Described as something of a Silicon Valley oracle, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick joins Flipboard CEO Mike McCue to discuss how the open social web decentralizes innovation and will lead to “a real revolution in new ideas.”
In the 1990s, we saw an acceleration from walled gardens like America Online to the open web. This marked an era of exciting innovation and meteoric growth. But, over time, we witnessed the rise of a new set of walled gardens: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Is history about to repeat itself? Will the open social web become a mainstream alternative to the walled gardens we live in today? Will people own their online relationships, or will there always be a company that owns these?
Host Mike McCue and journalist Mike Masnick dig into questions like these. Mike Masnick founded the blog Techdirt in 1998 and wrote a seminal paper called “Protocols Not Platforms,” in which he predicted the scenario unfolding before our eyes today. Mike has long informed an influential audience of lawmakers, CEOs and activists. In fact, the New York Times called him “something of a Silicon Valley oracle.”
In this interview, Mike McCue checks in with Mike Masnick to see how things have gone since he wrote the paper. The two “Mike Ms” also discuss:
🔎 You can follow Mike Masnick’s work at techdirt.com, and find him at BlueSky and Mastodon.
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon.
💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the Fediverse, sign up here.
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.
In the 1990s, we saw an acceleration from walled gardens like AOL to the open web. As we all know, this marked an era of exciting innovation and meteoric growth. But over time, we witnessed the rise of a new set of walled gardens. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok. Is history about to repeat itself. Will the Open Social Web become a mainstream alternative to the walled gardens we live in today? Will people own their online relationships? Or will there always be a company that owns these?
Welcome to that social, the first podcast about the world of decentralized social media, also known as the Fediverse. Each episode host Mike McHugh talks to a leader in this movement. Someone who's seen the Fediverse has tremendous potential, and understands that this could be the internet's next wave.
This episode features Mike's conversation with journalist Mike Masnick. Mike founded the blog tech dirt in 1998. And in 2015, he wrote a seminal paper called “protocols, not platforms,” in which he predicted the scenario unfolding before our eyes today. In fact, the New York Times called him quote, something of a Silicon Valley Oracle. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Mike McCue:
Mike Masnick, welcome to the podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I am excited to be here. It's great to have you here. I thought maybe a good way to start here is to talk about the paper you wrote in 2019, “Protocols, not platforms.” That was five years ago. Time flies.
I want to get into the paper a little bit. But, you know, I'm also curious, you know, how does it feel to be actually using some of these products that you theorized about five years ago, actually, as they as they start to happen?
Mike Masnick:
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's sort of fascinating, you know, the hack? I have lots of thoughts. Yes, is the is the short version of it. But, you know, it's been really interesting to see both the discussion that came out of that paper, and sort of the way that people have been thinking about it, and the various ways that that people have, you know, tried to make it a reality, and then actually being able to play with it, because one of the things that struck me is really interesting, after the paper came out, and especially after it started getting a lot more attention was how many people reached out to me and said, either like we're building this, or even more common was we've already built that. Which was rarely true. And so I would see these products that, you know, had some elements of decentralization, but didn't really have the full picture, and certainly didn't have users, often any, any users and that. So, you know, that was never enough. And part of the reason why I wrote the paper, and even the way I framed the paper, as it as it is framed, was to try to convince certain people of ways to build that, that would bring users in. And so but, you know, a lot of that was was trying to convince the platforms that already had users to kind of embrace that view that it would solve a series of issues that they were currently facing. And then, you know, they could bring the users was was kind of the plan. And as a, you know, where I was sort of successful on that front, was getting Twitter's attention, and getting Twitter to to fund and create and start Bluesky. But the expectation had always been that Bluesky would build the protocol, and then Twitter would adopt it and bring with it however many hundreds of millions of users they had. That turned out to be slightly different.
Mike McCue:
Exactly.
Mike Masnick:
Half that actually happened. But, you know, I think it's, I think it's kind of exciting. I think we're in this really exciting moment right now, where we're seeing all sorts of experimentation happen and not all of it is exactly as I laid out in the paper. I wasn't, you know, going to you know, have a perfectly you know, perfect crystal ball of how this might play out. But we're seeing the experimentation and and sort of just the the creativity that I find really, really exciting. So I've been like, you know, as you know, and as we've spoken about before, like, I'm really excited by everything that's happening with Mastodon and with Bluesky, and even with Nostr which which has some oddities as well, right, well, but but, you know, we went through this fairly long period of time where it felt like, you know, that kind of innovation was in the past, that creativity and experimentation around social media, in particular, was done, was settled, you know, there were all these stories about, you know, there were, there were four big companies, and that was all there was ever going to be. And unless we had, you know, antitrust, come in and break them up, you know, this was the end of history as it came to social media. And we're seeing something very, very different happening right now. And I think it's really, really exciting, and very dynamic, which, which is fun to watch.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, it certainly is, what was the first product that you saw that started to truly embrace some of the ideas you talked about in your paper?
Mike Masnick:
That's difficult to say. I mean, you know, because like Mastodon, for example, predated the paper, right. And there are definitely many elements of of the Fediverse and ActivityPub, that, you know, that helped inspire parts of the paper as well.
Though, I always thought there were some limitations to that model, and sort of the the federated set up of, of, you know, of ActivityPub, where, effectively, you know, it has, it has some advantages over the giant silos, that that, you know, that have created some, some problems and some difficulties. But it, it just sort of recreated those on a smaller scale.
And they're, in some cases, that's okay, you know, if if your concern is just about the scale. And, and then when you go to a smaller federated model, where, you know, if your particular silo is acting badly, you can, with some effort shift to somebody else's silo, or, or create your own silo, if you want, you know, that that creates some some really interesting incentives that I think are better. So, you know, I'd always sort of paid attention to that. But I felt like it didn't go far enough in terms of really sort of decentralizing really pushing power to the ends, and really enabling more dynamic innovation and creativity.
And then, you know, so that's where I think both Bluesky and Nostr have been really, really interesting. You know, I think both of them have challenges and different things that they'll have to overcome. But they're really taking on this concept much further and saying, you know, you know, and both of them certainly spend a lot of time looking at ActivityPub and Mastodon. And I know that Jay Graber at Bluesky, you know, really spent a lot of time thinking about like, Could we just build this off of ActivityPub, and decided there were some very real limitations. And in many ways, Bluesky was an attempt to, to, you know, rewrite things to get around the limitations that have held back Mastodon and ActivityPub. And so, you know, which ones do I think really sort of meet the, you know, the sort of criteria that I set out in the paper, I think Bluesky remains the closest, which again, not a surprise, it was somewhat inspired by that paper. But, you know, I still think Nostr is really interesting, as well as a very different approach and even a much more decentralized approach. I think Bluesky, you know, even as I had skepticism about the federated model, Bluesky still is taking a somewhat federated model. It's a little bit different than the the ActivityPub style version of that but it's you know, doing so in a way where the the federated aspect of it, hopefully will fade into the background we don't know for sure yet. Bluesky is still very early and they haven't actually done the Federation part yet.
Mike McCue:
You're on you've been on all of these products, since they're the early days Mastodon, Bluesky. I've seen her on Threads as well. Nostr. So which where do you spend most of your time? What's the what's the product where you you find you kind of naturally gravitate gravitating to most of the time?
Mike Masnick:
Right now it's Bluesky. You know, I still enjoy the others and I still check in on the others. But but Bluesky just sort of meshes with my brain, much more than the others. I enjoyed Mastodon. But you know, I definitely felt some of the limitations of Mastodon around you know, again, sort of some of the limits of the federated model, the lack of search, the lack of, quote, posting, which are our sort of widespread discussions and things that I think the developers have mastered on an ActivityPub was sort of recognized have really held back some of the some of their potential and they're attempting to shift in part because of that, but just overall, like just mentally in terms of usefulness in terms of enjoyment, Bluesky has sort of, you know, scratched the itch even more than an Mastodon did, though, I still like Mastodon.
And then Nostr again, it's sort of, you know, it's sort of fascinating to watch, but I think they're, they're running into some real challenges, and they don't really have a very well thought out approach on how to deal with those challenges. And so we'll see.
I mean, the other thing that will be interesting, also, is Threads, assuming that they follow through on their promise to, you know, to interoperate with ActivityPub, and Mastodon, that'll be really interesting. I have no idea what that would actually look like in reality. But that could be that could be a really big deal. So we'll see.
Mike McCue:
How how likely do you think it is that they will in fact, federate with ActivityPub?
Mike Masnick:
I think they will. There are definitely a lot of people who are saying, No, it's never gonna happen. The challenges are too big. The, you know, the regulatory issues, you know, are a huge challenge for them. But everyone I've spoken to at Meta seems really, really serious about it. They're not, they're not doing the things that you would do if if you were sort of trying to shy away from that promise. And I've had a few discussions. I mean, there have been a lot of public statements. I've had a few discussions with people internally at Meta and they they seem really serious about it, they're not they're not, you know, they're not just saying this stuff, they're really looking at what is it going to attack Intel, and they're, they're thinking carefully about it.
You know, there are some fears that people have that once that happens, it won't be good. And that Meta will effectively take over. And you have like the the embrace, extend, extinguish model that people talk about, I'm less scared of that. Because of the sort of nature of of the way ActivityPub works and the federated system.
You know, some people are definitely going to block Threads, if it does interoperate. And that's fine if they want to do that. But it'll be really interesting. I mean, if they can provide a really good, powerful, easy to use front end, that would be interesting. And could open up the the Fediverse, to a much wider audience than then has it now. Again, that's, you know, if people stick around, obviously, there are lots of reports of how Threads, you know, the fastest, the fastest 100 million ever, and then now it's like only 10 million people are left using it. But still, that's that's, that's 10 million people.
Mike McCue:
That's 10 million people. Yeah.
Mike Masnick:
And, you know, Mastodon today probably has less than 10 million regular users currently. So, right, you know, it would it would be a boost to that ecosystem, at least. Mm hmm.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, you know, it's interesting to see the Threads. You you put this in the post that you wrote on tech dirt when Threads launch the actual screen in the onboarding talks about the Fediverse and Mastodon. And they're definitely serious about it. You can see both from the technical work that's happening, that they're doing behind the scenes, how they've been talking about it with particularly creators, who, you know, obviously you need to have on on any new product to get, you know, people to want to come there.
It does seem as though creators, not not not all creators, but you know, there's certainly a subset of creators who now understand that owning your own audience, being able to actually have followers that no one can take away from you. No one can get between you and them, is an incredibly important thing.
And so, when you talk, you're both a creator and your user of these these products, do you feel like that is that message is coming through? How much how much of the sort of current adoption do you think is really geared toward Hey, creators really understand this, people really understand the power of this, versus Hey, I just want an alternative to Twitter.
Mike Masnick:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's mostly the latter, right. I mean, I don't think I don't think the average everyday user of social media or these kinds of apps cares that much. Right. And I don't think they should, honestly. Right. I mean, that's not, that's not the reason that they should be using this. Now. I think it's important for some of us to care about it, and some of us to talk about it.
But, you know, I had this discussion a few months ago, and — I don't know when this podcast is going out. And it might not matter, because I don't know when, when this article is coming out — but Danny O’Brien, I don't know if you know Danny.
Mike McCue:
I don't.
Mike Masnick:
So he was a, I mean, he's been at a few different places. But he was at EFF for a while. And he's now at the Filecoin Foundation. And he is very, very thoughtful on this stuff. And he wrote this great article, which is part of this sort of like magazine on decentralization that I helped to edit. Which again, I don't know when it's coming out, but soon…
Mike McCue:
Oh, I can’t wait.
Mike Masnick:
And he has a really great article in it that that, you know, I, I read, and I helped edit and worked on, and I want the world to see it, because it's a really thoughtful discussion of this particular question. In terms of where it talks about sort of terminal values, what what are the values that actually matter? And whether or not decentralization itself is a terminal value? Is that a value that matters? And I think a lot of people who who talk about decentralization are really focused on it, think of it that way, the decentralization itself is what matters.
And then they get upset when everybody else, it's just like, I don't care. I just want something that works. And so Danny makes the argument that I think I agree with, I think he convinced me of with his piece, that no decentralization is not the terminal value. But sort of, I forget the way he phrased it, and it's been a few months since actually read the final version of that article, but effectively, Mike, control over our own thoughts and ideas is the terminal value. And we lose that in centralized systems, that all of our thoughts and ideas are then controlled, and, and, you know, by somebody else, and that creates a really weird set of incentives, and some really problematic scenarios and situations. And therefore, the decentralization gets you to this other place where you have more control over your own thoughts and your own writings and your ideas. And that's powerful. But, again, is like not something that most people are going to be thinking about. You know, people just want something that works. But I think in the long run, if they want something to work well, having it be on a decentralized system, it solves a bunch of the concerns and problems that they have. Everyone, you know, everyone who was on twitter, and like, it's still complained about all different things that Twitter was doing. And it didn't have certain features that they wanted, and it wasn't handling this or that the way they wanted it to that you know, they want people wanted it to. And that still is happening on some of the decentralized platforms as well. But as they really decentralize, you get to have, you know, sort of a sorting function where people can make changes. If you don't like it, you don't have to wait for Twitter. And it's not just one provider who has to do it. You can find a provider who matches with your view of the world in terms of how these platforms should work, or you can build your own. Now, a lot of people aren't going to want to do that, because that's too much. But the fact that you have all of these different providers that you can go to, in theory, again, as we as we get there, and they can have different different tools and features and different setups and different rules, you know, allows people to sort of opt in to the world that they want. And I think that that becomes really important, with the recognition that I had an underlying, you know, base level, it all has to work, right. You know, the reason we all went to the centralized platforms was because they made it easy, right? You could argue that all of the you know, somebody had this chart once somewhere that was was great, this sort of graphic illustration of like, all of the original, like internet protocols that people use to rely on to communicate, whether it was, you know, Usenet, or IRC or whatever, and how they were replicated by the sort of big centralized companies into, you know, these these proprietary services. And but the reason that happened was because, you know, the old systems were often complicated, you know, especially at the pre web systems, I mean, you were, you had to figure out how to configure stuff, you know, may have been fun for you and me, but the average person had no interest in doing that. And so, the ease of use of the web front end, you know, drew a lot of people into these, and this is kind of an attempt to go back to that, to the world where we have all these different systems. But we still get the ease of use. So, you know, we need that, that, you know, usability and good UI and simple setup, that that everybody has become accustomed to. But if we can combine that with the, you know, the having the power pushed to the edges of the net, excuse me, yeah. Having the power pushed to the edges of the network and being able to, you know, to find the right levels for yourself, I think that that creates a much more powerful overall system.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. Yeah, you know, I think you're making an excellent point there. Decentralization isn't a feature in and of itself. And, you know, I think it's tough when, you know, if you build a product that's just a clone of a closed product, and it's decentralized, so you should care about this. I think that's a really hard thing to do. Users care about great content and great communities, great experiences, right? Decentralization is an enabler for more of those kinds of communities to happen, and more ideas for more content and more, more ways to discover that content to happen than then we currently have in these closed systems.
It reminds me a lot of the days of AOL. Remember the original AOL screen that, you know, you go to and had all the little boxes, travel, you know, sports, right. And that, you know, what was centralized was the whole, all the innovation was locked in by AOL. So they could only innovate on travel, as much as they have the team to do that, right. And what the web did, when it web decentralized AOL, is now you have, you know, people making they built websites that did things that AOL never even imagined doing, you know, Airbnb, would never have happened in the world of AOL. Right. And that the idea of an open platform or open standards and open protocols leading to then distributed innovation is such a powerful thing.
Mike Masnick:
Yeah. And I think it's a really important one. And part of is that like, nobody has any idea what what it will enable. And that's kind of the important thing. I mean, I, I think your point is dead on about, like just recreating what we already had. That's not that compelling, right. But recreating it in a way that allows for, you know, just a whole bunch of experiments on what will actually work and what will make sense for people, that's where the excitement comes in. Because, you know, as you said, you know, when the web came about, nobody predicted all of the different things that were going to happen. Nobody said, this is, you know, the web is going to be good for X, Y, and Z. It was because anyone could set up a webpage and build what they wanted. And, and then you just get experimentation, and people learn from each other and see what other people are doing. And then they experiment, and they have an idea. And a bunch of those ideas failed, and a bunch of them are terrible. And some of them were big for a little while and then disappear. And then but other things fit. And you have that experimentation to figure out what actually works. And that's how, how the innovation comes about. And when we had, you know, just a static system that came out of that, you know, that world where people are experimenting, but when you couldn't build, you know, you couldn't build on top of Twitter. You know, to some extent, you could for a little while, and there was some back and forth. A whole other story, which you're deeply familiar with, but the, you know, that's where the interesting stuff comes from. So I see Bluesky especially. But it's true of the other platforms as well as as the sort of, you know, foundational models that allow for experimentation, where we're gonna see things that nobody expected that are really interesting that are not just replicating, Twitter what Twitter's doing, and it'll be especially interesting in some ways to see that happen while you have like Elon Musk sort of trying to do, right, whatever it is that he's trying to do, he's got these visions of what he can build on top of Twitter. But it's his vision and his vision alone.
Maybe he's right? I have some doubts, and questions about that. But, you know, the Bluesky model is not based on the vision of Elon, and it's not based on the vision of of Jay Graber, or Jack Dorsey or anyone who was involved in in the creation of it, it is building it out as a as a foundational platform, then anyone, if you have the sort of, if you think you have the Elon Musk style vision for what you could do with Bluesky, you can effectively build that, and then see if people come — and not have to spend $44 billion in the process.
And that's where I think it's gonna get really exciting is the idea that, you know, once people start to recognize that they can use this as a as a foundational tool that they can then build other things on. And then we'll see we'll see what works and what comes out of it. And that's exciting.
Mike McCue:
It is very exciting. Yeah, the idea that social is a component of any online experience, any content experience, in a world where creators now need to be more social than ever, they need to establish relationships with their audience, and not have those relationships be, you know, interfered with, you know, building a followership on Twitter, only to have that followership go to waste. Because, you know, Elon decided to change the For You algorithm. These are, these are the kinds of things that I think, you know, increasingly people who are creating content where we certainly have a democratization of content creation now. But what we don't yet have is the democratization of that audience relationship with those content creators.
Mike Masnick:
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, again, there are challenges with all of that, right. I mean, I, some of this all sounds great. And in, you know, in theory, and then the reality is always very difficult. But, you know, but there is a lot of excitement. And I kind of want to see, you know, I really want to see what people do with it. And we're already seeing again, like, you know, I'm spending a lot of time on Bluesky these days. So I'm, a lot of my, my thoughts are framed in relationship to Bluesky, but I think this does apply to, to ActivityPub, and also to Nostr. And possibly to some others out there, though, I haven't seen enough adoption of the other ones to be that interesting as of yet.
But, you know, Bluesky like so one of the features that Bluesky has created that I think is really interesting. Is the — I forget suddenly forgetting exactly what it's called — But but the the ability to build your own algorithm, custom custom feeds. Yeah, that's what that's what it's.
Mike McCue:
It's awesome.
Mike Masnick:
It's awesome. And like, you know, one of the feeds I follow is, is the tech feed from Flipboard. Yeah, it's like, right. It's, it's a really useful tool where, and it feels like so obvious that it's almost incredible that nobody else has done this, this idea that like you, rather than relying on the one feed, the one For You feed, that the company gives you, right, or maybe having two options, like the custom feed or chronological order, you know, allow anyone to build feeds and share them with other people. And then you can experiment and see which feed makes the most sense. And it's like, that's such a such a simple idea that it's kind of incredible. Nobody else had done it before.
And, and is a really, really useful handy tool with within Bluesky and has made Bluesky like just amazingly useful. And this was, again, sort of going back to the ActivityPub, you know, there were people who were trying to kind of do that with Mastodon and ActivityPub, and there are a few out there, but a bunch of them actually got sort of shut down early on where people got really mad about them. And so there was this sort of attitude towards that kind of, you know, useful innovation that some people really just didn't want within the the Fediverse that I think was unfortunate. And I hope that we're getting a little bit past that.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I do, too. I think that that, um, the ability to have a whole marketplace of algorithms, I think is how Jay, you know, phrased it in she, you know, worked on that concept. I think it's an incredibly powerful model because communities form around content and content feeds. You know, feeds are like the new website. And when communities of people can form around a feed that's been carefully curated either manually or algorithmically or some combination of both, it's extremely powerful. And now coming back to, you know, you were talking about the ownership of your ideas and your thinking and your conversations and your relationships with your audience members, you know, being able to have a way to gather people around a feed, independent of whatever that platform has decided should be the For You feed, so there's one feed fits everybody in one algorithm that is a black box. I think that is, it is it's an incredibly powerful idea. And I do I do think that ActivityPub, you know, can the same thing could happen on activity from a technical point of view.
Mike Masnick:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think it should, and I think that they'll get there eventually. I think they're, they're sort of recognizing it. And they've been, you know, I think they've been adapting. And some people are upset with that. But that's, that's part of the process. And again, like, the nice thing about Mastodon and ActivityPub is that if you don't like the way certain things are going, you can, you can write your own way. Right, that's part of the, you know, part of the advantage of these kinds of systems.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I do think that the community dynamics that have manifested on Bluesky versus Mastodon, you know, these communities change, they're not static, you know, things will change and grow over time. But it is interesting to see that these, these products are very much as strong or as weak as their community is.
Mike Masnick:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it is interesting. And that, I think that's a challenge for everyone as well, I think that, you know, as a, you know, if you're developing one of these systems, you can become somewhat of a hostage to your community as well. And kind of, you know, their desires may differ from, from your desires, or the needs of, of running an organization, whether it's a nonprofit, or for profit organization.
And so, there are some really interesting challenges there. And I'm not sure that we've don't fully realize how that's how those things are going to play out over time.
Mike McCue:
Yeah.
Mike Masnick:
But, you know, the community's role in it is important. But again, you know, I think that the setup of, especially, you know, both Mastodon and Bluesky is such that if you really, if the community really diverges, from the views of the developers, that that's okay, that's sort of part of the process. You know, if you have a better way of doing it, go ahead and test it out and see what happens. And that's, that's kind of, you know, that's different than than Twitter, you know, yeah, we're very didn't have that option.
Mike McCue:
yeah, it's, it's so interesting, because decentralized social media means decentralized communities, right. So you can, there's nothing, the whole design of the service, or the protocol is so that you could have a community wall itself off from the rest of the world and just, you know, de-federate with everybody. And that's actually part of what we're designing into the whole system. As a feature, not a bug. And, and I think, you know, it's, it's, as you get to the point where more people come into using services that are built on ActivityPub, there's just going to be no one single community, lots of different communities, with people with different values and, you know, different approaches. And that's the point.
Mike Masnick:
Yeah, yeah. And, that's, that's kind of what's exciting about it. And, you know, we've already seen some of that already. You know, some are good, some are bad. You know, there have been reports on you know, they're sort of walled off activity, pub communities that are problematic in certain ways. But they're walled off from the rest of the, from the rest of the Fediverse. And that, I think, is is a good sign and shows that, you know, the Fediverse itself kind of deals with with these kinds of things in its own way. And we don't have to be reliant on you know, one central entity deciding, well, this community is okay in this community is not okay. It's, you know, it becomes a much more democratic process. And, you know, again, sort of gives gives a lot more power to to individuals and groups to figure out how, what they're comfortable with and what makes sense. It's a different way of doing things than we've seen over the last, you know, last couple of decades.
Mike McCue:
So what do you see on the horizon? Are there things that you've been starting to? You know, as you've been talking to folks, I, you know, you're talking to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and others, you know about where this is all going. Have you started to see glimmers of new ideas, big new things that are possible, because of this decentralized approach?
Mike Masnick:
It's still really, really early. And so people are talking about things. And like, to me, at least, the, the, the crystal ball for whatever it's worth, is pretty foggy. You know, there's a lot of experimentation going on. I thought it was kind of interesting, when, you know, when, when Reddit recently had all the right, these issues and problems were, you know, changes in the rules around their API and a bunch of other sort of, you know, central control issues on Reddit was always an interesting platform, because it had this sort of like, hybrid, centralized decentralized model, there's a decentralized world within a centralized system. And almost immediately, you know, there was like, a big jump up in, you know, some people had already built some sort of like Reddit-like clones on ActivityPub, with Lemmy, and Kbin. And those were really interesting to see, you know, almost overnight, somebody built a Reddit clone in Nostr.
And there was discussions about doing it on AT protocol, which is what Bluesky is based on, the I'm not quite sure where that went, or whatever. But to me that the interesting thing, there was not so much, you know, okay, we've built Reddit clones, but the way sort of, you have that opportunity, like, there's a problem on the centralized internet world. And we can deal with that. And we can build something very, very quickly on the systems, which were, you know, originally built to be sort of, you know, Twitter-like, for lack of a better description. But the protocol itself is so you know, adaptable, that we can build something else on top of it, and build up all these better services. And so I think, you know, to go back to a point that you made much earlier, that I think, is really important, you know, I think that sort of the big kind of revolutions in technology are always, you know, everything when you when you have this sort of shift from from one, I don't even know, one setup to another, the first thing that everybody does is recreate the other thing, right. I mean, the sort of classic example of this is, you know, when, you know, people went from radio shows to television, they were basically like the same sort of stilted, you know, conversational thing that was on radio. And then eventually, like, people began to realize, like, oh, wait, you know, the visual medium of television allows us to do different things than what we were doing before.
And so the big breakthrough, and sort of like, the enlightenment moment is always when people realize the thing that they can do on the new system that they couldn't do before. Yeah. But to get there, it feels like you have to rebuild the stuff that you did before. It's just, that's the way it is like, Okay, let's take what we know, recreate it in this world. And then someone is going to come along and say, Oh, now that we're decentralized, or whatever, we can do this thing. That wasn't possible in the centralized world. And, and suddenly, that'll be like, everybody be like, Oh, wait, that was obvious. We all should have done that. And and then then people sort of flood in, and the new system sort of takes on a life of its own. And so but we're not at that point, yet. We haven't seen that thing. And it's, it's great to speculate and think like, oh, what could that be? But at least in my experience, like, there's almost no one sees what that is before it actually happens. And oftentimes, it almost happens by accident, or just by, you know, a sort of weird, incremental process and nobody foresees it being the thing that catches on and goes crazy. And so so I don't know, I don't…I wish I did. Like it would be fun if I had that that very clear picture of what is the thing that that a decentralized social media, or a decentralized social protoco,l is going to enable that just is impossible today. You know, but I'm not quite sure what that's going to be.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I agree with you. We're not at that point yet. But it does feel like we're going to get to that point. There are a lot of developers working on both at and ActivityPub, and on Nostr. And, you know, with Threads happening, with it being the fastest growing app ever, you know, you've got all this innovation happening on AI. AIi needs data and AI and this Fediverse world feel like it could be an incredible kind of combination and sort of, primordial soup of, of big new ideas, right? So yeah, it does feel like this is an amazing time right now, it reminds me of the early days of the web, when people weren't sure what the web was really going to be in whether it was really going to be a big deal or not, and how are you going to monetize? And how's this whole thing gonna work? And what about privacy? What about security? All these kinds of questions we had then Right, yep. You know, it's very much like that time.
Mike Masnick:
I think so. And I think I think the other elements that's in there, that reminds me of that time that I think is important, is the fact that it becomes this kind of enabling thing where almost anyone can go and do something with it. Right? I think, you know, some of the other areas where people have talked about, like, were reached, or had that same sort of feeling, where, you know, it still felt like, there were still gatekeepers involved. And there were still people blocking you. And so, you know, like, mobile apps, you know, obviously, another area that you're very familiar with, and like, was like, was his own kind of revolution, but I don't think quite as big as the web itself as a revolution. And in part, because you did still have kind of gatekeepers there. You know, there were some ways around them, and it's dependent on things, but generally speaking, you still had to, you know, get past Apple and Google, if you were, you know, if you wanted to take part in that world, and, you know, and that, that creates some some limitations. And so I think, you know, the, the thing that's exciting me right now, is that we're reaching this stage where, I mean, the AI space will be really interesting to see how it overlaps with this, because obviously, there's a lot going on there. And some of that is enabling people to do amazing things. But a lot of that is also still reliant on, you know, companies who have purchased massive amounts of computing power. That's not available to everybody. But you know, it is it is becoming more widely available. So that'll be interesting.
But but, you know, on the the social media side and the decentralized side, the fact that, you know, we're really reaching that point where almost anyone can build something without having to go through any kind of gatekeeper. I think that's, that's where, hopefully, and you know, if history is any indicator, that's where the really interesting things are gonna happen. And maybe they'll they'll pull I'm sure, you know, they'll pull in things from the AI world and elsewhere, and other innovations that are happening today. But yeah, I mean, I think I think that's, that's an ingredient in that primordial soup that I think is really important as well.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. Yeah. The the, the whole adoption curve for these new services is also significantly easier. You know, because you don't, you know, you can have a service where you bring your followers to that service, you don't have to create a whole new followership right. So so as developers come up with totally new ideas, you know, they're looking at the Bluesky firehose, and mixing and matching it and presenting it in all these really new cool ways. Hey, it just works. I can still like, you know, see this content, I can comment on it, people can follow me, you know. So the it is, I do think that, that primordial soup is quite primed for some big new ideas.
Mike Masnick:
And I think also, like, you know, one of the interesting things too, which I think everybody forgets, for the most part, I forget, I have to sort of remind myself at times was like, you know, this aspect of social is relatively new, right? I mean, there have been there were like proto social networks going back to the 90s that you and I probably both played around with. And then, you know, as things came along, even like Facebook wasn't quite sure what social was, Twitter wasn't quite sure what social, like it became this thing almost by accident. And, you know, relatively recently, you know, it's a little more than a decade, maybe you could argue 15 years that we lived in this world where social is just sort of like how you communicate with things. Communicate with other people and groups and stuff. But we haven't really even had time to process like, what social means in a variety of different contexts. And that's part of what this can enable with the idea that you can just enable any other service to include social stuff. And, you know, people have tried to do that. And we have a lot of things where you have like mobile apps where you like, upload your contact book, which has some privacy concerns and other issues with it, and you're still dealing with some gatekeepers and some other issues. And maybe that doesn't make sense. But I think there could be something really interesting in, you know, in your social graph being portable, and, you know, adaptable to different services that you're using, where you could begin to see some really interesting things develop out of that. But, you know, we're, we're, we're still wrapping our heads around, what what does it mean to have, like, a social graph for anything? You know, right, it took us, it took Mark Zuckerberg a long time to realize that, like, the importance of the social graph was allowing people, you know, friends to communicate with each other, right? I mean, like, the newsfeed was, was not there, originally. And when it came about, people were mad at Facebook for the newsfeed where it's like, then like, the newsfeed became everything.
And even like, you know, Twitter's original, you know, vision of what, you know, you know, like Twitter, some people talked about it, it was like, it was the the creating the turning, turning AOL instant messengers away message into a service. Right, right. Which it was, it was just sort of this, like, status update, as opposed to a communication, right? It wasn't about the conversation. It was about, here's what I'm doing.
And so like, even the conversational aspect of it was like an accidental discovery that that came about later. And so we're still like, we're in such an early stage of all of this, that like, but you know, it's just the the natural thing that everybody looks at today and assumes that that's, that's the end of history, right? That's, that's where, right? That's, this is the final form.
Mike McCue:
You're so right, you're so right. It's so primitive. Now, when you really think about it, right? Like, I can email you, I can text message you, but then there's like a zillion different ways to do that. And you have to be on these different platforms, you know, and then there's the social media model where I can follow you. But like, all of these things are so primitive. You know, you think about the web and how rich the web is, and how much it's evolved, you know, you can code integrated into documents that are linking to each other and letting you book airline tickets. And, you know, Airbnbs, and but like, connecting people is still incredibly primitive. And the level of innovation that's happened is so nominal.
Mike Masnick:
It's yeah, you know, it's, it's not that I mean, like, again, like, people don't remember this. And I'm like, throughout this entire conversation, I feel like the old guy saying, Remember, but like, you know, there was, I don't know, if you do you remember my Blog Log? Do you remember what that was? No, I don't actually. So it was this company, which got like, in the in the blog space, got a ton of attention. And it was the sort of, you know, early version of being able to say that you were like, following a blog. So, you know, you didn't have accounts on different blogs, you would create an account with My Blog Log, which was what it was called, it was terrible name. And, and then you could see like other people who follow the same blogs, and you could, and then I can add some other I mean, it had some analytics features, which was how they convinced different blogs to sign up and implement it. And then users could sign up for that. And then they could also see what other sites they would like, and you could follow people. So it was like, the very early days, and this was sort of mid 2000s. And they got bought by someone I can't remember, I want to say it was like Yahoo, because Yahoo bought everyone in that time period. But it was like, you know, you could see how, like a my Blog Log type setup and blogs was sort of like an early Facebook kind of thing, where it added this element of like blogs were like publishing and content, and then you have this My Blog Log, which allowed the sort of following feature, which didn't exist, right. And feeds, I think there was even like, you could log in, and you sort of have like, a kind of RSS type feed in there as well.
But again, like that was, you know, as maybe 16 years ago, it was not definitely not two decades ago, we were still just figuring this out. And then sort of Facebook came in and sort of, you know, took over that space. But you know, it's it's really early, there's a lot more that can be done and a lot more creativity. And so, you know, and in some ways, you know, I think some of those creative things were stifled by the fact that like everything then had to go through Facebook or Twitter or whoever. And now we're at this point where like, we can get back to that stage where it's just let different people, you know, iterate and come up with different ideas and experiment, and some of them will be cool. And some of them won't be. And I think we're just going to see a real revolution in new ideas coming out of it. And that's, that's exciting.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, you know, it's one thing to discover a piece of content about Section 230. It's another thing entirely, to have that piece of content be something that I discovered because you recommended it. Yeah. And that's such a big deal. I just chance I probably would never have seen that story. You recommended that story. As as an interesting story that you think is like, something worth reading. There's a ton of stuff about Section 230 that’s not worth reading at all. But yeah, but that that combination of your endorsement of a piece of content enables discovery, it enables people to sort through all the noise is such a critical component of the web itself. Right? Yeah. And there's especially now with with as there's more and more content that will be just written by AI engines, it's just not going to be very interesting or deep or useful. You need You need people that you trust, who know what they're talking about, to help people discover what the good content is, and who the good creators are.
Mike Masnick:
Yeah, and I think I think that's, it's kind of exciting, we're, we're sort of, we're at this point where, you know, you know, we have all these different pieces that that I think, lead to something better in terms of, you know, this mix of, of people, content, and algorithms as well, were like, you know, a lot of people sort of focus on like, one element of that. And the reality is that you need this sort of like, mix, and you need these things working together. And, you know, I keep talking about in the AI space, I keep having these discussions with people where, where, like, people are afraid of like AI, destroying jobs, or like doing this or whatever. And it's like, yeah, it's not that good, right. But also, like it is, it is impressive in its own way, and what it can do, but there have been a few studies now that have come out that I think, each like, every, every few weeks, there's like another study on this kind of thing that basically says like, AI by itself, cool, impressive, whatever. But like ai plus human is, you know, kind of magic, right? Like, it's something much, much better bionic humans. Yeah. To some extent, though, that raises much rather, it's just too, but like, you know, you begin to think like, if we're building a web that recognize or an intranet or whatever, whatever this is, you know, that recognizes that these things work together, that it's not just people by themselves. It's, it's, it's not just the content by itself. It's not just the AI. It's all of these things kind of working together. And, and if they can enable and help each other and build on each other, then you start to open up all of these different possibilities that weren't really there before. And so I think that's pretty exciting.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, yeah, that's very well said, Well, before we go, I want to just get a sense from you on the people that you rely on most for that you follow on social media and Bluesky or Mastodon, who were some of the folks you recommend that people should follow?
Mike Masnick:
That's a good question. There's lots of people and a lot of different disciplines. I think a lot of where, you know, when I'm sort of coming to different conclusions or realizing things, it's often because I'm following people who come from things from a variety of different disciplines and a variety of different perspectives. And then it's sort of like making connections between the different views. So, you know, I follow a lot of people on the legal side and the policy side that are covering all different legal and policy issues. And so it's like, there's a long list.
Mike McCue:
It’s a long list. Have you made a list? Like have you made a list of these that you could share with with folks?
Mike Masnick:
I don't know that I have, really. I should at some point. You know, but but there's there you know, some, some really good folks on that. And then the computer security side of things. I spend a lot of time talking to people and following people who are focused on computer security issues which then touches on encryption and limits to certain technologies that I think are really important.
I spend a lot of time following and talking to people who do stuff in the trust and safety space, which, you know, we didn't get into this kind of like trust and safety questions related to decentralized systems, which is a huge and really huge, important question. And that touches on legal and touches on technology and sort of like the sort of monetization and all of these things. So those people are really important. You know, there are a bunch of academic researchers that I'm paying attention to, because, you know, they're testing stuff or getting access to really interesting data. Obviously, journalists and media who are covering all of these things who find out stories before anyone else does.
You know, all of these people, and then just, you know, everybody else. I don't, I feel like, you know, I wish I had like the here's the magic recipe. Yeah. You know, here are the 20 people to follow and see everything. Yeah, and I'm not sure I really have that right now. Yeah. Well, you're obviously social media is a major component of how you're staying connected to what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, that is a whole other, you know, thing in and of itself, right, the ability to you've spent time curating a list of people that would be really interesting to follow about, you know, different kinds of things. It'd be awesome to be able to have other people benefit from the curation that you've done there, right?
Mike McCue:
Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. Well, Mike, it has been just fantastic having you on this podcast, and great to talk to you. And I know I speak for a lot of people, a lot of founders, product builders, in this industry, that you are, without question, one of the most pragmatic and thoughtful people who've really helped all of us navigate these huge changes that have been happening over the last 20 years or so as the internet has has been growing and changing and evolving. So thank you again, Mike. And looking forward to seeing how all this plays out.
Mike Masnick:
Yeah, thank you. That's, those are very kind words. And again, I mean, a lot of that is built on, on being able to talk to lots of really, really smart people and put some things together. And so I certainly, you know, appreciate all the all the hard work of lots of other people and do not mean to take credit for for anyone else in doing that. But I always enjoy talking about this. So I was very happy to come here and talk on the podcast with you about it. Great. Well, thank you. Thanks.
Well, thanks so much for listening. You could follow Mike Masnick work at Tech dirt.com and find him on places like Bluesky and mastodon. You can find links to Mike's paper and other things discussed in this episode in the show's notes. Big thanks 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 as well as other places on the open social web.
Until next time, be well.