Entrepreneur and FediForum co-founder Johannes Ernst has a 10,000-foot view of how the fediverse is evolving and what needs to be done next.
For stewards of the fediverse (they sound like superheroes, right?), FediForum is a key date on the calendar. The third edition of the “unconference” is happening soon, on March 19-20, 2024. With Threads saying it will federate later this year, FediForum comes at a time of growing curiosity and promises juicy topics and demos.
What are the issues that are top of mind for the developers and leaders in this movement? What needs to happen for the fediverse to cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream? What are the opportunities for entrepreneurs, and how should they think about business models in the Fediverse?
Johannes Ernst, one of FediForum’s founders and an entrepreneur himself as the CEO of Dazzle Labs, discusses these questions and more in this episode of Dot Social, a podcast hosted by Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. Johannes’ projects also include FediTest, a test suite for the fediverse, and The Fediverse Developer Network.
Highlights of this conversation include:
• FediForum top-of-mind topics
• what it will take to bring people to the fediverse
• the business model for the open social web
• importance of strong use cases
• ways to solve spam attacks
• governance questions and ideas
🔎 You can follow Johannes on Mastodon @J12t@social.coop and his projects:
* FediForum: https://fediforum.org
* Personal home page: http://j12t.org
* Fediverse developer network: https://fedidevs.org
* Dazzle Labs: https://dazzlelabs.net
💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social, or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @mike@flipboard.com.
💡 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.
There's nothing like events to bring people together for people moving the fediverse forward. One key gathering is an unconference called FediForum.
What are the topics bubbling up for discussion this year? What needs to happen for the fediverse to cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream? What are the opportunities for entrepreneurs and builders?
That's all part of today's conversation.
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 Johannes Ernst, one of the founders of FediForum and the CEO of Dazzle Labs, a startup focused on the fediverse identity, privacy, personal data and AI. Johannes is also a force behind the FediTest test suite, and the Fediverse Developer Network.
We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Johannes Ernst, welcome to Dot Social.
Johannes Ernst:
Mike, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Mike McCue:
It is great to have you here. I am so excited about the upcoming FediForum. I've gone to two of them so far. And I found them to just be terrific. I love the grassroots nature of FediForum. And the way you run the conference, the way you know, people are able to participate and talk about a lot of different topics that are really vital for the health of the fediverse. I absolutely love it. And I'm really looking forward to the third one as well.
Johannes Ernst:
Well, that's very nice of you to say. Certainly we have been, I think the forum has exceeded our expectations in terms of what we will be we're you able to accomplish so far. And as you said, the third one is coming up in just a couple of weeks on March 19 and 20. Again, online, we are expecting again, a international audience. It's it's scheduled to be suitable for European and Americas kind of audience. That's where most of the people are located. Around the world. Also, we have had some people from Japan demonstrating software in the middle of the night. So it must have a certain pull, otherwise people wouldn't do that.
Mike McCue:
I found it to be just a fantastic way to understand what's going on and to think about where we're going with our own product work. When you look at this upcoming FediForum, it's coming at a really important moment for the fediverse, where it feels as though we're on the cusp of a massive new wave of growth. What do you see as some of the most important topics of discussion that you're hoping we're gonna get into?
Johannes Ernst:
So, you know, I'm just an unconference organizers. So whoever as clear says the whoever the right people, whoever comes out the right people, and whatever subjects, they bring out the right subjects, so we're not trying to enforce them. On the other hand, I'm also a participant in, in this emerging market or ecosystem, I would call it FediForum is really just a side project, I have other projects, including my main project, Dazzle, which is playing there. But so I have an opinion around this one. And we've been thinking about, where is this market? Where is this movement? Who are the people who would come to the forum in order to accomplish what, how will it be different six months from now?
We've been doing a bunch of work around this and if you if you indulge me want to lay this out a little? If that's okay. So so the way the way I think about it is, it might my favorite book on that subject, as you know, no ancient book, Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore and and what came up with McKenna back in the in the early 90s, I think, it was such a long time ago about how technology markets evolve. And the funny words at this point in time is very clearly still in early market. It's the there's no majority yet this is not a mainstream market yet. In in Geoff talks in the in the early market, two phases, the way I recall it, One of them we have the technology enthusiasts, who start with a new product or with a with a new movement. These are the people that tinker with the protocols, that solder together the boards, that you know do that are geeks, that basically figure out something and say, "hey, look, mom, it worked!"
And then there's a second early market, which is the visionaries where somebody who isn't a tinkerer, looks at us and says, if this actually works, this could do something pretty amazing and do something amazing for my customers or for my community. But they're not the tinkerers as anymore; they want to accomplish something this the technology. And at least that's my understanding how the model works. And I think the the fediverse is sort of right at the cusp between these two early market phases. I think we know that conversation is now changing from the technology conversation to the to the what can this do in the in the world? And hopefully a year down the road, we then make it through that early market, and the first mainstream adopters show up.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I mean, I think that is important because the just having an open version of Twitter, or, you know, some other walled garden, social media product, in and of itself, is not going to be a mainstream, widely adopted thing, right? What we need are new kinds of experiences that just aren't possible In in the walled garden worlds, or have a lot more friction to ever even happening, right? I think that's the key thing that we need is we have to move from this world of, "hey, we have an open version of Twitter" to we are now interacting with content and people in fundamentally new and better ways. And when you look at Twitter, it feels like the DOS command line before Windows or something. It's something that I think, you know, there is this like major jump that ends up that I think is going to have to happen.
Johannes Ernst:
One of the things that fediverse brings, that a closed network generally hasn't done so far, is what we could call heterogeneous interoperability. Meaning that software interacts with other software that's different. Truly different, not the same. From my perspective, it's not all that interesting to have other implementations of Twitter, and then now interact with each other through federation. Okay, fine, but you know, it's mostly more or less the same product.
But now, if one of them is a microblogging tool, and another thing is a forum, or a wiki, or a, or a photo sharing site, and they can interoperate, we can all of a sudden do use cases that are simply not possible in closed social networks. Except if somebody like, you know, Instagram, were to basically just put all the features of all the other products into Instagram, which I don't think this is feasible, right? So we cannot support use cases that are more heterogeneous, I don't think they have been quite articulate yet what they are, and who exactly wants them, and what the usability is, and there's lots of technical work to be done too. But this is this is, I think, the kind of conversations that are beginning to happen, because people will look at the unique possibilities that the fediverse allows, and this is one of them, that goes beyond just the fact that it is decentralized.
Now we're seeing much more polished things, things that are much better thought through and some actual genuine innovations, where people are going beyond Twitter, and going beyond what is there, and trying out new things that now they suddenly can do. And this is I think another one of the really, really important values of the fediverse: it enables, and supports innovations, but innovators, much more so than any other environment.
And my favorite example here is actually if we look back into history, Zynga and Facebook. If remember, we were all playing the farming game on on Facebook at some point. And, and it was great because Farmville, exactly, because Zynga could say, oh, we have an innovation here, which is some kind of collaborative working, you know, social kind of game. And we are going to put this into the, into the network. And of course, Zynga was very successful. And at some point, it became too successful. And that was the end of Zynga because Facebook has the ability to veto their business.
So if the same thing had happened in the fediverse, the story would have ended differently. They would have said, Oh, we are really innovators in gaming. But we don't want to build our own network, social network, which is what they did back then, except that jumped on Facebook, and Facebook at some point, and pulled out their veto. Well, in the fediverse there is no veto; there is no central entity that can say Zynga or anybody else, you cannot do that anymore. And so as an innovator, I can do things like like, like social games, and so many other things with first without having to build my own network, because it's already there. And everybody's helping me build it because everybody has an incentive to build a similar property. It's not owned by anyone or corporation, and then nobody can ever kick me out. And they cannot even put the toll booth on it. It's not like you know, all of a sudden they want somebody wants 30% of your affiliate revenue or some such thing it Is it is that you can do what you want to do, of course, you have to convince the individual server operators to actually carry your content and not block you. But that is a completely different story. If there is 1000s and 1000s of service operators out there that independently moderate their own servers, instead of one entity saying, "Nope, you can't do this anymore, because you're too successful for my for my own business." And so we're beginning to see some of some of these things in fediverse. This is the early days.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I think your point, you know, is a big one here that, like, you know, what about all those other companies, that could have been the next Zynga or that could have been the next Pinterest that can't get started because, you know, they had to build their own social graph. The fediverse changes that right, so you see, you can have more Pinterest, more Zyngas, more Spotifys actually happen. And I do think that that is a, you know, a huge, huge, you know, dimension, you know, I think of it as decentralized innovation. You know, you have decentralized innovation happening around a common model, common social graph, a common mechanism for interoperating. And then that just opens up the doors for all sorts of new ideas that, you know, typically weren't either a) possible or b), you know, you would end up having to spend so much of your energy on just building the social graph, that you had to put a very relatively small amount of energy into whatever the big new idea was. That's changed now. And so I do think we're going to start to see from these grassroots sources, a lot of really big new ideas. And I'm really looking forward to that.
Johannes Ernst:
I think you can go down industry by industry, and you say, whatever you have, if you have in your in your product in your website, if you have a thing that you would think of as a social object, or I think there's a social object, an object that more than one person would like to interact with, whether that's a game or a product listing, or a newspaper article, or whatever it is...does it makes sense to socially enable this object to write there has to be part of the fediverse, as opposed to taking this link and copy pasting it into a Facebook feed or in to something where you have no control of whether it's ever been shown to anybody, or in the context of which is being shown. And you were in charge for a lot. So I think that the really more interesting part, this next phase of the fediverse is not so much. We have, like in enclosed social networking platforms, we have the social networking product, and everybody sort of tries to connect to it somehow. But the product goes away, the network becomes just something that's always there. And so instead, we have a social network, we are seeing, we have endpoints that become social. And if you look like you're back into the history of the of the fediverse, before it was even called the fediverse, it was called the social web. That was the term that people used, what if we made the web social? What if every website was social? And I think we coming back to this one, we've seen a ton of interesting projects around that it happens very rarely in the history of technology, that you have a platform worth trillions of dollars, as in case of social networking as a whole, that apparently could maybe actually dissipate and disappear. Because the value goes one level up. Whereas all of these applications now natively talking to each other. And I think that's the great proposition from from a business perspective, you know, and that's why I'm mostly an entrepreneur rather than a conference organizer.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, yes, exactly. You know, your point about the applications and the network, and the network is the application in some ways, right? I think that's a really, a really good point, the, you know, what will bring people to the fediverse, or the social web, it's going to be the other people that are there. And as well as the applications that you know, people want to use, which brings people and so you have this combination of new kinds of applications, as well as, you know, groups of different kinds of people, journalists, scientists, you know, singers, you know, et cetera, as these different groups start to come to the network. And then those folks are able to interact and use the with these different applications. I do think you're going to get this kind of critical mass where people will realize that like, look, this is the social web is this connection of everyone. And they're all using different applications. But you can seamlessly interact with all these different groups. Versus if you go to a walled garden, only some people using one very specific application, right, I think that's a very different way of thinking than how we're used to thinking about social media.
Johannes Ernst:
Absolutely, you know, the, the the point of a social network today of a social network platform, is to optimize, you know, the share price of the operator of this particular social network. So the objective, that's the objective, right? It means, you know, more clicks, more engagement, more enragement, more, more. I think of it manipulated content, because you have to manipulate your users and your advertisers in order to optimize your share price. That's just the way it works. It's inherent in the structure of this. And so social interactions have a lot of value, far more than whatever the value is that the particular social network operator can extract from it, and optimizes for.
And so I think what's happening here is my friend, Doc Searls, years ago, he started to talk about Linux. And one of his phrases was on the question, how do you make money with Linux? And the his answer was, you do not make money with Linux, you make money because of Linux. So you know, trying to charge for the operating system. But given that the operating system exists, what can you do now that you couldn't do before? And that's the that's the question. We need to ask ourselves in the fediverse. it's not how do you monetize the fediverse? No, we don't want to monetize that actually. Nobody wants to monetize the fediverse, we want the fediverse to be free and accessible for everybody. But now, if we have this in as free, accessible, what is not possible that wasn't possible for? And most notably, it's all the use cases that do not contribute to the revenue stream of the platform operator. And I think that's, you know, that's the business strategic question, what are those, how they apply in my industry, and then, you know, what we need to do as the people are trying to make this, this, this this future happen is, of course, there's a lot of work, which is we got to, you know, go down and say, one industry at a time, one, you know, set of use cases at a time, one community at a time, what do these people really need? Alright, and now, let's make sure we build the solutions for that.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I think it's a bit of a misnomer that sometimes people ask, well, what's the business model for the fediverse? And that's like, what's the business model for the web? There, there's going to be many different business models that I think will emerge based on the different applications and the different communities that are adopting it. Right. And that's, that's, that's kind of the beauty of this is that, you know, there's, there's going to be lots of different ways, ultimately, for business models to materialize here. When you look at the the next set of you said industry or applications or communities, what for you? What are you focused on, you know, with your entrepreneurial hat on that you're, you're excited about?
Johannes Ernst:
So the, I think news is a very obvious one, because there is a perfect storm in the news, in the overall news, information, facts sharing kind of world. And, and, you know, we perform, we had various sessions about this. For example, we had the gentleman from the BBC come by last September, and ran through, through through his thinking or their thinking, in why they're doing this and what they hope to accomplish in in, in really, it really in detail. And one of the things we're trying to do is bring more people out of this industry together to find each other and figure out what would this actually mean for us as an industry to adopt this because I think it's a little hard to see how this can be adopted one company at a time, this is the kind of thing where, where a lot of similar thinking has to has to occur. So news is one of them.
Another one is as boring as it sounds, governmental related communications. If you're a government and you try to communicate with your, with your citizens, from something as simple as you know, the big street will be closed on next Tuesday, to you know, whatever we have on plans for new files, whatever, how do you actually do this today? And I think, if you, I see no reason as a citizen, that this communication between the government and me should be mediated and moderated and down voted and upload voted and mixed up with ads by some platform overlord attempting to attempting to basically optimize their their own business as part of what my government wants to tell me. So there is a, there's possibilities to put direct communications in there.
Mike McCue:
One of the topics of discussion that I'm sure is going to come up is probably going to be the recent spam attacks that had been happening in the fediverse. Do you? Do you have any thoughts on that, as you've been talking to folks.
Johannes Ernst:
This is a great example, because the fediverse is so different from so many other places where this kind of problem has occurred before. And that is that there is no one authority. Nobody can do anything unilaterally. It's all a matter of people trying to figure out things together, right. So basically, if Facebook had a spam attack of some kind, then somebody somewhere in the product in the hierarchy or Facebook say, "okay, I heard three proposals, we do No. 2, go!" But it's not how it works in the fediverse. We have to figure this out together. And one of the things we were really started, we needed for FediForum, this community to FediForum is so people can find each other. First, who are the other interesting people who talk about this, and then we can connect with each other and start projects from it. And there's several projects that have started already out of FediForum. So one of them, for example, is we got a developmer network started, we had a session where a bunch of developers were in there, and said, you know, we'd really need to communicate better, we need to protocol problems, and we need to find each other. So we can debug things together, spam would be one of the one of the use cases for this. But but there's many other things like this.
Mike McCue:
This particular spam attack was relatively simplistic. Some people say it was, you know, some high school students and so on, you know, goofing around, But, you know, there's going to be much more sophisticated spam attacks, as the fediverse continues to grow. And that is something that is going to be critical for crossing the chasm, right, we've got to, we've got to be able to as a, you know, industry with this. And I think this is, you know, Threads, and some of the other larger businesses that have been around and dealt with these kinds of problems for a while, Flipboard certainly, there are things that, you know, these companies can bring to the mix, whether those are AI tools, you know, open source approaches for, you know, dealing with detecting spam, you know, ways to, you know, enlist, you know, perhaps some of the army of moderators that are over at Threads, you know, in Facebook, Meta, and so on, to bring those people into the mix to help, you know, leverage some of that there's just, there's a lot, there's a lot of opportunity to address this. But we've got to, we've got to talk this through, we have to figure this out.
Johannes Ernst:
Right. Get in one of the things the fediverse brings from a technical architecture perspective, and even from a business architecture perspective is this principle of modularity, you can actually focus on one thing, because the network will provide the rest of it, you don't have to do at all. And so to expand, right, or take any anything like that, will take moderation, actually, moderation might be an easier example, let's say you have a gigantic social network is one of the platforms, and you're trying to figure out what to do about moderation. And the truth is that you will not make people happy. Because whatever you do, there will be a very large number of people who's going to be very unhappy, even if you try the best you can. And they might not always do that. But even if he's right, so but now here in the fediverse, we don't have to have a single policy, every server can have their own policy, which means that the people who feel safe in one's environment, but not another, have the ability to go into a place where they are safe. And while in a single policy across the entire social network, that simply cannot, it's really not possible. And I think it's really important to think of it from an international and multicultural perspective. You know, different cultures have different norms, and why we believe that some, every one of us believes that some norms are better than others. The fact of the matter is that there are different ones. And to a large extent, we simply have to respect that. And so the moderation policies should be different. And I think the whole notion of a global social network that has one set of policies, one set of business models, one set of features is something that is going to be very quaint in the future, because it doesn't reflect the way humanity is structured, right. instead, what if anybody can come, any subject, any software, any moderation policy, any business model, and it all interoperates — it's so much more beautiful.
Mike McCue:
It's more messy, but more beautiful.
Johannes Ernst:
But, you know, it's such a big, big, big thing. I mean, we in the history of humanity, we have never had products that had billions of users. I'm not sure that a product with the same one product with one feature set is the right answer for multiple billions of users. I don't think so. Right. So now if we say we have products that have much smaller numbers of users, that's still very profitable, you know, 10s of millions, maybe, but now we have can have hundreds of products. And it is possible that you find the right product for you.
Mike McCue:
It's interesting, the way Bluesky handles moderation. I think there's a lot to learn from that, as well. And I'm sure that's going to be another topic of discussion at FediForum, you know, the Bluesky federation work and, you know, between Threads federating with ActivityPub, with Bluesky and the bridge that's being built from Bluesky to the fediverse. And then moderation, you've got kind of a perfect storm of, you know, things to navigate and talk through.
Johannes Ernst:
Yeah, there's, there's a ton of different protocols, of course, popping up. You mentioned some of them. There's some more in the crypto, more crypto related protocols. But there's innovation all over the place. And the fediverse as we know it today hasn't always been ActivityPub. There's other protocols that came before. And so some people say even better protocols. From my perspective, as a technologist, I care about what the protocols are and what they can do. But as somebody who knows the technology occasionally, ultimately, it doesn't really matter. It's part of the plumbing, you know, whether there is a version one in HTTP, or version two in HTTP matters to some people, but most people really don't care. So the question is more like, what's the network here? What can interoperate, and that's what I think of as the fediverse. The fediverse is when I can communicate with you, regardless what software we using, without the middleman in the middle. That's, that's the fediverse, right? Because ActivityPub will, you know, if it continues to be successful, it will get to version two and version three, and there will be innovation all over the place. And that doesn't, doesn't really matter as much as, as, as the overall network and having, from my perspective, having you know, Brian, right, sorry, Ryan, who wrote who wrote the bridge to, to Bluesky is a great project, because it grows the networki n that definition.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, it was one of the more controversial things that that's happened over the last few weeks, this concept of a bridge. And then how does you know, how do you? You know, do you default on or default off to, you know, opt in or opt out, you know, all of these, these kinds of discussions, I think, are really important for us to have.
One of the things that is, I think Ryan makes a very good point of in some of his blog posts, is that networks are inherently about interoperability. That is what makes good networks. And so interoperability is something that should happen. The question, of course, is how, and, you know, I think there's a whole set of discussions around, you know, how do you enable interoperability, but also enable people to preserve an approach where they have their own network, and they don't want that network to be somehow you know, intruded on, they want that network to be more private, they want that network to be more in their control, which is, of course, one of the great things about the fediverse.
The challenge, though, is that, you know, you can't necessarily grow anything that's going to be the fabric, the social fabric for the web, by doing lots and lots of tiny, little mini, you know, networks, if you don't have interoperability, then there is no common layer, right? So these things are almost, you know, juxtaposed how do we enable both those use cases, right, and that I think, is really, really, really, really important at this moment, because if we stay there, kind of in this debate between this or if we kind of gravitate to like, no, everything just needs to be by default, private, and people have to opt in to participating in these other networks. You're just never going to get this sort of dream of a global open social web. It just won't ever happen. So that's a critical moment, you know, and threading through I think Ryan has been, you know, he's been the pioneer that's been, you know, really getting a lot of abuse, I think, in some cases, unfair, but you know, I think he's also, there's been a lot of really good, legitimate, high quality debate about this. And I think this is something that, you know, I'm expecting will happen at FediForum, you know, it'd be good to have the debate happening with people live on the screen rather than just, you know, threads and conversations on, you know, so but this is this a big moment.
Johannes Ernst:
Yes, I think this is one of the reasons why, why have an actual event where people show up, even if it's only on screens, where they can see each other and interact with each other as human beings makes a big difference over just leaving some mean comment that isn't entirely thought through. In particular, in case of Ryan, I've known him for a very long time, and he's just about the nicest guy you can imagine. So, abuse thrown in his direction is just by default, simply not correct, because he's so much nicer than I ever would be, for example.
So I totally agree with what you say about this this hairball, we have to figure out here, what what, how does global interoperability on one level relate to what some people call the freedom of association and non-association. And I think that people are more actually even concerned about the non-association than the the association, right, there is plenty of subcommittees in in the fediverse. versus say, Okay, if you have this political opinion, I cannot possibly interact with you, I never want to hear from you. Or if you have ever worked for this particular company, I will not interact with you, or if you...there's so many things. And that's fine, because we want to make it possible for people to have their communities that they are comfortable with.
So the question is, what are the technical and the product kind of implications for this? And I don't think we have an answer yet, as you said, this is an unresolved problem. At this point, personally, I believe, we need to have two things. One of them is a on a technical level, the ability for anybody to relate to anybody if they want to -- the ability, not the requirement, the ability. And then then the second level, we have the ability to limit this on a user level to what the user considers to be the right set of people they want to interact with. And I think, you know, in, for example, one thing that is very fascinating to me is, it's quite clear that there is some communities in the fediverse that have difficult, impersonal, emotional, psychological backgrounds, and they feel safe in this environment. Because certain things doesn't do not happen to them, there's no danger of of this happening to them in their environment that they built up for themselves. They're very protected those environment, you know, imagine you suffer from PTSD of some kind. And, and you really go into some kind of episode when certain things show up. If you have the ability in the fediverse to say, this is not going to happen here, this is beautiful, we need to protect these people. But I don't think that we can we should do this at the cost of avoiding or preventing global connectivity. So we need to do both. There's a challenge here, I think it can't be solved. We haven’t quite solved it yet.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people began working in the fediverse with the goal of being in control and having their own choice. And that needs to be preserved. And at the same time, there needs to be the ability to have this global open social layer that will also include, you know, benefit society in incredible new ways. And so there's a there's a set of, as you said, product, and design and expectation sort of approaches that I don't think there's that many of these things to think through. But there's a few. And I think if we can talk about those things, and try to come up with a model that embraces both of these different scenarios, and people can decide to, you know, decide how they want to participate in the fediverse. And the more sort of private model versus a more public model. I think that's going to be critical. And and I do think that it's it's possible, I don't think this is like rocket science. You know, a lot of the lot of this has to do with how you set the defaults in an instance. A lot of this has to do with being clear about when you join an instance, what is the stance of that instance? Right, what you're joining this instance, that's the instance you're going to have your your account on. It is, you know, what is the expectations that instance is going to have? Is it is it inherently more open or is an inherently more closed and protected. And there's nothing wrong with either one. But I do think when we run into problems is when the expectations are misaligned, wait, I joined this instance, why are you federating with Threads? I thought this was closed, you know? Well, or I joined this instance, why are you not federating with Threads? Why are you making that decision for me? Right? That's, that's a problem. So that's the I think that's a, that expectation setting is critical.
Johannes Ernst:
That experience is absolutely critical. It also we need more fine grained controls. So there is a lot of product stuff that needs to happen as well, for example, it should be, it should be possible for for users to say, some, I restrict comments to my post, from people that I trust, for example, there, you know, things like that, it shouldn't be possible to keep the post on my instance, and not move it out. So there's a there is there's controls that, that we need around this.
And then also, I think there's larger governance questions, too. And I want to bring this up just for a minute here is we have been, we have been trained to believe that there is this thing called a social media platform or an instance and it is operated by somebody who is the total dictator, who unilaterally makes the decisions, what happens in that instance? That's the model that we've been trained on in in technology. But it of course, doesn't have to be that way. You know, it's a fundamental political question, we have different ways of organizing how to make decisions. And of course, we can put a dictator in on top of our town, but maybe that's not quite the thing that most of us would want. So we can, we can have different decision making structures. And you know, my personal primary fediverse account is in an instant called social dot coop, which is a cooperative, where I'm a member, and I'm paying them a small amount of membership fee, like everybody else, that money gets bundled. And all decisions are made democratically. So for example, on the questions of should there shouldn't be federated or should this instance federate with Threads, there was a long debate, and there was a vote. And now we have, we have a democratic process by which we decided what happens with a little condition that says if the following things happen in the future, then we're going to reconsider.
I think this is a much fundamentally a much, much better model than these these overlord models. Even if it is just individual instances, it also goes to a funding model, I'm quite confident that instance will be around for a long time, because it has an income stream, it costs me very little, like, give them like two bucks a month or some such thing, but they have a surplus in funds coming in. And there are certain copycats, or copycats, but it's really copies of the same model popping up around the world. And actually, the guy who started as Nathan Snyder is actually going to come again, and have a conversation about hosted conversation about governance models at the next FediForum, I know that because he told me.
Mike McCue:
You know, the FediForum is coming at a really good moment in time, because there is a lot to talk about right now. You know, in a, you know, collegial collaborative way that I think, you know, I've seen already in two FediForums, so far. So this is this is a really, I'm really looking forward to this set of discussions.
Johannes Ernst:
That's great. You know, you're trying to have a forum like conversation, which means that everybody's welcome. All the subjects are welcome. We are not going to exclude somebody because they're working for a surveillance capitalist or anything like that, we want to have a composition that includes everybody who's affected in one way or another. That means there's certain ground rules, including, you can absolutely be expected to disagree with people, but you have to do this respectfully. And I think that is that is the only way that the world ever makes any progress in the fediverse or otherwise. And so that's what we're trying to do.
Mike McCue:
It's no small task to gather these conversations and host them and have them happen. So I think it's great that you're putting this together. What else are you anything else you're honest that you want to tell us about what you're working on next. And, you know, things that people should be looking out for from you.
Johannes Ernst:
I think on a community on a market level, we need more structures by which the art community can organize itself and figure out things together and for the forum is one sort of pillar in this is is more of a discussion of find each other kind of thing. But then we need to also have other other structures, we need to reorganize a re reinvigorated standards process. For example, we need to deal with things such as moderation standards and so forth. We need to we need to have test suites we need to have documented documentation. We need to have lots of things like that. So we need to create more organizations like that including coming up with There should be a place where the press can pick up the phone and say, I heard about this thing called fediverse. Who do I talk to? Right? And so and then, of course, we need organizations that innovate, like you do, and and other organizations do. And we need organizations that help the people who want to innovate. And that's where I see Dazzle has a role where we, you know, help help companies that look at this and say, it's early days, but there's something here. What can we do here where we can help them figure out what the lay of the land is, what the opportunities are? We built some rather interesting technology to support interacting in the fediverse for for organizations that, that, that need that. And so we just need to build out, you know, a very thriving market. And my analogy is a little bit like the personal computer market, you know, as it was before it was locked down into a very small number of suppliers. You had the graphics card manufacturer and the RAM manufacturer and zero control, the manufacturer and the box bundle. And, you know, you had this ecosystem of all sorts of interlocking companies. And before the big overlords took over in the PC market as well. But we need to have something rather similar in the in the fediverse. If you know if back in the PC market, if we didn't have the motherboard guy and then RAM guy and you know, the guy who installs the PC at the dentist's office, if he didn't have this entire ecosystem, nothing would have ever happened. You need all of them. And we need to build something rather similar here in the fediverse. So another thing I'd like to see whether we get together is a group of entrepreneurs in the reverse, and that could be social entrepreneurs, or, or commercial entrepreneurs, but the people who have this drive to make a change in the world, just to have them connect, and compare notes, I think it would be extremely useful.
Mike McCue:
My early days as an entrepreneur, it was, it was the TED conference. TED number four, I think it was in Kobe, Japan, and I went to that was kind of my breakout moment when I got a chance to meet some of my heroes, and be able to actually, you know, talk to other people in the industry that I'd never met in person before. You know, and it was a huge moment, every entrepreneur needs that every entrepreneur needs that ability to get to a group of other people who are interested in, you know, similar collections of ideas. And, and I think that it is, it's, you know, it's the primordial ooze for creating companies, right, these conferences, these, these, these are these, you know, these connections that are formed, that to this day have that have helped me as an entrepreneur. So I'm sure that that's the case.
For me, one of my favorite things about working in the fediverse is the people who are there and getting a chance to know them, and learn from them and collaborate with them. It's awesome. So I'm glad that you've been able to pull this together and, you know, really excited to participate in March, as well as, you know, all the other subsequent gatherings that I know you're going to be hosting. So, thank you so much for talking with us.
Johannes Ernst:
Well, it was my pleasure.
Well, thanks so much for listening.
You can find your Johannes on Mastodon at @J12t@social.coop.
Big thank you to our editors Rosana 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@flipboard.social.
See you in the Fediverse!