protocol that made it so it didn’t matter if you were using AOL or CompuServe or Prodigy — it just worked.
The same analogy explains how things work in the Fediverse, an open-source system of interconnected, interoperable social networks. The Fediverse is powered by a protocol called ActivityPub, which provides an API for creating, updating and deleting content across several platforms.
What does ActivityPub unlock for product builders and tech entrepreneurs? How will social networks without walled gardens change our relationship to content and to each other? Why does any of this matter?
In this episode, host Mike McCue talks to Evan Prodromou, one of the co-authors of ActivityPub. Evan is an entrepreneur, technologist and advocate of open source software. He’s also the Director of Open Technology at the Open Earth Foundation.
Highlights from this conversation include:
🔎 You can follow Evan at https://evanp.me/ and on Mastodon.
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon.
💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/
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.
You may not know or remember this, but there was a time when people couldn't email each other unless they were using the same email client. That changed when developers came up with a protocol that made it so it didn't matter if you're using AOL or CompuServe, or Prodigy, it just worked.
The same thing is happening now in the Fediverse. If you're new to this idea, the Fediverse is a decentralized system of interconnected servers. It's a world where moderation is distributed, where you have more control of your experience, and where you'll get deeper engagement with your communities.
It's also why this podcast exists.
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the role 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 Evan Prodromou, one of the authors of ActivityPub, a protocol that enables the Fediverse to function. Evan is a longtime entrepreneur and advocate of open source software. He's also the director of Open Technology at the Open Earth Foundation. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Okay. Evan Prodromou. Welcome. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Evan Prodromou:
Mike, thanks so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.
Mike McCue:
So you, among others, helped create ActivityPub as as as a part of the W3C working group? Which I don't I don't think that working group is still going now the social web working group, is that right?
Evan Prodromou:
That's absolutely right. Yeah. So we started the social web working group in 2015. And it was based on a number of different factors coming in. So there were, so there was a previous group called Open Social, which had been supported by Google, IBM, a few other social networks. And they gradually stopped supporting that standard and pass it off to the W3C. And so one thing that W3C wanted to do was say, hey, what do we do with this standard, which was part of why the social WG started, I think we had also seen some uptake of some of the underlying technologies. And there was a sense of like, hey, something is happening here. The W3C really wants to do this. The W3C, I should probably say the World Wide Web Consortium, which is the organization that defined standards, they define HTML, they defined CSS. They wanted to be involved with social software, they were wanting to take a leadership role. But they also had some issues, right? Several of their member organizations were big social networks. And so Facebook, Twitter, Google, at the time had Google Plus, they didn't have a lot of appetite for open social standards. So there was definitely some back and forth on it. Consequently, we had a mandate to a very limited mandate for the working group, and limited time to get it done. So long way of saying that it was only a few years that the WG was around.
Mike McCue:
Wow. And so this working group, this all happened. Sounds like from 2015, around 2018, 2019…
Evan Prodromou:
Yeah, I think the last last meetings we have have are like January 2019, the wrap up time, so about three or four years, which seems like a long time. And it felt like a long time. But in terms of standards, you know, that sometimes you can go for decades working on the same standard.
Mike McCue:
Right? Well, and especially that has something that has so much consequence as this particular standard. And when we're going to get into all of that here. I'm curious to know a little bit more about some of the folks that you worked with as as co authors on the ActivityPub.
Evan Prodromou:
Oh, thanks. So there were a few people who were involved in terms of the data structures. James Snell, who was at the time at IBM, he's now working for Cloudflare. And he was the primary architect on the data structures, but our protocol and API work, which is what the main part of ActivityPub was three women who did the main development and editing so and now I'm going to have to pull up online name. So we have Christine Lemmer Weber, who was the main editor Jessica Talon was the other editor, Aaron Shepherd was the original submitter for the specification and did most of the guidance there. And then Amy guy was the was did some integration at the end. So there are five people credited for authorship. I'm really lucky, I snuck in under the wire and gotten as an as an author.
Mike McCue:
So this is this has turned out to be very consequential work. You know, this year in particular, we've seen a large amount of activity around ActivityPub. What Why is this work so important to you? Why have you been you continue to advance this and advance realize that? Why is this so important to you?
Evan Prodromou:
Yeah, that's a really good question. Partly it's based on my understanding of the importance of social social information and social connections, right? Our social software, the the software that we use, in social networks, is, you know, how we connect to family, how we connect to friends, how we keep in touch with people we haven't seen for years. It's some of our most meaningful connections. It's how we find work. It's how we relate to our political representatives, it's really important software, we often dismiss it like, Oh, it's just Facebook, it's just Twitter, it's not important. These are the most important things in our life, right? Like these family connections, social connections. And so making those that functionality available in a way that's more open, that people have more control over, that people can participate in, in better is, is really, it feels important. Now, I've tried to walk away several times, I wish I could say that I've been like unwaveringly supportive, I've had a lot of times where I'm like, I am done with this. I did my part, I'm ready to walk away. But you know, it's like, it's like in Godfather three, because when I think I'm out, they pull me back and say,
Mike McCue:
Well, I think everybody's appreciative of the fact that you have come back in, during those times. And, you know, I think your your point about this being, you know, a way of enabling those really important connections to, to thrive and to flourish and to be healthy is a big one. Yeah, the, the, if you look at the how ActivityPub has been, you know, taking off over these last, you know, I don't know, I guess 18 months or so 12 to 18 months, what are some of your observations? What surprised you the most?
Evan Prodromou:
So, you know, I think that the the most important like aspect of this, of this process over the last like 12 to 18 months has been developments at Twitter, or now x, right. So, A, since the acquisition by Elon Musk, of of Twitter, it has shaken people's expectation that Twitter is going to have that central role in the world of social media. Not necessarily people haven't necessarily lost faith in it. But that sense of like, this is going to be a monolith. And everything is going to work through Twitter is no longer, you know, common expectation. And we've seen, you know, a lot of Twitter alternatives come up. Hive, post news, substack notes. There's probably a few dozen others that I could name right. And Mastodon and the and the ActivityPub Fediverse have been a really important area that people can come to. And I think the one thing that really has been amazing there is with the growth has been also a growth of the community. I would be I would be probably kidding, if I didn't say the most surprising thing that has happened in the last 12 months has really been the launch of Facebook threads and the announcement that they're going to support ActivityPub and lat and allow this kind of inter network connection happen with their, with their community and their Software, right, I think that we have for of any organization on the planet that has kind of a siloed approach to social networking, that has really put up a moat around their social network and protected the data protected their community. Facebook has the biggest one. So finding out that they are going to support open standards has really, it was it was a really big surprise. You know, it started off as rumors. And then when they finally announced it, it was like, wow, this is really happening. Maybe when I know this is a little bit silly, but like when Elon Musk, like was going to fight Mark Zuckerberg, like over like, that was the part where I was like, what has happened here? I am I dreaming, like, I need to pitch myself this has gotten really strange. Yeah.
Mike McCue:
It reminds me a little bit of the times back in the early days of web where, you know, I a lot of people don't know this. But back before the web, you had a well, you had MSN you had, you know, prodigy and CompuServe. And these, like proprietary, sort of social places, internet places, or they weren't internet, they were online places. And, you know, they did not, you know, coordinate with each other. There was no you couldn't, you know, send an email from someone, you know, from AOL to someone on CompuServe. And the there was no sort of interaction between those services. If you wanted to build something online, you had to go to a business development deal with one of those folks. Right? And, and Netscape and the web, and Mosaic and the W3C, changed all that. And the, you know, I remember, just before I joined Netscape, seeing Bill Gates get up on stage. On December seventh, I remember that day, that date. And I believe it was like 1995, I want to say, and he gave a speech about how going forward, everything that Microsoft was doing would be done on the internet on the open web. And that was mind blowing, right? And, and so yes, I do feel like there's like this moment where it feels as though the tide may well change here from this closed, walled garden approach to an open model for a variety of competitive regulatory user demands, creator demands, you know, a variety of reasons. I think that's happening, depending on the initiative, but it does feel like that moment is approaching.
Evan Prodromou:
It's also like, I absolutely, I love this example, Mike, because it's so true that there were those it's very similar to AOL, MSN CompuServe. world where, like, you know, if you wanted to send a message to someone on CompuServe, you had to have a CompuServe account, you had to log in, use their system. In the mid 90s, you know, around this 1995 Time, time, they all started adding a little bit of internet functionality, right. So at first, you could maybe send and receive emails, and then it got a little bit a little bit further. And then they had a web browser built into AOL. And, and suddenly like it, it just caught on like, oh, overnight, you know, and the walls really came down. And for people who, like, didn't go through it, it can really feel like well, you know, those walls are up, they're gonna stay up forever, right? It's like, it just takes once the dominoes start falling, falling, they really start falling fast. So yeah, and, you know, I don't like I think what's really interesting is there were organizations that had kind of committed to the open web at that time, that were there to benefit from that big opening up, right. So like, Netscape being the classic example of just like, hey, we, we have kind of staked our place in this world and, and everyone is coming to us now. Like, it was a pretty amazing time.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. So when you when you look at now, the state of where things are at with activity, pub adoption, you know, obviously, we know Macedon has been, you know, the probably the most well known and most used service that you know, has been using ActivityPub, but there are a lot of there's a lot of decentralized innovation happening. Now, right and because of this protocol. So what are some of the projects that you're most excited about or most interested in that others may or may not have heard yet?
Evan Prodromou:
I think, one, you know, I talked about the Twitter issues earlier this year and kind of Macedon takes a little bit of that Twitter flavor, right, it's it has that microblogging style. Another service that, you know, was a dominant while still is the dominant service. Reddit also had some issues with its big communities, and some of those communities moved to the Fediverse, using software called Kaban, or Lemmie. And they've replicated that Reddit experience, but it's happening on hundreds of servers across the Fediverse. And that was really interesting, the way that kind of picked up and there are hundreds of 1000s of users on each of these services. And it is really, I mean, it's it's really gratifying to see that the standard that we made is applicable for these different applications. But we've got all kinds of like interesting projects that are working with different kinds of sociality, on the, on the Fediverse. So we have pixel fad, which is a photo sharing and photo album service. We have funk whale, which is a video service, book worm, which is a you know, it's it's a lot like good read. So you can write write about books. And the new ones come up every day, it's really cool to see these happen. What I especially like is that creators and developers understand that the underlying structure of the services is a lot the same. We make connections, we create things, we share them out to our network, you know, we get responses back likes and reactions and comments. And whether it's images or bookmarks, or, or videos, it's a lot the same. And they figure out how to map, you know, their ideas of these different applications into that same structure, which has been cool.
Mike McCue:
I've heard you explain this as sort of comparable to how phone systems work, with number portability, with the ability to text people, regardless of whether they're on 18 T, or Verizon or what kind of phone they're using. There's a lot of things that happen behind the scenes to pull that off. But you know, that is it is interesting how, like, that wasn't always the case. And you know, if you changed phone providers, you did have to get a whole new phone number. And so there was lock in there. And I think it was a regulatory change that, that set that up so that you had number portability, right?
Evan Prodromou:
Yeah, I mean, even in the early 2000s, you couldn't text between networks, right? They had their own text standards. So you can only text other people on Verizon or only text other people on at&t. And that interoperability really provides benefits for everyone and the everyone in the area, right like for, for those account organizations. They really feel like I need to keep my 10 million users protected from everyone else, nobody else can use them, no one can talk to them, I don't want to let them out of the pen that I've got them in. But you find out that the value to that 10 million people of your service is being able to talk to the 100 million people or billion people who are outside of your service, right. And so if you're able, like an AOL in 1995, to start enabling email or a Verizon start connecting people via SMS across networks, you don't lose those. Those people, they they see it as value add, and they become actually more loyal to your to your service. And if some walk away, you know, that's great. It actually makes the people who stay have a sense of like, Hey, I'm not stuck here. I'm not locked in. I'm here because I'm choosing to be here.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. And I think that's, that's really important for users as well as creators, publishers, they they can basically build a followership that they can rely on forever and utilize across a whole range of different services and not be tied to any one service.
Evan Prodromou:
Yeah, I think one of the things that's really great for creators, you know, when we, when we talk about it is as you, if you are able to make choices about the service that you use, for publishing, text, images, videos, etc, you can make decisions about what's best for you for your business for the message that you're trying to get across. I think I probably won't name names for any particular networks, but one of the big disappointments for creators on some networks is that they work really hard to build up a following to get, you know, 100,000 followers, a million followers and cetera. And as the, the higher up they go, the less reach they actually get. And they get, you know, they get outreach from their, from their platform that's like, hey, you know, you should be, maybe it's time to start paying for some ads to reach your own followers. And it's like, we already did all this to bring people in, right? So having that sense of like, Hey, I'm a brand, or I'm a creator. And I have this one to one direct relationship to my followers, to my audience, to my, to my customers. And that's something I want to be in control of, I don't want someone telling me like, what, what the rules are for first staying in contact with them.
Mike McCue:
That's such a great example and comes right back to, you know, the reason why you have been doing this work, right, that connection stays persistent, it's a valuable connection, people work hard to build a connection with a member of an audience that they're they're working to build. And to have that be persistent and durable. Regardless of the service, regardless of the content, you're putting out. The mode you're in as a creator, the service or tool you're using. It's kind of a mind blowing concept. It's, it seems very logical. And, and but yet, at the same time, obviously, that's not how social media works today, in these walled gardens,
Evan Prodromou:
It really isn't right and, and a lot of ways, my relationship with my mom, my kids, my employer, my high school best friend, like those are, those are mine in a, in a way, that's very deep and personal. Ryan, that's not something that belongs to Twitter, that belongs to Facebook, those relationships are mine. And having ways to like keep those relationships as I go between platforms to keep them alive and active. It's, it's, it's so crucial, right? I think we all know, the experience of you know, trying a new platform, and having things you want to share with people you care about, and just being like, Oh, they don't have accounts here yet, right? Like so this, this photo that I want to share it to my uncle and aunt right isn't going to reach them. And that's a, it's a, it's a really important personal thing, like social software is really important to our lives, and we need to be able to feel like those relationships, the content we create is really under our control.
Mike McCue:
Right? In some ways, what you're really what you've done here with the ActivityPub work is the foundation is those relationships. And, and that's what the protocol effectively describes, and enables write is how those relationships, you know, send and receive content. And then the tools that you use, to post to interact, communicate, are varied. You can use whatever collection of tools you want. But the relationships stay persistent across those tools, which is the exact opposite of how things work.
Evan Prodromou:
Absolutely, right. Like and, you know, we've we've gotten used to thinking about like our sociality is related to the app, you know, and this app has high quality digital, right, and this one has, and it's like, well, it's not about the content. It's not about the buttons on the screen. It's about the people and about the people that we're connecting with. When we talk about social networks. When we talk about any networks, we talk about a an effect called Metcalfe's law. And Bob Metcalf was one of the founders of three calm. And he identified the fact that as a network grows, its value grows by the square of the number of people so like a network of 10 people has like 100 value trends, you know, and a network of 100 people has 10,000 and we go up 1000 to a million right it just balloons really fast, which is really great for communications. But it also means that it's really hard to break in with innovative new functionality and features, right. So if you are doing a social startup, and you have a new way for people to interact, you have to just like start with your first user 10th user 100 users. It's grueling, right, and you're fighting all that time, because people are like, well, I want to be on the big networks where everybody is, and I have a lot of value. With this kind of open standard format, you can create a better mousetrap, you can create, like, new ways of interacting new structures, and you can plug it into that big network, and nobody has to, like leave their other networks in order to try your software out. And I think that's going to be so supportive of innovation, right, I'm so excited to see what new things people are going to be building on the Fediverse. Knowing that they don't have to start from zero, right, they can start from 100 million.
Mike McCue:
Well, you know, that's, that's such an important point. And you know, what you get to there also, is that you also don't have to build a whole social network. So let's say you do a great like, video filter, you know, awesome, you know, set of algorithms that use AI to do great things with video. You don't have to go build a whole social network, also, right, you can just build a video filtering thing, and then that can plug into tools that people already using connections that are already there. And that decentralized innovation, I think, is your right, I think that's gonna be very powerful. Yeah,
Evan Prodromou:
I mean, all the things that a social network has to do, right, like email notifications, and, you know, GDPR, and profile pictures and data, and it's just like, hey, I'm gonna focus on what we're really good at, and like, build that part of it. And we'll just leverage off the existing system. So I think that there's a lot of cool opportunities for building on these on this. Yeah.
Mike McCue:
And, you know, I think when we come back to that AOL example, you know, I remember they had a travel box, that was one of the things you could click on, right. Um, but it could only advance as fast as AOL could hire people to advance it. Right. And but once it opened up, now, you have things that we never imagined, like Airbnb and Expedia and, you know, booking.com, and, you know, just an amazing array of services, that all in and of themselves, are their own businesses worth billions and trillions of dollars. That just never would have happened, had we not moved to open standards with with the web.
Evan Prodromou:
Yeah. And I think, you know, I think that's such a great, such a great example, I think the other thing is like for the more that networks have gotten centralized. So again, you know, talking about some of the ancient history of social networks, there was a time where there were hundreds of social networks, whether it was, you know, Bebo, or MySpace, or this or that they're all and they have, yeah, Friendster, thank you, tribe, they have like, really condensed down to a few big players. And that means that for those few big players, what is an important enough feature to implement has the bar has raised, right, so for a Facebook, if they don't have, you know, 100,000 users on that feature, it's not worth it for them to keep supporting that, even if it's important to you or me, right? It's like, Hey, we're gonna sunset this out, right. And so having the kind of software features and tools that appeal to, you know, I say, small audiences, you know, 1,000,010 million, even 100,000, or 10,000, for specialists alike are possible in this in this world, where they're less possible and one where, you know, 100 million or bust.
Mike McCue:
Right, that's a great point. And it's interesting, too, because you can almost see that pace of innovation has already slowed down dramatically. Like everyone's just becoming on this in the walled gardens world, another version of tick tock, everyone's doing vertical video. Now, you know, before they were copying Snapchat stories. They all just ended up kind of copying each other, and just becoming different versions of the same thing where are, you know, I think there isn't, you know that there needs to be that outlet for totally new ideas to thrive, right? Yeah.
Evan Prodromou:
I think that's absolutely the case. I don't know. So I'll really go to my we've mentioned Netscape twice here. But you know, Jim Barksdale famous quote, that there are just like two main, great businesses bundling and unbundling. Right. And there's a lot of opportunity for folks who are interested in, in supporting this area to think about unbundling some of the big bombs, right, like what rights of Facebook say, or what parts of Twitter do you think would be really work well on this federated social web, focus down on doing that really well. And like, you've got a really great opportunity, right? Or a dress a certain audience or a dress a certain kind of platform or support, right be the greatest iOS marketplace app, right for the Fediverse. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here.
Mike McCue:
I agree with you. In fact, that's a great segue to you know, the innovation. So far, what we've seen so far on the Fediverse. And on ActivityPub, has been a lot. Not all, but the popular stuff anyway, seems to be kind of a replica of the walled garden, just moved over to this, you know, more open approach. But that's those are like the early days, I think of, of innovation here, right? I think what you're getting at is something much bigger than that, right? Where are you starting to see? Or have you even neater, sort of identified yourself opportunities where you wish there was some, some engineering happening, where it kind of moved beyond just sort of cloning the existing walled gardens?
Evan Prodromou:
You know, I think that that's a that's such a good question, right? And I think that the answer is like, hopefully, it's coming, right? Like, I definitely have had the conversations with people who are like, Oh, we're going to look into 3d, we're going to look in VR, we're gonna look at supporting even more deeply, like large language models into the social networking area, the, the actual software on the Fediverse is still coming along. We are still in that like cloning aspect, but I think that's fine. Like, that's how we, you know, let's make a good copy of Instagram. And then we've got, you know, the next step is like, oh, what can we do this better than Instagram? Right, right. So I think there those two are, are kind of go hand in hand. I think the last thing is like, there is the point at which we've got a really good Instagram clone. And Instagram comes in, and it connects, right. Like, that's where we go, the next step. And I think that's, you know, what's happening with threads too. So, right.
Mike McCue:
And are there specific when you look at the unbundling, you know, notion? Do you see opportunities, there were some of these things that have traditionally just been a part of a walled garden social network, really could be its own thing. And done much better. Oh,
Evan Prodromou:
yeah. So I think that there are a few things that are really like great opportunities right now. Like if I, if I wasn't doing what I'm doing, like full time, dating is a huge industry, right? It's very important in people's lives, there's a lot about control that we need in that kind of world, right? So feeling safe, feeling private, but at the same time making connections that matter to us. And so like that there's an opportunity for building kind of unpaid, unbundled features and kind of taking these like small networks and connecting them to the larger network so that's what I think is really interesting marketplaces so like your Craigslist or your Facebook marketplace, being able to offer things for sale, get bids on them and then actually sell them having social connections that are your kind of vouch for like Yeah, I know Mike, he's or my friend knows bike so I know that he's probably someone good to buy from. Right. So those are a couple right there that are just really great opportunities. And, you know, they're also like, very potentially like great, great businesses to start. But other you know, a They're things that are, that are interesting there are groups and supporting groups. So we've got some support for groups right now on the Fediverse. But that sense of like, I have a family group, we post our kids photos into this family group, we have a sense of it's like that everyone's there, and we can kind of all participate. I think that's one that's going to be really kind of picking up a lot, too.
Mike McCue:
That's very exciting. Do you when you look at the business models, you mentioned marketplaces? Do you see anything that's interesting or exciting to you materializing on that front?
Evan Prodromou:
Yes, I mean, there are there are standards starting right now for doing marketplaces. Right. So, and one of the things that happens in the open standards community is we have this kind of push pull, right? And so we have the standard comes forward, we have kind of architects and and standards nerds like me, who are like, well, this is how this could happen. And then we have entrepreneurs, open source projects, who are like, Okay, we're going to kind of push the envelope on what the standard looks like. And they go back and forth and becomes like, Oh, this is how it's done right now. This is how we think it should be done. And we eventually kind of negotiate a place in the middle. So right now, the standardization around marketplaces is looking really interesting. So some great, you know, representation of that, like, make an offer, accept bids, doing auctions, etc. And seeing the implementations comm is probably going to be the next big step. I think it's I think it's gonna be really, really interesting to see how that how that works out.
Mike McCue:
Where can somebody go to look at what, what is happening there?
Evan Prodromou:
Hoo boy, okay, so there are a few places that you can go to, you know, kind of talk about some of these standards where the new development new developments are happening. Fetti db.org is a great like, dashboard, it's a great place to go look for servers software, figuring out what's going on in the world. Now, it's a little bit like graphs and and, and dials and dashboards, but it's fun to see like, it's fun to see that stuff happening. We have ActivityPub dot rocks, which is the like kind of old standard, and it's got links to a lot of the software, the standards, etc. And then for the W3C, which is where I do most of my work, we've got a a social CG, which is the social community group. And that is the that's the kind of place so it's the W three.org. community, social CG. If you search for some sort of CG, you'll find us but it is the kind of community of implementers that are working around these around these areas.
Mike McCue:
I'm curious, do you see a role for advertising in the Fediverse? I mean, obviously, it's been what has funded social media to date. It's awfully hard to go not have any advertising model at all, and have all these projects get the funding that they need. What's your take on that front?
Evan Prodromou:
You know, I think that anytime we are spent, we are spending our attention applying our attention to a medium, that's an opportunity for advertising, right like that is how advertising works as we introduce a message into the medium. So I don't think that the Fediverse ActivityPub is different in that way. And it's a really great way to support some of these platforms and frameworks. There are some tough parts with the model, right? So probably the big one. Is that because users have this control, and because that locus of control is spread, it's not just one big platform. You have you know where my account is, where your account is the different apps that we use. There's no kind of guarantee that an ad that's shown at point A is going to appear at point B. Right. So there is there's still some work on it. I think probably like the state To the state in advertising on the Fediverse today and 2023 is more along the lines of like sponsored links. So what we see in influencer economy work where you do sponsored content, you label it as sponsored and it gets out there. My expectation is that other platforms as they come online are going to look for ways to introduce advertisement into the platform, likely what will happen is we'll have in stream ads on platform, so when you're looking at, you know, a particular site, and it's your home site, you might see ads there, but those might not go out to your followers, they may see a different set of ads. Right. So that kind of sense of like everybody's seeing the same ads may break down a little bit. Sure. I think it's a great place for for some innovation, I think we're going to see a lot happening here.
Mike McCue:
Well, and you know, what's interesting is that the way advertising has worked in social media is not the way it has to work in, you know, going forward. And yeah, you know, when I talk to brands and advertisers, one of the things that I hear from them, it's very similar to what I hear from creators that they want to build genuine, direct relationships with their customers. And they've had to do these, build these relationships in these awkward, problematic ways, because of the way the systems all are set up today. But if you could build a system that was really geared around a genuine direct connection between a customer or would be customer and an advertiser, that was a respectful relationship. I think, you know, you could have something that would be, you know, far better than anything we've seen with advertising so far.
Evan Prodromou:
I think it I think it's so it's such an opportunity to kind of reboot that brand customer experience or brand prospect experience. And I think that it's like, there's gonna be a lot of exploration Happening. Happening here.
Mike McCue:
When you look at now going forward with ActivityPub, what are the big things that you think need to happen with the standard?
Evan Prodromou:
Yeah, so I think probably the biggest thing that we need to be kind of emphasizing in the standard, we have talked a lot about the server to server aspect of the protocol, right. So I, I post a message to my server, it shows up on your server, we actually have some other modes of communication, so client to server, and that has largely, up until now worked on clones of the Macedon API, but we actually have a standard API that also works really nicely. I'd like to see more of that working Mastodon is, you know, clearly focused around that microblogging style, having other ways of interacting happening through that other API. It's probably one of the big ones for for for us. And mostly, it's going to be stimulating that, that area. So one of the things that that I'm doing right now, on top of all my other work is that I'm writing a book about ActivityPub. For O'Reilly Media. Yeah, it's so it's aimed for developers is primarily for developers, I think that there's probably some good work to go in for, for other, you know, business people, or people who are content creators. I'm focusing on what I know, which is the technology side. So it's going to be out in summer 2024. Right now, you know, all I'm thinking about is like, Okay, how do we communicate to developers how to build on this on this network?
Mike McCue:
And, you know, there. So when you talk to developers about building an activity, pub, and I would think, pretty much now if you're a developer, and you're going to build anything that's social into your product. Building on ActivityPub just makes total sense. Yeah, right. You know, why? Why would you want to reinvent the wheel and create a completely separate, closed off network where everybody has to rebuild their followership and so on, when you can just be part of this broader movement and not have to build all that right. So yeah, when you talk to developers, what's the advice you give them on? On how you know how to get started, how to think about, you know, integrating activity pup into their projects?
Evan Prodromou:
Yeah, that's such a good. That's such a good point. I think the thing that I try to let developers know is that there are a lot of tools already built libraries. There are, you know, plugins that already exist for sale. stem. So if you're programming and go or rust or Python or JavaScript, there are great libraries that already exist. So starting from scratch, you don't have to do that you can start with what's out there. And then also is that it's a, it can be incremental, right, you don't have to do the whole package all at once, you can start off with the simple parts, you know, doing the syndication outwards, don't worry about getting, you know, followers or things like that, and then gradually build more on to so you get it, you don't have to eat the cookie hole, you can take it bite by bite. And that's probably one of the most important things for developers activity. Pub is not a huge specification, but even so you can take you can pick and choose the parts that may make sense for you.
Mike McCue:
Well, I will say it is a very elegant, and relatively simple, you know, approach that you guys landed on. And I think that's the beauty of it. It doesn't try to be everything, you're not trying to also deal with identity and you know, all these other kinds of things that other standards can work on. But I think it's it's a very focused, I will sometimes think of it maybe this is tell me if this is a good analogy is two way RSS.
Evan Prodromou:
Absolutely, it's RSS, huge inspiration. So yeah, I think really important to recognize that RSS like that feed structure, going back and forth. So having a feed reader and a feed generator in the same like kind of process or, you know, another model that I really like is Internet email, which is, again, a very simple protocol at its base. And it took off because it was so simple. And then as people said, Hey, we need to be able to have formatted text, have file attachments, have encryption, et cetera, we built on top of it, we had the base platform. And then we built on top of those to get the richness that we actually needed. The web is another example right building up from HTML, to CSS to JavaScript to all the frameworks that we have now. And I think that's what we want to have happened with ActivityPub, the base specification does what it needs to do. But the creativity happens when you build on top of it and build, build cool things with it.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, that's such a great point. You know, I I'm on record of having said that, I think that the social web is probably the greatest single technology innovation that we've seen, that I've seen, since the original web. The the degree of innovation of opportunity, that I think this will unlock is is just massive, you think about like when when when you you know all the all the folks who have built a website, and people come to the website, but then there's no way to build an ongoing relationship with that person who visited your website, you have to You're reliant on SEO to get them to come back again. Therefore, you have to write articles that are more, you know, more click baity headlines. And there's this whole sort of like downward, you know, spiral of problems that happen when you're just trying to build that relationship, because it's so indirect now. But by taking what you know, I think you aptly pointed out as one of the most important things in our lives, whether personal or professional lives, it's the relationships that we build, by having those be able to be formed and be persistent and easily established in an open standard. That is, I think, one of the most that is one of the single most important technology ideas, I think that have that have happened in the last several decades. So yeah, yeah.
Evan Prodromou:
I think that it's a really great point that, you know, there is a lot of a lot happening in this space. And I think it's really cool to see how that, that those developments are happening.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. Well, I know you, you're also working on a lot of other things. How can people How can people follow the work that you're doing? And, you know, open Earth work that you're doing? continued work? on the social web, what are how or where would you guide people to follow you?
Evan Prodromou:
So let me say that people who care about my work on the social web really recommend following me at Co social.ca. So my handle on the Fediverse is Evan at co social CLSA. Oh cipl co social.ca. It's a cooperative, Mastodon service for people in Canada, we've been going for about a year now really excited about that process. That's where I do most of my posting. In terms of the work that I do at the Open Earth Foundation, we have a and I think this is going to be relatively common. It's happening a lot with open source projects. But we've got a mastodon server that runs for our organization at social dot open earth.org. And all my team has accounts there. And so you can follow me and my team, as well as like, some of our researchers are our directors. So those are the two main places to to find me. And then I another thing that I'm very excited about my WordPress blog is Evan p.me. So it's E V A n p dot M E, and very new. I'm probably putting myself at risk saying this, but WordPress has been enabling ActivityPub for all the wordpress.com blogs, they're working on getting that going. I lucked out, I got an early, early access. So if you want to follow me at Evan prodromou@fmp.me, you can follow me there too. And that's where I do most of my longer form writing about ActivityPub.
Mike McCue:
That's terrific. Well, Evan, it's been an absolute pleasure getting to know you and to talk to you about all of this incredibly important work.
Evan Prodromou:
Mike, I, I do want to say before I let you go like I have a I have to say you've been such an enthusiastic part of the Fediverse. And it's really great to have, have you there have the organization there to know that that you are kind of providing that leadership and it's cool to it's cool to be on this podcast. I'm so excited to see how things go.
Thanks so much for listening. You can follow Evans writing at Evan p.me and find him on Mastodon at Evan at co social.ca. You can also follow Evan and the whole openers team via their social dot open earth.org instance.
Big thanks to our editors, Rosanna Caban, and Anh Le.
To learn more about what Flipboard is doing in the Fediverse sign up via the link in this episode's description. You can also follow Mike McCue on Mastodon at Mike at Flipboard dot social. See you in the Fediverse!