Newsrooms need to build direct relationships with their communities, and the fediverse is one way to do this. Hear from two men at the forefront of the future of publishing.
It’s tough being a media outlet these days. Audiences are fractured, referrals from search engines are dropping, and publishers are at the mercy of algorithms they don’t control.
Savvy journalists at forward-thinking newsrooms are not letting this happen to them. Instead, they’re doing the work that arguably has been most critical all along: building direct connections with their audiences. It’s common to do this through email lists and subscription models, but the open social web offers a new, more equitable ecosystem for quality journalism to thrive.
Two people on the frontlines of this movement are Jason Koebler, a journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, and Ben Werdmuller, the senior director of technology at ProPublica. In this episode of Dot Social, the two talk about their fediverse experiences so far and why they’re hopeful for publishing in the future.
• Addressing online media’s biggest challenge
• Solving problems around discovery
• Core selling points of decentralized social media
• Will Threads become the whale in this pond?
• Ghost vs Substack
• The threat of AI-generated content and how it plays algorithmically
Mentioned in this episode:
🔎 You can find Ben at https://werd.io/ and @ben@werd.social. You can find Jason @jasonkoebler@mastodon.social and 404 Media at @404media@flipboard.com
✚ You can follow Mike at @mike@flipboard.social and @mike@flipboard.com
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.
Finding the good stuff on the internet is one of the biggest challenges of our time. High-quality work gets lost in SO MUCH NOISE. Audiences are fractured, creators are exhausted, and publishers are at the whim of systems they don’t own.
These days, one of the most valuable things creators and publishers can do is build direct relationships with their audience through things like email lists, subscriptions, and the fediverse.
What does this look like in practice? Who’s already making strides here? And why are they hopeful about the future?
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 Ben Werdmuller, Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, and Jason Keb-ler, a founder and journalist at 404 Media. Jason used to be the Editor in Chief at Motherboard, and Ben also has a rich history in media and tech at places like The 19th, Medium and the Matter accelerator for media startups. Both men are forward-looking thinkers who care deeply about the future of high-quality journalism.
We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Jason Koebler, Ben Werdmuller, welcome to Dot Social. It's great to have you guys here.
Ben Werdmuller:
Thanks for having us. I'm really excited for this Convo.
Jason Koebler:
Yeah, real pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Mike McCue:
You guys are two of what I consider to be the most thoughtful people in the world of online media, publishing on the web. You're both entrepreneurs as well, and I'm really excited to get a chance to talk to you guys about where you see this world going and, you know, I wanted to start Jason by saying, first of all, congratulations on your one year anniversary at 404. Media.
Jason Koebler:
Thank you so much. Yeah, we sort of were, like, very nervous in the run up to the to the one year because, you know, it's a subscription business, and you launch something, and a lot of people sign up as annual members, and you hope you haven't done something in that first year to upset everyone and have them mass cancel their subscriptions. But that didn't happen. So, so we're here to stay. Hopefully.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, it's, it's really fantastic, and I really liked the letter that you put out, where you talk about what you've learned in your first year. And there was a quote in there, I wanted to to maybe start with that and get your guys thoughts on this. So in this letter where you talk about, you know, the things that you've done, how you started the company, the things the journalism that you've done, it's just a fantastic letter. At the end, you start you talk about your biggest challenge, and you say, the biggest challenge that we face is discoverability to the extent possible. We don't want to have to rely on social media algorithms, search engines that don't index us properly, and which are increasingly shoving AI answers into their home pages and an Internet ecosystem that is increasingly polluted by low quality AI spam. That is a incredibly good encapsulation of, I think, not only is this your biggest challenge, but I think is, you know, the web's biggest challenge. Online media's biggest challenge, anyone who's a quality journalist, you know, trying to build any kind of audience or business on the web, big or small. This is the, this is the challenge of our time. And I thought it was a fantastic summary.
Jason Koebler:
Well, yeah, I mean, thank you so much for saying that. And I think we launched at a very opportune time. I think. We launched in August 2023 and I was, I was the editor in chief of motherboard, the tech site at VICE for quite some time, and I stopped working at VICE on Friday, and we launched on a Tuesday. And this was kind of after, like, many years of working very hard, and I probably could have used some time off, but I feel like the attention span on the internet is very brief, and we sort of felt like there would be one moment where, if we disappeared for a long period of time, it would have been difficult for us to start a new thing. And I think that we had the privilege of sort of being associated with a large publication and being associated with motherboard, which was, you know, a publication that a lot of people respected. We had a lot of readers there, but it has been our big. Challenge like we've seen the fracturing of social media. Sort of five years ago, we used to just tweet all of our stories on Twitter. It's no longer Twitter, and many people have left that there for very good reasons, and now it's like when we publish a story, you know, we have to post it on five or six or seven different platforms, and our audience is really fractured, and you're sort of at the mercy of, is a story going to be picked up by a Google search algorithm, or are you going to win the Reddit lottery or the Hacker News lottery, or is it going to do well on Flipboard, which I'm very happy that we're on Flipboard and have had some success getting readers from there.
Mike McCue:
One of the things that I love about being a subscriber is you also get this full text RSS feed, which I thought was a really great thing to include as part of a subscription. I think it's been really just heartening to see your organization thriving in the midst of a lot of other organizations falling apart and going out of business. So you're obviously doing a number of things right. I think you know the basic first principles of just hey, write something meaningful that people are interested in and ask them to support you. And so the interesting thing, of course, is, then, how do you scale that? How, or do you even want to scale that? And how does technology play in here? And you know, to help with this discovery challenge that you've talked about, Ben, you've been a technologist for a long time. You're running the technology team at ProPublica now, right? Yeah, and, and, and also, I know you were at medium slash matter, helping to build that out as well.
Ben Werdmuller:
So, yeah, so I was at Medium, and then I was at Matter. There was a Matter that was involved associated with Medium. It wasn't that Matter. I was involved in another thing called Matter, which was actually, actually an accelerator for early stage media startups. So I supported 75 early stage technology companies involved in media, basically, and learned about their challenges too. And then we partnered with sort of the New York Times, the Associated Press, KQED and so on. So, like, I've had a look sort of inside a lot of different media organizations, and then for the last couple of years, I've actually been inside a newsroom myself, and having started, like in the world, of helping people to publish on their own sites, helping people to establish their own communities on their own terms using open source software. That's been the thrust of my career. It's been a really interesting time to come into media, because it turns out this was by accident, but it turns out that those are some of the ideas that are probably the most important when it comes to finding audiences and kind of building building trust and building a community full publishers today.
Mike McCue:
So when you look at this from a technology point of view, from the web, you know what we've been working on with the fediverse and the open social web, you know? What are your thoughts as it relates to how 404, media and other kinds of smaller, you know, new media organizations, journalistic organizations, should help solve this problem around discovery.
Ben Werdmuller:
I mean, I honestly, like, first of all, 404 is clearly part of the future. Like, it's been really, really exciting seeing, seeing what you all have been doing, like it really, and the things that you are talking about are actually leading some of the conversation in media about this. So that's been really wonderful to watch. I think we're in a situation where a lot of teams and a lot of publishers have got used to the internet as sort of being stagnant and being about kind of a certain set of social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, maybe LinkedIn. And that has obviously shattered, like it's been, Jason, as you were saying over the last five years, that's that's really fallen apart. Audiences have fragmented, and at the same time, referrals from search engines are also dropping. What it really comes down to is that newsrooms need to build direct connections with their communities. That can happen a lot of different ways. It doesn't have to be about technology at all, but it turns out, there's a whole great set of technologies that are about sort of taking out the middleman and really establishing direct relationships with the people who both want to learn about your journalism and also need to learn about your journalism. And it's been really there's a lot of potential for you. Verse, For indie web, for other decentralized technologies to really come into their own. Here, what we've seen is that a lot have started with email, because everyone understands email, and so the reason why people like email, I think, is that everyone has an email address. You reach your audience directly and get to know a little bit about them as well. You know who's subscribed to you, you know who's going to be. You know who's opening your emails. You know who is, who your journalism is reaching. But these other technologies sort of augment kind of that level of relationship, allow you to learn a little bit more about kind of your community on a consensual basis. And really could open up the ways that newsrooms build community if newsrooms are willing to actually pick them up and experiment with them and sort of and sort of jump on that opportunity.
Jason Koebler:
It's been really interesting to me that some of the most innovative technologies that people like us are using are much older technologies like email and like RSS. You mentioned the RSS Full Text RSS feed, and it's trivial for us to offer a full text RSS feed, if we had a website that didn't have a paywall, which is, you know, some of our articles have paywalls. Some of them do not. But the moment we add a paywall, you know, the RSS feed cuts off at that point, and we use Ghost sort of as our back end, which is an open source CMS system as well as it integrates directly with stripe, so it helps us manage our subscriptions and things like that. But Ghost didn't have a way to deliver a full text RSS solution to paying subscribers, but not to everyone else. Like to make it open to the entire rest of the internet. And I know a lot of podcasters have what they call premium feeds, where they sort of do an ad free feed, or they do, like, bonus episodes or bonus segments on a premium RSS feed. And there are many, there's many podcast providers that offer this ability, and the way that these RSS feeds work are there, you know, they're, they're basically long strings of random text for the URL. So they're, they're creating individual RSS feeds for each subscriber to their podcast, and they're getting delivered that that RSS feed, and when they stop paying, it automatically turns off. And this is technology that exists for podcasters, but from what I could tell, it didn't really exist for someone who wanted to do something similar on a blog. And there was a blog post by Anil Dash, who is just a really great internet thinker, blogger, jack of all trades, and I think it's called something like, listen to this wherever podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, is a radical thing that many podcasters say, because RSS is just this open technology. You can go do it anywhere. And so we wanted to recreate that, but for our articles. And thankfully, you know, we were able to find two people who helped us build this out, both on the like providing the full text access to it, and then someone to help us, sort of like, manage the subscription side of it. And this is very old technology, but for some reason, it feels I don't know either innovative or futuristic to be able to deliver this. I don't know if those are the right words, but it's like it's a lot of this old technology has, I guess, like another gear, like more to offer that that hasn't necessarily been exploited in the way that ways that it should be.
Ben Werdmuller:
Well, I mean, the the internet was designed to be decentralized, designed to, you know, have these, these direct connections, and like the web is built like that, right? So you have, you know, you can set up a website, you have a direct connection with the readers who are accessing it directly in order to to consume the content. Emails, clearly like that. We lost that a little bit because, you know, these, you know, these third party services that made it really easy to get on the internet, you know, made their money by centralizing those relationships and really owning those relationships. And so it is funny that kind of all of that sort of older stuff, that older ethos of the internet feels like incredibly cutting edge now, but it is in some ways. It's like coming home, right? It's like bringing it back to where, where the web really was meant to be, which is really cool.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, and I think there's a whole new set. The realizations that people are having, like, if it only could do A, B and C, we'd be in a fundamentally better place. Email, of course, is a great way to build a direct relationship with your audience, but there are certainly downsides to that too. There's a lot of you know, challenges with emails actually getting through, actually getting opened. You know, you're in it's interrupt driven. It's a less than ideal scenario. Plus, we don't really have a two way relationship. It's really a one way relationship. We're broadcasting these emails. And I think that's the promise of ActivityPub. I've viewed ActivityPub as a almost like two way RSS, or maybe you can think of it as like two way email, right where you can, at scale, actually communicate with your audience back and forth, and they can communicate with each other in a way where you don't have to go build your own social media experience or super high end commenting system on your site. You can just leverage activity. Pub, and the fact that these folks are already have fediverse addresses, and they can just communicate with each other. That I'm incredibly excited about, and that's one of the things that, you know, we had John O'Nolan on the show. I don't know if you guys heard him on dot social, but you know, he is incredibly thoughtful about where he's going to be taking Ghost as it relates to the fediverse. He's got a weekly blog post that he puts out, which is now federated, and it's really fantastic because, you know, I think Jason, you're obviously, you're already on Ghosts. There's some other fantastic people on Ghosts, like Casey Newton and others with Platformer, where the community of people who are in the fediverse will be able to be much more integrated into your your communities, right? There'll be that and that I'm really, I think, is going to be a game changer for discovery.
Jason Koebler:
Almost every news outlet has people who are dedicated to social media, 404 Media doesn't have anyone who's dedicated to it. We sort of divide it up and sort of do it all ourselves. I think ultimately, we will need to bring a dedicated person on to help us manage all the different platforms that we're on. But posting on all of these platforms is not necessarily the challenge. It's when people start responding on 10 different platforms and making sure that you feel like you are native on those platforms in a way that the people on that are using any given social media feel like you're paying attention to them. And it used to be just a tiny part of my job to go and check my twitter mentions and respond to them, or check motherboards Twitter mentions and respond to them. Now you might have to keep 2030 conversations up across seven different platforms. And I think part of the promise of ActivityPub and the fediverse, more broadly, is honestly, by decentralizing, you kind of see a path where you can centralize the work again, like centralize it for us while being everywhere. And that's very appealing to me. I mean, I'm in huge favor of decentralized services and social media more broadly. But the idea that I don't need to post the same thing or slight variations of the same thing 10 times and then respond to it is very appealing to me. And then, of course, the portability of, you know, anything on the fediverse.
Ben Werdmuller:
I mean, it decouples the message in the platform, right? And so, and that's that's a real difference to centralized social media. So you can bring the tool that you want, they can use the you know, your community can use the tool that they want. They could all be different tools, but it's one interlocking set of conversations, rather than lots of different siloed worlds. One of the challenges that we see is really just, is exactly that? Like, you know, we're a small nonprofit, we have to figure out where we're going to spend our time, where is it worth it for us to spend our time? And so, you know, really understanding which networks, you know, have the conversations that will lead to people engaging in our journalism, frankly, that will lead to people donating to us and supporting our work, is really, really crucial. And one federated open standard has the promise of allowing us to understand that more deeply, rather than having to rely on tools integrating with each individual social network as it arises. That hasn't quite happened yet, like analytics on the fediverse are really underdeveloped, but I really do think that that is going to be one of the core selling points as well, one of the really most valuable pieces of it.
Mike McCue:
Yesterday, notably, Threads announced the ability to see all the comments from the fediverse. Is on a post that was federated. So whether you're you've turned on Federation or not in your account settings on Threads, which I encourage everyone to do. But if you, even if you haven't turned that on, you can see people commenting from Mastodon, from Flipboard, from other social media tools that they've decided to use that all connect via activity. Pub, on this one standard like Adam Mosseri posted, and there are comments from the fediverse, from people using a variety of different apps in the fediverse, as well as comments from people in Threads. And you're starting to see it come together. And I think it is, it is, you're right. It's sort of like centralizing and decentralizing at the same time, right? But you're creating this place where you can see, you can post something, it can go out to many different kinds of clients and audiences, and you're starting to be able to see the conversations now coming together.
Jason Koebler:
I’m not nearly as big of an expert in ActivityPub and Federation as either of you. In fact, I'm not at all an expert. I sort of broadly understand how it works, but I have been kind of monitoring active users on Mastodon dot social, like the big, the big. I think it's the biggest Mastodon instance, and I've noticed that it's been falling quite a lot since Threads turned on Federation. And I don't, I don't know if that is bad, but I'm very curious as to whether you think there is a correlation there of some sort, because, and to what extent we should be concerned, or if we should be concerned at all, of the ability for something like Threads to sort of become a gigantic whale in this fediverse pond, if you will.
Ben Werdmuller:
I think what's going to end up happening, what we need to happen is for there to be, you know, we know that threat is going to be huge. We know. I'm very, very grateful that Flipboard is doing what it's doing, right, and really being first class theta, first participants. We need a few more, you know, big tent poles. And then you're going to have a long tail of communities, which I think Mastodon is going to represent. I think we are getting there. I think that is happening. I think other people are working on this. I love, obviously, what Ghost is doing. I think there's and we're going to see more. We're going to see networks that we we aren't aware of yet, that are going to spring up. I do think we need to work on usability. And usability is kind of one of, one of the key, one of the key issues there. What I will say, though also, is that the mastodon community in itself is incredibly vibrant, even though you know that might be true on Mastodon dot social, there's a whole bunch of different instances out there. I ran a kind of guerrilla test. I don't know if I should say this, I'm going to say it anyway. The I ran a gorilla test twice for ProPublica. We don't, you know, ProPublica is on the fediverse, basically because of the efforts of one person in our audience team who just was like, Okay, let's do this. And it's been very successful. I ran a just, you know, we do as nonprofit fundraising campaigns through throughout the year, and we do it on this, on the traditional social networks. I sort of guerrilla posted to Mastodon, the same kind of fundraising link, and more people donated via Mastodon than all of the other social networks combined. So even though, and I did it twice, I did it for the subsequent the subsequent fundraising drive, and exactly the same thing happened. So even though it's, you know, clearly Mastodon, it's, what, 3 million, 4 million users, it's not anywhere near as big as Threads. It's not anywhere near as big as the larger social networks. They're incredibly engaged. They are. They tend to be a very informed kind of population, and clearly they've got the ability to donate. So it's definitely still a network to pay attention to. And then, you know, I think as more networks join the fediverse, we're going to have this effect where people who are maybe, let's call the mainstream users, are maybe going to join kind of the temple networks, and then folks who have very specific needs, whether that's in terms of moderation, whether that's in terms of features, may join the long tail. And I'm kind of, I'm really bullish about that case, like, I think it's, I think there's a lot to be said of that kind of tapestry of communities, kind of working together. And we are, you know, there's already more than 110 pulse. So I'm not, I'm not so worried about Threads. What Threads has done is legitimize the fediverse for other networks, they see this giant name, right? Who is coming and supporting it, and it sort of gives, almost like social permission to come and join too. And so in that sense, I actually really see it as a very positive thing. There's everything to play for we will see, and there does need to be investment in other, fair, diverse networks. But I really do think the future looks actually quite bright for this. And it's not I'm not somebody who naturally praises Meta. That is not kind of my default stance, but I really do think what they're doing here is is a positive influence right now.
Mike McCue:
I agree with that. And in my take on this phenomenon, Jason, is that we're in this moment in time right now where things are still very much moving around. People are experimenting with different social platforms, thinking through their social media strategy, rethinking how they want to, you know, be online, and so there's still a lot more to come. What I think would be a problem is if people were leaving, let's say Mastodon dot social, joining Threads and not federating, right? That would be concerning to me. But if people are leaving Macedon that social and they're federating. Well, that's actually fine. I mean, that's what the whole point of the fediverse is, right? You can, you can try, you know, you can use different platforms, try out different, you know, experiences, and still reach the same networked audience. I think that is one of the really key things right now is to really help to evangelize the benefits of turning on that Federation switch, because it's an opt in thing on Threads right now, the more people who do it. Marques Brownlee just recently did it. That's that was a huge statement to many creators, right? David Imel came out with a fantastic podcast, you know, deep dive episode explaining the fediverse Yesterday, this is what we need. We need more people to federate. You know, I really do think it's sort of like a federate or die kind of situation, right? If you federate, you really can actually now begin to own your audience, right? Where, as opposed to renting your audience, as opposed to being dependent on whatever discovery engine is going to happen on Threads, and that's the only way you're getting discovered, versus the massive amount of innovation that's going to be happening on ActivityPub that is now happening on ActivityPub, to create new ways to get more genuine discovery that is not about link bait and not about, you know, engagement, and it's much more about genuine connections between people who are trust, who trust each other, who are engaging with content and are more likely to discover ProPublica and 404, media through that kind of discovery process, because people in the fediverse Are, they don't have, they're not driven by some public stock value, right? They are driven by solving real problems that are on the internet. And many of them are creators. Many of them are bloggers. Many of them understand the challenges here. So I think by federating your Threads account, you are basically tapping into all of those other potential discovery things that could emerge. And you're and in a way, you're also supporting the opportunity for these developers to try out all sorts of new ideas, because they can actually have your content in their app right versus before the fediverse, like they have to go call you guys up and say, Would you please, please post on my platform so I can get some people interested in using it right that you that no longer is a barrier. So, yeah, this is a big deal. And I think what I also think is going to happen as a next phase here is that soon you will be able to follow users in the fediverse from Threads, which then I think there's going to be a lot of people saying, okay, so where's my primary fediverse account? Is it going to be on Threads? Is it going to be, you know, on my own website? I think you're going to see a lot of publishers saying, Well, hold on a second. I'm going to run my own instance here. Maybe, you know, with Ghost, you know, Jason, that is your primary social media presence is your own website via Ghost. That's super exciting, and you can tell people on Threads to follow you on 404 Media.
Jason Koebler:
Yeah, that's been one of the really exciting things about owning our own platform. I've talked to a few other folks about this, but I think that with sort of the rise of, I guess, quote, unquote, higher quality AI powered spam, I really do think that the journalism outlets that are in the middle are going to die. Right? I think that, like the New York Times and CNN and really massive publications are going to adapt, because they have both the name recognition, but also sort of the ability to, you know, join the fediverse, or join some of like innovate, and sort of get with the program, whereas, like your vices and Buzzfeeds these, like large companies that spend a lot of money on, you know, keeping their heads above water, but are still kind of can't, like they have their boat tied to these social media platforms, and for them to sort of start over is there's not enough time. They can't turn the boat before they hit the iceberg, to mix my metaphors there. And then there's people like us, and there's people like ProPublica, and I know ProPublica has been around for a very long time, but very dedicated audience, like very dedicated point of view, you're not trying to be everything to everyone has the ability to embrace these technologies and also help build them and guide what they look like. You know, I really have a bit of regret, because I am I don't know that much about the technical aspects of things, but I do think I know quite a lot about publishing and reaching an audience and journalism and just sort of like the types of features that I would like to see. And some of the most rewarding parts of having 404 Media is doing things like, you know, building this full text RSS feed, which is not the fediverse, but, you know, similar, similar vibes, and then being able to give that technology to other people, and we had to find someone to build it for us. But hopefully, if we sort of like, scream from the rooftops enough and say, like, here are the features we want and why we want them and why we need them, then the technologies will build it. And you know, if enough people support us, it's like we actually have the money to help fund some of that and then either open source it or make it available in some way, shape or form. And I think that that's why I feel a great sense of peace to be sort of like in charge of the day to day operations of what we're doing and have ownership of it, because it does feel like there's a lot of opportunities to embrace these technologies and to sort of guide them. But I think that if you're part of a larger institution that is kind of barely treading water, it's really hard to get on board without, like, bankrupting the company in the process. I maybe took that on a tangent, but that's sort of how I how I look at it.
Ben Werdmuller:
I think that's really one of the most important aspects of this actually, and it's one of the things that excites me the most. You can probably see me. I started to vibrate in my chair as you were saying this, because I'm so I'm really, I'm really excited about the potential here. News has the tendency to think of technology as something that happens to it, rather than something that it can shape and build so and, you know, newsrooms have come by that really honestly, like it's they've been trained into it because it is really hard to affect what a Google or a Facebook does, but open source, the open web, is actually available for everybody to shape and build together. And when newsrooms actually take that and take ownership of the platforms and really think about what they need and consider what they need to be first class, sort of citizens in sort of the idea marketplace of the web, that first of all, it makes the web better for everyone. It means that newsrooms actually have technology that truly serves them, and it creates an ecosystem where journalism can actually reach the people it needs to reach. So it's it's really win, win, win. And the idea of newsrooms truly embracing open source, open web, the fair, diverse, all of these open platforms, is really, really, truly exciting for that reason, like you go to a lot of the traditional journalism conferences, and people are still kind of talking about like, Oh, should we buy this platform? Should we buy that platform? You know this, what are other newsrooms doing? No one's really thinking about, Okay, what do we need to do to meet our needs? What do we need to build in order to really serve our journalism well? And all of these technologies actually afford those opportunities. And I think again, like from the technology side, there's a whole community of open source developers, open source movements, communities that are really ready to help people kind of embrace these technologies. And like, connecting the two is going to be one of the most impactful things, I think, to happen. Are in news over the next couple of years. It's going to be really, really exciting. And I honestly, I truly can't wait.
Mike McCue:
We're basically all part of team fediverse here, like there is an opportunity for these really thoughtful people who have kind of figured things out from in your case, Jason, what you've done as a brand new media organization. And Ben, what you've been doing from a tech point of view across a whole range of big and small companies, and what John is building from a platform point of view. You know, there is a there's an opportunity for some of these really thoughtful people to collaborate right now in this moment and actually shape that future. You know, Jason, you were mentioning in your, in one of the blog posts you did about 404, media, and as you were creating it, noticing that, like, you didn't really need to have a lot of super high tech here. It's just really, you know, you didn't need to be, you know, a technologist to set up this, this organization, right? And I think getting getting this feedback to the people that are building is one of the most important things I think we could be doing right now, because I do feel like we are on the verge of having something where it's a lot more turnkey for someone to start their their their journalism effort and get subsidized, uh, through, you know, audiences that truly care about what that person is writing about.
Jason Koebler:
Yeah. I mean, that's the biggest thing. Is that if we tried to do this eight years ago there, I mean, maybe there was, but not to my knowledge, there was not really an off the shelf thing that we could have gone from having no website to having a website in one day. I mean, we could have, but not with the payment processing, not with the subscription management, like that sort of thing. And now there are multiple different options. And I think that, you know, we decided to go with Ghost for what I hope are obvious reasons, but you know, you can go with Substack, you can go with several others. And I think that what turned us off about Substack, besides, you know, its alignment with right wing talking points and Nazis and things like this, which, to be clear, was a deal breaker for us, but was the fact that it felt like joining something that was very centralized. Honestly, it felt like we were, it's old school, becoming like it. It is not quite another social media network. But it felt like we were tying our fortunes to the success of Substack itself, whereas Ghost, you know, it just has, because it's open source, because it's more portable, because it's a nonprofit. It really felt like we were joining something that was like, not owned by anyone, and also felt like we were joining something that we could help guide. And if we didn't want to guide the future of Ghost, it was like, well, you can hire a developer and fork Ghost or add features to Ghost. It's very customizable, and I think that was very exciting to us, and it's the same sort of ethos that you see in the fediverse. And I know that Flipboard is really like doing quite a lot to to help this ecosystem. A lot. We haven't talked that much about flipboards entry into here, and I think you're probably being polite, but I'm personally very um, Flipboard, it has always been a quite a large driver of readers to all of the publications I've ever worked for. And I think that is a that's a pretty important role, um, for as someone who writes for a website, owns a website, uses a website, it's like, well, where are the people going to come from? And quite often, you know, sometimes the people come from Flipboard. And the fact that, rather than focus entirely on having, like a more closed these are our readers perspective, the fact that you're supporting ActivityPub and the fediverse is very interesting to me.
Jason Koebler:
The fediverse is one social graph that you can plug anything into, like that. I mean, it's going to enable so much innovation as well. Like I think about kind of the startups I founded, which were all about kind of creating social networks, building, you know, getting people to join, and actually building that initial excitement and that initial those initial discussions were so freaking hard, and so being able to take, you know, that graph where people already are, they're already having conversations, and then apply the new thing that you're building to it is going to enable, yeah, it enables, absolutely, newsrooms, journalists, publishers, but all kinds of new startups, all kinds of new platforms as well. And everybody gets to see the benefit of it. It feels a lot like the web all over again to me, and I think it's really I'm so grateful and excited that you're doing this. And again. Just to say we also get a huge bump from Flipboard the 19th where I was before joined the fediverse. Was able to join the fediverse because we switched it on with Flipboard, and it's just a real enabler, both for publishers and readers. And there's just going to be more and more and more of it. And I love it, yeah.
Ben Werdmuller:
Yeah. I mean, I think this is something that is sorely missing right now because, I mean, we write a lot about the threat of AI generated content, and I think that I talk about it a lot as like a pollution sort of thing. It's like there will be people who use AI and generative AI to make high quality content. But what we are seeing largely is that just a flood, like a flood of stuff, and it's it's making discoverability a lot harder, as I said, but the people who are using AI in a smart way, and by that I mean the people who are spamming most effectively are taking their cues from social media companies and from search algorithms, and they are optimizing that content to play very well algorithmically. I've written a lot about spam on Facebook and in the past, if you wanted to spam Facebook, you know, you may be copy pasted things over and over and over again, but now you can make like, quote, unquote, like new content that has never existed before, that has AI generated, and you will get the feedback of the likes, the shares, the comments, and then you can scale up what works on those platforms very quickly and as, just like, you know, a person sitting at a keyboard, I feel like I'm I write very quickly, but it's, you know, an article a day. You know, bigger investigation takes me weeks or months, and the feedback that I get from the social media algorithms if I were to want to write for those algorithms, it's a very slow process. I get the feedback, I optimize it, I do it again, and it takes me a while, but with AI, you can do it over and over and over and over again very quickly. And I think that that is what scares me, is that we have not just humans who are trying to optimize their content, both for search algorithms and for social media recommendation algorithms, but then AI factories supercharging that. And I think what's really missing is the human to human connection and the human curation, where I mean our sort of informal tagline is by humans for humans, and we really just want someone to look at our stuff and send it to their friends in a group text, or talk about it out loud, or add it to a stream on the fediverse. And I think that has been missing. I know different people have tried to build it, but I think that a sort of like human curated feed of topics that are being shared because of quality versus because it has the correct keywords in it is it's desperately needed.
Mike McCue:
One of the things I think, has been the root of a lot of problems in social media. Has been the for you feed this black box algorithmic model for surfacing content regardless of whether you followed it or not. And you know it is a proven engagement and growth mechanic to you know what Tiktok has done, for example, and what a lot of other social media companies have now done is, before you feed that's 100% algorithmic, and sort of, you know, maybe it sort of looks at the things you're folks you followed, but it's still going to just recommend all sorts of other things too. And those things are, you know, a value judgment, how the algorithm is tuned. There's nothing wrong with algorithms. The problem is, who's running them, who's programming them. What are they designed to do? What are the motivations behind them? And that has led to massive pickup of clickbait, conspiracy theories, etc.
The question is, what's your sort of value system as a business to like, go in and adjust your algorithms, sort of deal with these kinds of problems, right? And so this is the kind of thing that I think when you look at the fediverse, there's custom feeds, there are other kinds of models. There's the following timeline, these, these, you don't have these black box algorithms. You have more sort of an open approach to algorithms that I think really could transform how they're tuned, so that you could enable genuine human to human, trusted connections and discovery. I'd love to hear from both of your guys' point of view, what is your top one of your top wishlist items for the web? And you know, might include the fedverse, might not, but just as as someone who's been, you know, you know people building in this space, what's the biggest thing you hope happens?
Jason Koebler:
I think that I have more of a wish for my own website, versus the web as a whole, which is, I would like to, and this is possible, it exists, but I would like to be able to tweet to my own website. I think that the verge has done a good job of this by sort of redesigning their homepage in a way where it's not all, where everything doesn't just look the same. It's not all just like links to articles and big articles. It's more of like a feed that, you know, it will be a big article, and then it will be a couple thoughts about, you know, a smaller news item or something like that. And I would really like to be able to, and I believe the fevers and ActivityPub can enable this, and I'm very curious how Ghost ends up implementing this. But I would like to be able to pull articles from or posts from ActivityPub and put them on our own home page in a seamless way, so that we can begin to not just do journalism, but to do curation and sharing in a much more seamless way. I think that this can obviously be done now, but it is, as I understand, like relatively arduous to do it. I want to be able to do it in a way where I don't have to go into our own CMS, build a new post like and assemble it. It would be nice to be able to have a mix of quick posts, big features, photos, and then pulling things from social media, from the fediverse, from ActivityPub, and placing it on our own website. That's sort of my dream for the nearer term.
Mike McCue:
I love that. Ben, how about you?
Ben Werdmuller:
It's a very similar dream. I want a world where everybody can publish on their own website using their own domain, and have all of the reach, all of the community, all of the potential connections that you might have on a traditional social network today. And then I want to go beyond that. I want it to be the size of the web. I want the network to be the size of the size of the web, and for there to be more reach for people who are doing it this way than they would have on a normal social network. I do have on my personal website thanks to the indie web, I've got tweets, I've got photos, I've got bookmarks as well as long posts. I want everyone to be able to do that, and I want them to be able to key into community, potentially from anyone in the world. And what's cool about that is I think we're actually going to get there. I'm so excited, like we actually are on that road. And I think, you know, we're going to see some really major things happening, even just in the tail end of this year, and certainly into next it's going to be really,
Jason Koebler:
it feels like a pretty small dream, probably because I know it's possible and I know that's where we're going, but yeah, it does feel like that implementation is still a little bit tricky, and I think that if we get to a spot where everyone can do what I'm talking about and what you just described, it will help the health of The Web in a way that is much bigger than, you know, I want to be able to share links on my website sounds
Ben Werdmuller:
I think that's the key, though. I think it's not just about it being possible. It's about it being accessible to everybody. And I think that's the work is bringing it to everybody and making sure that anyone can do it, regardless of their technical ability, regardless of what equipment they happen to use, regardless of what their you know, what services they happen to subscribe to, it's something that they can just do. And that's we are definitely not there yet today, but I really do think we're going to get there.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. There's a huge amount of alignment from people who have the ability to move the ball forward in their areas of specialty, to light the way for the future and to help actually build it and make it happen and collaborate on it. And I do see that happening.
Jason Koebler:
I have one more and it's a different, different conversation, but I'll just tee it up, and maybe we can talk again months from now, or something. I would really like to see the rehabilitation of advertisements on the internet. I think that advertisements have become like spyware, essentially, and they have for a long time, but I think that journalism has been funded in part, by advertisements for 100 years. And I would like to see someone, and I think people are probably trying this, but I would like to see a return to a more healthy, less surveillance minded advertising. Ecosystem, because I think that there's probably value there, both for publishers and for companies. I think that so many companies are wasting tons of money on advertisements that surveil people, but also are being delivered to bots. And I think that we have to fix advertising if we want to fix the internet, is my bigger dream, and that's a much longer term and more difficult problem.
Ben Werdmuller:
I think I'd love to build on that and just say, an end to surveillance and a move from a platform centric to a people centric web, where people's rights and their sovereignty are respected by default, and I think that'll give you what you need. And so so much more.
Mike McCue:
Some of the greatest ads that I've ever seen that were the most effective were in a magazine. They were not tracking me. They were contextual. They were there. You know, when I get, you know, when I get my rock climbing magazine, I wouldn't be tearing the ads out of that. And like, I don't want these ads be part of the content. There's a world that that can happen again. I think, I think that is going to happen. I couldn't agree more this is a big deal, the business model of the of the web, and how we evolve in a way that's much more respectful. It all comes back to that genuine respect for people and each other, and the genuine ability to have those connections, not to bots, not to AI engines, but to actual, thoughtful people that you can trust, and those can be brands. So I do think that's a great I love it, guys, this was a fantastic discussion. I'm incredibly optimistic about the future in no small part, because of what you guys have already achieved, and where you're going and how you're thinking about this. And I'm looking forward, we'll definitely set up another time for us to talk again, you know, maybe 612, months from now, and see how it's going on on the monetization front. And I'm excited for your second year, Jason, at 404. Media. And congrats on everything you guys have accomplished there. And Ben, super excited to see where you take help, take the technology for ProPublica, but also across the board, industry wide. So thank you again for being on Dot Social. It was really great to talk to you guys.
Well, thanks so much for listening! You can find Ben at https://werd.io/ and @ben@werd.social. You can find Jason at 404 Media and @jasonkoebler@mastodon.social.
You can follow Mike at @mike@flipboard.social and @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 show’s notes.
Until next time, see you in the fediverse!