Molly White is a leading cryptocurrency critic, but she’s anything but cynical. The force behind the Citation Needed newsletter and Web3IsGoingGreat shares her thoughts on how the social web is transforming our lives, why everyone should be a blogger, and how the concept of digital ownership is changing before our eyes.
Molly White is a leading cryptocurrency critic, but get to know her and you’ll see she’s anything but cynical. In fact, this researcher, writer and software engineer cares so deeply about free and open access to high-quality information that she’s been a Wikipedia editor since she was a teenager.
Now Molly is the force behind the Citation Needed newsletter and the Web3IsGoingGreat site, and frequently speaks to journalists and makes media appearances. Despite tracking and writing about crypto’s shames, she is actually hopeful about how the internet is evolving in ways that are more open, collaborative, and in the user’s control.
In this interview, Molly shares her thoughts on how the social web is transforming our lives, why everyone should be a blogger, and how the concept of digital ownership is changing before our eyes. She also explains the POSSE model — Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere — which has the potential to revolutionize how we share digital content and think about our online identities.
Highlights of this conversation include:
🔎 You can find everything Molly’s posting via the POSSE implementation on her website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed. She’s also on Mastodon at @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io.
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the Fediverse, at @mike@flipboard.com
💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
It takes a certain strength of character to speak plainly.
Today’s guest doesn’t shy away from that. In fact, she often seems more knowledgeable about cryptocurrency than the people she’s critiquing.
She is also extremely hopeful, noting that we’re entering a new phase of the internet, where we ditch the status quo for something more open, more collaborative and more in OUR control.
How is that possible?
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 Molly White, a researcher, writer and software engineer who cares deeply about free and open access to high-quality information. She’s believes for so long, she’s been involved with Wikipedia since she was a teenager.
Molly is now a leading crypto critic, but get to know her and you’ll see she’s anything but cynical. In this interview, Molly shares her thoughts on how the social web is transforming our lives, why everyone should be a blogger, and how the concept of digital ownership is changing before our eyes.
We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Molly White, welcome to Dot Social. I'm so excited to talk to you.
Molly White:
Thank you for having me.
Mike McCue:
I know that people, a lot of people know you as a very prominent crypto critic. You're very effective. You have no problem, speaking truth to power. Your Bill Ackerman post, by the way was so good. You're you often times seem more knowledgeable about crypto than the people that you're critiquing. You come at this from a place of deep knowledge about crypto and what it's supposed to be anyway. But what's most interesting to me is, it seems to me like you're coming at this from a place of optimism about the future of the web. I almost think of you as like a happy warrior, you're you're you're a Web Warrior looking to like make the web better, crypto isn't it. But I get the sense that you have some ideas about where the web should go. All of your longtime involvement with wiki pedia thank you for everything you've done on wiki pedia your you know, the work you've done as an engineer, it seems like you are optimistic about the future of the web, even though you are also a major crypto skeptics and web three skeptic. So is that a fair assessment?
Molly White:
It is. And I think it's maybe something that I've tried to say myself, but hasn't maybe gotten? It hasn't been heard as much as I would like I suppose because I think a lot of people think of me as maybe kind of a pessimist or a cynic or a Luddite, you know, and I, I am those things to some extent. But a lot of my work actually really does stem from profound optimism about the web, my sort of lifelong love for the web, and my desire to see the web move into, you know, sort of a positive direction. And, you know, when I first started paying attention to crypto, it wasn't because of Bitcoin, it wasn't because of, you know, all of the talk of the financial side of things. It was really what really caught my attention was when people started talking about web three, and talking about blockchains as the solution to everything that ails us on the web and in society even. And, and it wasn't, oh, that sounds dumb. It was, you know, it was more, oh, you're gonna fix the web? You know, that sounds great. Tell me more. And then when I started to learn more I that was when my skepticism began to develop. Because I realized that a lot of what people were saying was not realistic, or it didn't seem possible to me, and it seemed more motivated towards the financial side of things. But you're quite right that, you know, a lot of my work, despite being so focused on crypto really stems from my interest in the web much more broadly. And that's only sort of a niche that I fell into some somewhat by accident.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, it is. Interesting to see the you've been writing about this a little bit more often now. And I'm excited to see this develop. What are you most optimistic for? What are some of the things that's driving your optimism right now about the future of the web?
Molly White:
I think that there have been a lot of developments in the last handful of years that seem pretty negative in the web, you know, around a lot of the things that we've been seeing on social media where social media just feels bad ad, you know, everyone who just doesn't like social media anymore, it used to be this really sort of new and exciting thing. And now everyone's like, Oh, I hate it. Um, you know, I think the same thing is sort of true with AI generated content where people are starting to see more and more of that, and it's not, doesn't feel good, you know, when you got to look something up and run up on this sort of junk page full of AI generated content. And those things actually give me some optimism that we're entering a phase where people really need something new, you know, they want something different from what we've sort of been dealing with for a long time. And, you know, the actual changes that have happened recently with AI and with social media are not necessarily that new. I mean, there's been junk content on the web ever since the web existed pretty much, you know, I mean, I'm just thinking of like, the SEO keyword spam that people used to do, that was absolutely nonsense, and useless. But you know, that's always been there. Social media has always had issues with, you know, the quality of the posts, that people are making, the incentives behind it, and things like that. But now, I think people are just very, very aware of it, and looking for alternatives and actively seeking out and using and developing alternatives. And, you know, the the developments that we've seen in just the past year or two in the, you know, social media alternatives has been pretty enormous. I mean, there's been much more adoption of federated platforms like Mastodon, you know, we're seeing alternatives like Bluesky. It's, you know, it seems like there's 100 social networks, which is frustrating in its own sense, because you have to use 100 different social networks, but it means there's alternatives. You know, it's not just everyone's on Twitter and Facebook, and that's it. And I think that's great. And I think that, you know, the same thing is going to be true when it comes to AI generated content, where people are going to start looking for that really human authentic material, and that's going to create avenues for people to, you know, successfully produce that type of material, which is really exciting.
Mike McCue:
Right. I mean, if you really have something genuinely good to say, something interesting, something insightful, you know, it's not the kind of stuff that you're gonna see in an AI generated article, you, you're gonna see it from people who really know what they're talking about. And those people will be more in demand. They might be harder to find through all the noise. But that's the thing that I think where social can help right as you can help. If there are ways to curate great content creators and great content through social kinds of models, you could have a much more, you know, interesting human web than what we've had in the past.
Do you see so how important in your view is social as it relates to the web? Sometimes, you know, we talk about the fediverse, sometimes it's the social web, you know, talk, sometimes you talk about a social graph being part of the web. How do you think about this?
Molly White:
I think that social is inextricable from the web. I mean, you know, the whole basis of the web is, you know, hyperlinking, and the ability to really sort of weave together a bunch of disparate pieces of, you know, material, just HTML pages, and things like that. And that is inherently social, you know, that's not something you can really do without thinking of the people behind the pages that you're linking to, and the types of relationships that you have. So I think the idea that there is a social web, and then sort of a not social web is kind of a farce, you know, there isn't really an anti social web or a, you know, a just completely siloed web page. I mean, you can have, you could publish a page to the web that has no links, and you know, but that isn't really needed.
Mike McCue:
That would be weird.
Molly White:
Yeah, it isn't really a meaningful part of the web today. So I think social is, you know, a fundamental part of the web. And it's just a question of, you know, what kind of dynamics are in play there? You know, what do you you know, these different platforms enable, can you comment and message? Is it that type of social interaction? Or is it more of a, you know, reader publisher relationship? Those types of questions, but everything is social, I think.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I think that is a great point. And, you know, people were never really a part of the web. In its early formation, it was documents linking to other documents, obviously, people made those documents, but there wasn't the notion of like, there's this person and they're another node on the web, and they're connecting to these other documents, right. And in a lot of ways, it feels like the opportunity to put that in place would be a game changer for the web to actually formalize that. And that's kind of how I see ActivityPub and AT Proto in some of these other approaches where there's a, there's a person who's actually publishing, you know, set of posts and other people are, are subscribing to those posts. And that forms a social graph, which then further informs, you know, what content people can discover.
Molly White:
Yeah, I mean, I think there's some truth to that. I mean, I think I think there has always been sort of the there is an identity behind every thing on the web. And it's just a question of, you know, how real that identity is, you know, is it an anonymous username? Is it an IP address? versus you know, is it Joe Schmo who lives at this address. But you're right, that I think that the ways that we think about it, the ways that we interact with that have really morphed over time. And now I think social has become sort of a predominant feature of the web, where, you know, there are people who that's sort of their only interaction with the web, that's the primary thing that they do with it. And that, you know, they use it to talk to people and connect with people. And so I think that really has, you're right, that that really has changed over time.
Mike McCue:
Early on, the idea was people could create their own website, and they could blog. And some people wanted to do that. Some people do do that. But, you know, interestingly, when you have an account, on Twitter, you have an account on Facebook, you basically have a web page of sorts, you're publishing, right? It just so happens that you're not really posting on the web, you're posting in this more sort of walled garden world. And now we can make that actually be more like you're actually posting on the web.
Molly White:
Yeah, that's something I've tried to, I've tried to argue for a long time is I have this sort of strongly held belief that everyone is a blogger. And, and like, I feel like the word blogger has become sort of, like an insult over time, where it's like, oh, you're just a blogger, you're not a real writer. And it's like, now people want to be sub stackers. And I'm like, but you're just a blogger. That's what blogging is. And I think that's great. I think everyone should be a blogger. And if that means that you're, you know, writing to your own web page, or you're publishing a Substack, or you're just tweeting, you know, any sort of writing on the web, I think, is essentially blogging. And I think that's great. I think blogging is like a really healthy activity for people. And it's something I think everyone should have a blog. This is my little, my little blogging soapbox, but, but that's also one thing I've been really excited about is it feels like blogging is having a comeback to some extent, especially with platforms like Substack, that really became popular, it's like everyone has a Substack now, and that means everyone's blogger now. And I think there's a lot of value in that to be able to sort of read people's sort of musings and thoughts without having to go through, you know, the filter of an editor or publisher. You know, obviously, there are tradeoffs, but it's, it's wonderful to be able to just read things right from the source. And I've been avidly following blogs for, you know, 15-20 years now. And so to see more and more of this suddenly springing up feels wonderful.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. And, you know, another thing I think is really interesting is, you know, you posted your blog role recently. So I get a chance to see the things that you're reading, not just writing, right, which is also really cool. And that's another that's, you know, something that people do on Twitter, they'll post an article that they read, and, but what I love is that, you know, there is this ability to if you're not a writer, still, you know, you might find something that you read, and you were like, wow, this is really I learned a lot from this, and you can post it right, and now other people can benefit from that. And that helps sort through the, the AI gunk, right? So, you know, if I look at your blog roll, there's no artificial generated stuff on there, right? It's all good quality content.
Molly White:
Yeah, I've I really liked that too, the blog roll. But also, I've maintained like a reading list on my website for years now, where basically everything I read, I just add it to the reading list. And for one, it's great for me, because I have an absolutely horrendous memory, and I'll find myself, this is sort of where it came from is, I would, I would find myself thinking, Oh, I read something like two months ago, and it was about this topic, and I can't for the life of me think of what it was. And I find myself sort of searching through my browser history to try to find it, and I never did. And so now I use it as my own sort of like memo pad to be able to go back and find the things that I was reading about. But it's also a really wonderful way to sort of share what I'm reading with people and that helps them understand what I'm thinking about. And then we have, you know, shared conversations about things maybe we've both read, and I can, you know, write down my thoughts on something I've read without having to go to the trouble of doing a whole newsletter post about it or something, I can just dab it off and put it down. And I think there's a lot of value in that type of like social bookmarking, almost like public browser history type of tool. Yeah.
Mike McCue:
Yeah,it's really great. And your your site, Molly white.net/feed. That feed, I've noticed, you know, you post there. And then those posts end up on Twitter on Mastodon, Bluesky. Not sure there's anything else and this is using something I'm not sure a lot of people are familiar with POSSE. So can you talk a bit about that?
Molly White:
POSSE is an acronym for post on own site syndicate elsewhere. There are slight variations to it sometimes. But that's the general gist of it. And the idea is that instead of writing your material on Twitter, and just having it live in this sort of walled garden, that is Twitter, you first write that content in a place that you control, you know, a website that you fully operate yourself and have total control over, and then you syndicate that post to anywhere else, you might normally want to have your content. And so for me, it's Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, but you know, you could you could hook something up with just about any other software you wanted to. And it's a model I've adopted recently, after admiring it for a really long time, I just sort of didn't have the time to do it. But it's something that's come in really useful. As I you know, as I mentioned earlier, with the whole proliferation of social networks, you know, I sort of actively use at least three social networks, some more that I use, you know, with personal friends and things like that, and it became overwhelming to, you know, write something on one network, and then, you know, manually cross post it to the other ones, or, you know, decide if I wanted to or not. And so now I can just write it on my site, click a button, and it goes out to wherever, I like to post my ideas. And I still have the main copy of it on my website, so that if you know, Twitter goes up in a ball of flames like it seems likely to do, I don't lose the things that I wrote, you know, when I, when I was publishing there. And so it's something that I've really enjoyed building out. And it'll also allows me to sort of build out the features that I wish those sites had, which has been really enjoyable as well.
Mike McCue:
So you built this yourself, or using a set of libraries to do this? How did you implement it?
Molly White:
It's mostly stuff that I built myself, I'm using, you know, like a JavaScript library for the rich text editor and stuff like that. But it's, it's pretty much handmade, with all the bugs to go along with it.
Mike McCue:
That's pretty cool. And you are using like a Twitter API to generate the post when you post it to Twitter.
Molly White:
Yeah, there's Twitter, there's a Twitter API, a Mastodon API, and there's a Bluesky client now that I'm using too.
Mike McCue:
So yeah, the conversations that then happen, presumably, you're not seeing those conversations in one central place on your site, you go to the social networks, to see all the replies and engage with people there.
Molly White:
Yeah, that's something that I've been thinking about. And for now, I'm keeping it just, you know, on the social networks, because it feels a little weird to like, copy people's comments back to my site without their consent. But I do have support for Web mentions in there. So that if someone you know, blogs about a post that I, you know, wrote about, then it notifies me and I can link to it or not. So I'm sort of working on how I want to integrate a little bit more of that interactivity into the site. But for now, I just link out to the Twitter posts and all the other posts. And then if people want to see any threads that came out from there, they can just go see it over on those sites.
Mike McCue:
And then can people subscribe to your posts via RSS?
Molly White:
They can, yes, I have like four different RSS feeds on my website, so people can sort of mix and match what they want to see. But yeah, it's all in an RSS feed.
Mike McCue:
And so how do you think about ActivityPub, you know, as you've been experimenting with this, what's your take on ActivityPub?
Molly White:
So I was I thought a lot about ActivityPub when I was writing this because part of me was thinking, Oh, I should just, you know, build an ActivityPub, and then it will just itself become part of, you know, the federated web. And instead of like, cross posting the Mastodon, for example, I could just have the blog be a part of the metaverse and I sort of started down that road, but it's a pretty heavy lift to incorporate ActivityPub into a website, you know, there's kind of a lot to the protocol, and it's kind of loosely specified, I would say in terms of you know, how you actually go about implementing it. So I ended up moving away from that for now with the idea that maybe in the future I could do that, but I kind of like the the way that it happens right? now because it's sort of the types of things I post on that site are well suited to just cross posting to Mastodon, and that feels like I am, you know, a part of the fediverse in the way that I want to be without also having to, you know, implement the whole ActivityPub server, handle all of the, you know, back end side of that, that I wouldn't necessarily want to do.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, the it's interesting to think about the intersection of RSS, and ActivityPub, AT Protocol. These other these others are models where you can start to build this connection between people who are discovering your content, commenting on it, discussing it. Yeah. So how do you see now that you've got experience doing some of this stuff, do you is there like a wish list that's materializing in your head? Like how how this can start to help form a better web?
Molly White:
Well, I mean, I think that I think that usability is a really tough part of the, you know, sort of future of the social networks that we might eventually end up using, you know, it's really challenging to implement ActivityPub, even as a fairly experienced software developer. You know, the AT Proto is also very nascent, and a lot of the things that you have to do, they're, like, difficult to test, and somewhat poorly specified. And so I think that, you know, the more that we can make it possible for people to just, you know, create a website and incorporate it into the fediverse. Or into, you know, whichever sort of social media model we end up wanting to use, the better. You know, I think the same thing is true about, you know, blogging, and creating your own website and things like that, you know, we, I will often say, oh, you should just create your own website. And then when, you know, someone asked me how I, how I go about doing that, it's like, oh, you have to buy the domain. And then you have to decide how you're going to serve it. And maybe you have to pay because it's not free to just host and, you know, so the more that we can make it really, as easy to create your own website and your own social presence outside of the, you know, walls of Facebook and Twitter, I think the better because it's really easy to just sign up for Twitter or sign up for Facebook. And then you can post and you don't even have to think about it, you don't have to pay for it. And, you know, it's all just there in front of you. And that's getting to be the case with Bluesky and Mastodon and some of these other social networks, but they're still more challenging to use, I think, then, then the Twitter's and the Facebook's of the world. And so the more that we can make it, you know, equivalent in terms of a user experience, I think the better it will be for adoption, where people don't have to go figure out what a server is, you know, when you sign up for Mastodon, it says, what server do you want to use? And people like server to server? You know, and then with Bluesky, you know, this, like, oh, how do I get that cool username, and suddenly, you're talking about DIDs. And, you know, oh, you have to create a DNS record. And people are like, what? So? Yeah, I think I think making things like really user friendly is, is going to be really critical.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, you know, what is really interesting to me is that your site is, in a lot of ways, I think of it as a representative of the future where, let's imagine you could just say, Okay, I'm, you know, Mike McCue, and I had a website and you could type my name in to a browser, and you could go to that, that was my identity on the web. What you know, mollywhite.net, really is, is like this. It's your identity with the your different facets of you, as a creator, as a writer, as a publisher, along with your other, you know, networks that you're participating in all in one place. And that's really amazing. Like, you know, today, it can be very confusing when you search for somebody and you see, well, here's their Facebook profile and their Instagram profile and their LinkedIn profile. It's like, okay, and then there's people with similar names, and you know, who's who and how do you pull all this together? Right, I, what I love about what you've done with mollywhite.net is it's just it's like one clear place to see everything about you. And you know, it would be great if there was like a big Follow button there and I could push follow in the right thing happened right? Posts now right from everything where however you post?
Molly White:
Yeah, yeah, I really liked that model to where like, I have sort of one primary record on the web. And then this is the source of truth about Molly White on the internet. And if you see another Molly White, it's probably not me, you know, because it's not listed here on this website ever really common name. There are a lot of other Molly Whites on the internet. There are people who try to impersonate me and run crypto scams and so it's really easy to just Be like, look at this one website. And if it's not there, you're talking to someone else. You know, and I think that's really nice. And it sort of, you know, to bring this a little bit back to crypto, I think it's something that a lot of crypto advocates have sort of talked about where they're like your wallet address is your primary identity. And that's how everything will work on the web. And like, I see the the appeal behind that, but I don't think crypto wallets are maybe the mechanism for it. And so for me, you know, that the solution is, oh, I just have a domain. And that domain will always point to me, wherever I am, it doesn't matter what what's behind it, you know, I can point the domain somewhere else if I want to, but it will always be me.
Mike McCue:
There's like this sense of ownership around the content that you've been posting. You wrote about this a little bit. In, you know, what does ownership even mean? On the web? Can you tell us a little bit about how you think about ownership of your content on the web, and how to think about it a little bit more broadly?
Molly White:
Yeah, so I get I'm really interested in this idea of sort of digital ownership. And one thing I read about recently was the fact that when people talk about ownership, especially in a digital context, people imagine, like 10, different things, you know, 10, different people will have 10 different ideas on what it means to own something online. For some people, it's all about copyright. For some people, it's about if they can sell the content that they've created, you know, for some people, it's about the ability to, you know, rescind that content, if they ever wanted to, you know, there's all these different ideas, and I, you know, sort of values that go into the word ownership. And so it's challenging to talk about it in the abstract when people are thinking about different things.
But for me, I think, you know, ownership is really, especially when it comes to the content that I write online, it's about, you know, being able to share the content that I create, under my own terms, you know, and that could be, and often is, for me, sharing it with a free license that allows people to reprint it if they want, because I care a lot about open access and free licenses and sort of the commons. And so it's really important to me to be able to do that. But also, you know, with some restrictions where you have to maybe attribute me, you know, you have to link back to the original or whatever it might be, you know, people will choose all different things. So, and then, you know, there's all these different facets of ownership that I think are even continuing to develop, where I had this realization, a couple years ago, when I started working on crypto stuff that like, I've been freely licensing my content so that people can reuse it. And that suddenly means that like, someone could make an NFT out of a blog post that I wrote, and I don't know if I really liked that, you know? And now it's like, now there's a question of, okay, so now that I've, you know, because I freely licensed my material, people can train an AI model on it, and it's like, oh, boy, I don't know how I feel about that either. And so, you know, we're starting to get into this, you know, time and place where ownership is becoming more and more nebulous, as people can do more and more things with content that's online.
But I think for me, you know, some of the most important parts of it are being able to sort of dictate the terms under which people can use the content. And you know, and that includes opening them up very, so that they're very unrestricted, which is what I tend to default towards. And then also the ability to take my content elsewhere if I wanted to. And that's something that's really important to me is that, you know, I don't love publishing something under a restriction that it will have to be there and only there forever. I do it once in a while, like, if I write a freelance article for a newspaper, usually there's some clause that I can't just go and then republish that same thing in my newsletter, for example, because that undermines their business. But for the most part, I like to be able to, you know, keep control of the stuff that I write, so that I can you know, if someday I want to up and leave, wherever I am, I can do that. And so in the piece that I wrote, recently, I talked about that as like digital sovereignty, you know, the ability to just go somewhere else. I think that's really key. Yeah.
Mike McCue:
And you did that recently with Substack. Right. Right. back, and then did you go to Ghost or did you create your own platform, or…?
Molly White:
It's a self-hosted version of Ghost that I have since tweaked, rather, extremely, but yeah, it's, you know, I, I, I liked what I was doing with Substack. For a long time, I found their platform to be very useful. And then, you know, things changed. And I decided that I didn't want to be publishing there anymore for you know, a host of reasons and so I was able to sort of gather up everything I had published there and invite everyone who followed me there to go somewhere else. And that's, you know, that's what we did. And I think that's wonderful, you know, for all the criticism I have of Substack. I think the fact that they allow people to do that is absolutely critical. I think every platform should, to the greatest extent possible, allow for that, even though I understand that, you know, there are a lot of forces, economic forces, and you know, business strategies that really encourage people to create these walled gardens that you can't leave. I think it's so much better for the end user, if there is that portability.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, and the portability of the relationship, right, the fact that you know, someone subscribed to a newsletter on Substack, and they're still a subscriber when you've left Substack. So not only are you able to bring the content and everything you created, but those relationships translate as well. It's one of the big challenges, for example, with, you know, the web in general, if you look at publishers, when I talk to publishers, the big challenge they have is they don't have that direct relationship with their audience the way they want to, right. Used to be, I'd be a member of National Geographic, subscribe to their magazine that get it every month. And you know, that's, I have a membership there. Now, increasingly, it's drive-by, you know, anonymous users, they have to do all sorts of, you know, compliance with GDPR. And, you know, you know, disclaimers about cookies and things. And before you can even read an article from National Geographic now. So it's actually really, really hard to build a relationship directly with someone on the web today. And so yeah, that's one of the things I'm most excited about with this new set of technologies, including ActivityPub, is that you can, you can actually enable people who are creators of content to have a relationship with someone that transcends the platform, transcends the business model, you know, and allows, allows people to maintain that.
Molly White:
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, I think I think the more that people can have relationships that are based on these sort of protocol levels, the better, right, because it's not like, you know, when someone when I was on Substack, it's not like, someone was subscribing to Substack. And then via Substack, they got access to the things that I was writing, you know, they, when they entered their email address, that sort of, I got their email address, and I got the permission me, Molly White, to send my writing to them. And so when I left Substack, it was easy, because it wasn't me having to convince Substack to give me the stuff that they didn't want to give me because then I’d leave, and so the more that people can do that, whether it's, you know, the email level, or, you know, using federated protocols, you know, so that you can just move somewhere else, I think, you know, I think that's the best possible scenario, because it allows for that relationship, that's, you know, between you and me, it's not between you and the platform, and then the platform and me. And it makes things so much better.
Just around the anonymity thing, too, is, I think there is actually a lot of value to allow people to define the kind of relationship that they want to have with you. Because sometimes people don't want to have that kind of one on one relationship. And I think it's actually a value of the web, not a, you know, a detriment that people are able to have that sort of drive by relationship where they can read something without signing in or without, you know, consenting to having all sorts of cookies added to their browser session. And so that's something I've always also tried to cultivate where, you know, if you want to read my writing, you can always just, you know, visit the website, or subscribe on RSS and I won't drop any cookies on your page, I won't, you know, demands your email before you can read what I have to say, you don't have to pay anything, you can just do it that way. But you know, if you want to support my work financially, or if you want to receive my writing in your inbox, you know, you can always decide to do that, too. And that's, you know, I love that. And that, you know, people can sort of take what they want, and define the relationship that they want.
Mike McCue:
When you think about, you know, how the web eventually as it develops further from a business model point of view, you know, how are people able to be subsidised as creators? How does the web evolve? You know, from a, you know, economic point of view? Do you have thoughts about that?
Molly White:
I do. And, you know, I think it's one of those things that it's challenging to just say that, like, oh, this will be the business model of the web going forward, because there are so many different types of businesses on the web and so many different, you know, types of relationships. But I do think that, you know, the web that we have today has become pretty much overly dominated by the sort of venture capital model, and the funding incentives that that introduces, which are, I think, often quite orthogonal to the, you know, the desires of the user and the the, the things that users might actually want. So I would love to see, you know, some movement away from that model. But I think that there is a lot of, you know, I think one of the great things about the web is that there is a lot of space for a diverse group of models. And I think that's honestly the ideal, you know, you can have the types of, you know, I have the sort of patron, I guess, approach where people, you know, decide they want to support my work or not, and I think that works really well for me, but for some people it doesn't, and so they decided to go with, you know, advertising, or they decided to go work for a company that, you know, pays them through their own, you know, model. I also think that there should be more public funding of the web. And different types of things that happen on the web, like news, for example, I think, really needs more public funding. And I would love to see, you know, more treatment of the web as sort of basic infrastructure and sort of a basic right, but also that, you know, people should be afforded because I think we've moved along past the days where having internet access was, you know, an option, but not a necessity. So, you know, I think that we really need to sort of shift to the times and, you know, acknowledge that people need access to the web, they need access to services on the web that should be funded, through, you know, public funding, and not necessarily profit driven business models, you know, nonprofits and different things like that coops, I love the idea of co ops on the web. So, you know, I think I think there's, like I said, a lot of space for different models, but definitely room for improvement.
Mike McCue:
You know, I sometimes wish for a ActivityPub version of Patreon, I support a bunch of creators on Patreon, it's great, I love being able to support them, and they get access to, you know, additional content that they post, but you have to go to Patreon to go see it, it's no, it's not showing up in Mastodon. It's not showing up in the place where I normally consume my content. And so, you know, in some ways, I think the Patreon model is a really great one. And, you know, pairing that up with an ability to build these, like, you know, these open relationships with users who are able to, you know, stay on stay in touch with that creator, through, you know, whatever it is, however, they're consuming, their their content feeds.
Molly White:
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that there are ways to do that. But I think that today, it's very much you know, you have to be a software engineer to do it, or you have to have some degree of programming experience to then, you know, hook that up yourself. And most people just don't have that, or they don't have the time and desire to maintain a very sensitive, you know, piece of financial software. And so it would be great, I think, like you said, to see something come out where that's more plug and play, and you can just set it up without needing to go write some code or, you know, maintain something. And I think I really do like that, you know, the this model of, you know, the Patreon model, or the Substack model, or, you know, the, the idea of just supporting an individual, or maybe a small group of people who do something that you like, I like that that is taken off. But I am also very cautious about sort of describing that as, like the future of media or the future of how people are paid to create, you know, right online or anything like that. Just because I do think that there are downsides to it also, where, you know, a lot of that content is paywalled, for example. And so, if you can't afford it, you know, then you don't get access to it or, you know, it, it can, in aggregate become much more expensive to support 10 writers on Substack, then subscribe to a newspaper that has 10 people writing for it. And so, you know, there's there's tradeoffs that you really have to consider and that I think, sometimes are missed when people talk about, oh, this is sort of the new model that everyone's going to be using.
Mike McCue:
I totally agree. Wikipedia has been funded largely through donations by individuals right. Up to this point.
Molly White:
Yeah. So it's a mix of individual donations and also larger grants, but yes,
Mike McCue:
larger grants and You know, the, obviously that model has worked very well for Wikipedia over the years. Has that? Have you seen the sort of level of donations continue to be, you know, healthy? Or are you concerned about the longevity of that? I'm
Molly White:
not terribly concerned about the longevity of it. And I think that, you know, the actual cost to run, the Wikipedia project is fairly low, especially compared to some web enterprises of similar size. And so it's pretty straightforward for the Wikimedia Foundation to continue operating even with a, you know, substantially lower level of donations. And we get today, and I think that people do donate, you know, they recognize the value of Wikipedia, and they say, all right, that seems like something that's worth $5 $10, you know, just throwing in, you know, what they can afford? And so I think that's wonderful that, you know, people are willing to do that, and to provide that kind of financial support. But yeah, I think it works really well for Wikipedia. And I love that that's the model that they've gone with, I think Wikipedia would look very different had they decided, oh, maybe we will do ads or something like that.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I was listening to Ezra Klein on the Search Engine podcast recently. And he talked a lot about how people need to understand more, that it's important to if you want, if you like the content you're seeing, figure out a way to pay for it and buy. Because if you don't, eventually it'll disappear. And it was a really good, if you haven't heard that, I recommend it, it was a really good discussion. He spent a bunch of time at Vox and in their early days, and had a lot of really interesting things to say about the future of, you know, content, quality content on the web. I do think that like making it easy for people to actually support the content, and to support the people who are making great content on the web is fundamental to figuring out a way to get this to happen. And as you said, also making it easy to form those connections. And you shouldn't have to be an engineer to figure out how to post your content in lots of different places and reach the maximum number of people who are interested in your stuff. Right. It's, it's, that's, that is really important. So do you see any projects on the horizon that hold that promise?
Molly White:
Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of sort of indie web projects that are trying to do things like this, you know, I've seen people developing plugins that will post, you know, your WordPress blog to the fediverse, or something like that. And it's pretty straightforward to just download the plugin and write your WordPress blog, which is also meant for people who are not super technical. And I think that, you know, there are also there is some acknowledgement among the people who are developing software for these types of projects that it isn't user friendly these days. And I think that alone is progress. I saw a blog post recently, that was like, as soon as you're telling someone to type in npm install, you've gone too far. Like that is just not the level that we're looking for here. And I thought that was really, you know, that was really accurate is that like, OK, we realize that this is asking a lot of people.
But yeah, I mean, I think Bluesky is a really interesting example of, you know, trying to try to sort of straddle the line between, you know, federation, and this very open protocol, but also make it a little bit like Twitter, you know, so that it's recognizable to people who've used Twitter for 10 years. And, you know, if you just want to sign up, you can use the @ bsky, you know, you can just login and it looks pretty similar, and you can follow people. And then, you know, as time goes on, hopefully, they will continue along the mission of, you know, federating and allowing for composable, you know, content moderation and all the things that they've described in their roadmap, while keeping that level of, you know, user friendliness. And so I'm optimistic about Bluesky, just in that sense, that they seem to really recognize some of the pitfalls that you know, for example, Mastodon has been struggling with, you know, I think, and I think Mastodon, you know, and the sort of ActivityPub community is also realizing, as well that, you know, user friendliness is not a nice to have, it's sort of a must have feature.
Mike McCue:
It is it feels a lot like the early early days of the web, when things were still pretty, you know, techie and not totally together. And, you know, I do think that there are a lot of projects underway to make the fediverse and the concept of the social web much more user friendly. But it also is clear to me that people are still trying to figure it out, like the pieces haven't. It's not like everything's all kind of connected in people's heads yet in terms of how it should all look. It's very exciting. It's a very sort of formative time right now.
Molly White:
I agree. Yeah, I, that's partly why I get so excited about this stuff is it feels like, you know, even though the web has been around for decades, now, we're still figuring it out. We're still trying to decide what the best ways of doing things are. And I think that's exciting that, you know, there's still that opportunity for that type of innovation to happen. as needs change, and as new technologies emerge, and things like that. But I also, you know, one thing that I love about this time and place is that compared to 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, it's becoming so much easier, and also so much cheaper for people to experiment, and just try things out. And you know, there are projects, like, glitch, for example, where you can just go create a website pretty easily, you know, it is pretty quick, and it's free, and you can just go play around with stuff. And, you know, when I, you know, I'm remembering back to when I first got interested in building websites, it's like, oh, man, I guess I need Dreamweaver, and maybe I need a, you know, physical piece of metal to like, plug into the wall. And that will host my website, you know, and so now with, you know, cloud services, and different things like that, it's really cool that it's becoming more and more accessible for people to just play around, try things out. You know, tinker.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. And as you said, at the beginning, you know, now there's an incentive to try new ideas out, because a lot of where we've landed on the web is so problematic. And, you know, I think, you know, November, a year ago, you know, it was very clear to a lot of people on Twitter that this was not a good situation. They didn't want to continue to support. You know, what was happening on Twitter, and they looked for alternatives. And they're really, did you talk to anyone prior to that, like, Hey, you're here. Here's a really interesting idea, a completely new open version of Twitter, people would be like, Why would I need that? Now, now, at least there's a need now at least people are like, Oh, an alternative to Twitter, cool. They still don't necessarily know what open means or why that's beneficial to them. I think that's one of the things that is so fantastic about your writing is that you're helping to educate people why this stuff matters. And that's so important. Because I think the more we understand these first principles, and inhabit those, the better the future of the web will be.
Molly White:
I certainly hope so. That's, that's definitely one of my goals. So I'm glad to hear you. You think it's been effective.
Mike McCue:
Well, Molly, thank you for your excellent writing for the work you've done on Wikipedia for helping to educate us on the state of crypto, and, and most importantly, your vision for you know how we can build a better web. It's been absolutely awesome to follow along with you. And I'm really looking forward to seeing how things develop here in the near future.
Molly White:
Yeah, thank you for having me. It's been great talking about it.
Well, thanks so much for listening! You can find everything Molly’s posting via her website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed
You can follow Mike on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social and @mike@flipboard.com
Big thank you to our editors, Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up via the link in this episode’s description.
Until next time, see you in the fediverse!