Thanks to the open web, it’s more viable than ever for creators to take back ownership and control of their work, their audience, and their livelihood. No one knows this better than Molly White, a researcher, writer and software engineer. This episode was recorded live at SXSW 2025.
Thanks to the rise of the open social web, it’s more viable than ever for creators to take back ownership and control of the distribution of their work, their connection to their audiences, and their livelihoods overall. Real alternatives to walled-garden platforms aren’t just theoretical ideas — they’re here, and getting stronger every day.
No one knows this better than Molly White, the researcher, writer and software engineer behind the Citation Needed newsletter and the project Web3 Is Going Just Great. Molly’s not only an outspoken advocate for an open, ethical web, she’s also cracked the code on being a successful, autonomous creator herself. During this conversation with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, recorded live at SXSW 2025 on March 9, 2025, White explains her setup, philosophy, and learnings, and takes smart questions from the audience at the end.
Highlights include discussions of:
Mentioned in this episode:
🔎 You can find Molly at mollywhite.net.
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @mike@flipboard.social and @mmccue.bsky.social.
🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new beta from the people at Flipboard: https://about.surf.social/
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
There's an important shift happening right now on the internet. Thanks to the rise of a more open social web, it's more viable than ever for creators to take back ownership and control of their work, their audience and their livelihood. Real alternatives to walled garden platforms aren't just theoretical ideas. They're here and they're getting stronger every day.
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 better versus tremendous potential and understand that this could be the internet's next wave.
Today, Mike's talking to Molly White, a researcher, writer and software engineer. Molly's not only an outspoken advocate for an open, ethical web, she's also cracked the code on being a successful, autonomous creator herself. You can hear how she does this in this conversation, which is a repurposing of an official panel at South by Southwest 25 called “Digital sovereignty is a new influencer status.” We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Hello, everyone. Good to see you guys. It's very nice to have you here. We got to let the audio settle down a sec. We're good. Okay, welcome. How many of you know Molly White?
Molly is one of my absolute favorite people on the internet. She represents a new generation of leadership for the web. She's a writer, she's an activist, she's an engineer, um, and we're going to be talking a lot about digital sovereignty, which is something we're going to unpack here in a little bit.
But to start pull up on your phone, uh, mollywhite.net, now this is not something that you have to join a social network first. You don't have to figure out who to follow. You don't have to know what social network she's on. Just type in mollywhite.net, in your browser.
Molly White:
I was just gonna joke that it'll give you a free NFT..
Mike McCue:
Those are very valuable. Yeah, NFTs, I hear those are a good thing.
How cool is that? First of all, that I can just say, go look at mollywhite.net and you know how to do that. You can look at that. You don't have to, like, sign up for some other service. You'd have to give all your data. All your data away. And on that page, you'll see who Molly is, what she's all about, and you'll see links to her different blogs, as well as what she's posting across social media.
You'll see the all the work that she's done all in one place on a web page. And so I'm really excited to talk about this and how Molly thinks about the web, the world of content creation, how people who are making content get that content discovered, monetize it, do it in a sustainable way.
So Molly, it's just a real pleasure to get a chance to talk to you about all this. Really excited to talk about it as well. I end up getting asked to talk about crypto a lot for probably obvious reasons, but digital sovereignty and the sort of making the web a place where you want to be and where you enjoy being is honestly one of my biggest passions. And so being able to talk about this as well is really wonderful. And how many for just to get a sense of the folks in the audience, how many of you are creating content, publishing content? So maybe let's just start at the top. What is digital sovereignty? And why is it important?
Molly White:
Great question. So, digital sovereignty is sort of a term that I use to describe I've also heard people use technological self determination, which is a similar concept, but basically the idea of establishing your own presence on the web, where you control what you create, where you create it, who can see it, the terms under which they see it, where they see it, basically taking control of your digital life, and that means your content. If you are a writer or, you know, I feel like when you ask if someone's a content creator, almost everyone is a content creator. We just don't think of ourselves as content creators. But if you post on a social network, if you upload a photo to Instagram, you are creating content in a way, even if it's just for you or your small group of friends and how control over that content is really a key part of digital sovereignty, as well as control over your data, control over your relationships with the people who follow you or who subscribe to your email newsletter, or however you interact with people having that under your own terms and not under the terms of a platform that dictates what you can post and how you can post it, and controls the relationships that you have with people who follow you or that you follow or you interact with.
Mike McCue:
And so what are some of the things that you've done yourself to to have that ownership?
Molly White:
It's I've done a lot over a long period of time to try to establish something that I am comfortable with in terms of my relationship to what I do on the web. One of the biggest ones. I mean, you've just pointed out my website, I use a strategy called POSSE, which is an acronym for post on own site, syndicate elsewhere. And that is basically everything that I write on social network, even if it's just like a dumb little tweet, you know, it's like a shower thought that I want to just dash off. It goes onto my own website, and then I syndicate that to Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, whatever new social network will probably crop up in the next month or two, and that gives me complete control over what I write. If I write something that's too long for a platform that you know, I want to cross post to, I can either split it into multiple posts, or I can just blink back to the site and it'll always be there, even if Twitter goes up in flames more than it has already, you know, it'll always be there. And I can always unplug Twitter and plug the new one in. And, you know, I have that complete control over my writing, whether it's something that you know, I want to last for years or if it's just sort of a brief thought that you know crossed my mind. Then there's the sort of my professional work online in terms of my writing. I write a newsletter called Citation Needed, which is published on a platform that I self host. I use the Ghost blogging software. Shout out to them, great team. It's all open source. I self-host it myself. I can change it however I want. I have changed it in many ways.
I have, you know, a list of my email subscribers that I can download if I ever want to leave. And you know, that is a relationship that I fully own in a way where, you know, there is no platform that can say we didn't love that, you know, criticism of our founder. So we're just gonna, you know, pull the plug.
You know, there is no algorithmic deboosting. It's all in my own domain. And then, you know, my other blogs, I host myself as well, usually with software that I wrote myself. And it's the same strategy where, you know, I guess you know, my server provider can kick me off and then I'll just go to another server provider. I have the complete ability to just pack up and leave if I ever need to, and that's powerful.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I mean, and you're you, it's not like you have to shape your writing because of the platform that you're on, right? And that that's, you know, there's a phenomenal article I forget, who wrote it on The Verge about a year, year and a half ago, where they talk about how a great article has to then be discovered, and SEO is the way to do that. And so the way the article gets structured, the way it gets written, all of the different kind of ideas of the article start to get fragmented, and then it ends up in a terrible place just for discovery, right? And so that was actually really pretty amazing to read that article, because I really it was kind of an aha moment that creators end up, writers end up having to basically cater to the search engine, right? And is that something that you worry about? How do you think about discovery when you're when you're creating your content?
Molly White:
I don't even think about it. I love I yeah, I am not stuffing keywords into my articles. I just write however I want to write. One thing that I think is really powerful in that same vein is that people, I think we really don't understand the degree to which we are constrained by the platforms where that we use.
So, you know, an obvious example, if you use Twitter or you're constrained to 280 characters, four photos, one video, one minute long. You know, Bluesky, you got 300 characters. Just mass it on. Probably depends on the server, but you got to limit somewhere. Probably you can't, you know, change the HTML. You can't write custom JavaScript. You can't, I mean, there's a lot of things you can't do. And when you own the website, when you control the software, I can create anything that I want. You know, I can create interactive visuals. I can create, you know, experiences that really illustrate the points that I'm trying to make. And if I want, you know, something to flash across your screen. And, you know, give you like the reintroduce the blink tag from the old days. I can do that. And I think that's really powerful because, you know, there is so much to the web that you can do in that medium that is stripped away by platforms like Twitter or even, you know, some of the more full featured, you know, writing platforms like Substack, where, you know, you can't control a lot of the experience there, you've got like, four fonts to pick from, you know.
And, you know, in some cases it seems really trivial, like, Okay, who really cares so much about the font? But there are some cases where you can make really powerful points using a much broader array of the tech, you know, the technological options that are out there on the web that are just sort of artificially constrained by platforms that want everything to sort of have the same vibe, and, you know, fit the same sort of structure, so that if you're scrolling through the Substack app, it all looks the same, or the, you know, whatever platform you're using.
And so there's a great deal of freedom to having a place that you fully control, beyond just the SEO, beyond just the you know, the ability or the pressure to fit what the algorithm wants, or what you know you think is going to rise to the top of the pile on on social media somewhere. Yeah, that's totally that's so well said. There's a great example, actually, of what Molly is talking about. We'd go to mollywhite.net, check out. The link for web three is going just great. And if you haven't seen this, this site, it's absolutely awesome, little depressing, but you got to check it out.
And in the lower right corner, there's a amount of money destroyed by crypto counter. And as you scroll through the stories, the counter can either increment or decrement. Depends on how you want to set it. You can actually change the setting on it. And it's, you know, the amount of money burned by crypto, crypto schemes, crypto, you know, theft, all sorts of things like that. And it really gets the point across. It is like, and I don't think Twitter would be very happy if they had a crypto counter on there. Yeah, weirdly, that's not a feature.
Yeah, when I hit big milestones, I have little fireworks that go off. It's very enjoyable, and yet somehow not supported on big platforms. I wonder why? I wonder why? Yeah, and, you know, I think that is an amazing point, too. The other, the other thing is that you can, if you have content that looks the same as everyone else's, makes a lot harder for it to be discovered, right? I mean, I think that it's a really key differential, if you like, if you ever see some of the like, data visualization that some of the news publications will do, some of that stuff is incredible, like, it's like art, you know? It's like, really, really well designed. And it just makes the point in a way that text and images alone can't, and those often are articles that get a lot of engagement. You know, they go far and wide, because they are so effective at communicating and so being able to do that even when you're not the New York Times, you know, even when you're not a big newsroom, obviously, there are challenges in terms of, you know, if you are not a technical person or something like that, you have to find someone who can do that type of thing. But you know, it is something that should be more achievable to people than it really is. And the reason, in many ways, that it is not achievable for so many people is because they are relying on platforms that don't want to give you that degree of control over what you are publishing, and so by getting over that hurdle, by taking that control and ownership over your own platform, you are reducing the barriers to doing journalism in the way that makes the most sense, and not just journalism that fits the mold of the platform that you're using.
Mike McCue:
So for someone who wants to have more ownership over their content, what's the advice that you give folks like, basic things they can start doing?
Molly White:
Yeah, so one of the biggest things I try to emphasize is like, you do not have to just like, dive in head first, and, like, learn how to write HTML, CSS, JavaScript. You don't have to have a CS degree, like you can if you're a software engineer and that speaks to you, like, by all means, go for it. But there is so much you can do to increase the degree of control and sovereignty that anyone can do. So, you know, just it's like going and buying a domain that you use everywhere where it doesn't even have to be a website that you wrote or anything that you've created yourself. You can even just point it to your Twitter account for all, for all that matters. But that's still a step in the direction of when someone goes to your name.com, they will always be able to find you, even if Twitter goes up in flames. You know, you can always just change where that goes, and they will find you there. You can alias your email so that you know I have Molly at mollywhite.net and you will always find me there, even if Gmail explodes or starts charging me a ton of money or starts reading all my — well, continues reading all my emails — you know, that will always be where you find me on the internet. And that alone, I think, is really powerful, um, but beyond that, I think, really examining the services that you're using, whether or not they meet your needs, or if they are boxing you in, and then examining alternatives to services that you use. And it doesn't have to be like, you know, a really, like, puritanical saying where you only use the most free or the most open. You know, I still post on Twitter. Twitter sucks, but, like, I still post there.
And you can just, you know, choose the ones that work for you without swearing off everything you know that that you think is still valuable to some extent, but creating an identity online that is sort of under your control, where you have sort of the position of power, where you are not just the user being kicked around.
Another thing I really try to emphasize is taking control of your data. And I mean, you know the things that you write, and I go back again to the point that even if you don't consider yourself a content creator or a writer or someone who you know professionally writes online, you still have data that you create. You have things that you probably value, backing those up, you know, exporting them somewhere where you have control over them, getting them into a format that's portable is really, really important, because a huge part of digital sovereignty is not necessarily just having total control over where you post online, or what you write online, but having the ability to just up and leave at any point that alone is really powerful. And so if you have that material of yours, and you no longer are sort of chained to a platform because, well, I've been posting here for 10 years, and I don't want to lose everything that I've ever written or every conversation I've ever had, suddenly you are in a position of much more power, and that alone is really meaningful.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, what do you think the odds are that you're going to get banned on Twitter at some point in the next few years?
Molly White:
Inevitable, right? And, you know, this is a thing, like, people don't really fully realize that, you know, they say, Well, I've got like, 20,000 followers, or 50,000 followers, 100,000 followers, well, not really, right? I think that that is the thing that is really important to understand. They're not your followers. They're Twitter's followers of your account. And if they want to turn off your account, they can absolutely do that if they want to make sure that your posts don't even show up to the people who are following you. They can and have done that.
Mike McCue:
And this, you know, Elon is probably the most extreme example of platform stewardship. Here, where he is, you know, has no qualms about breaking links and hiding accounts and putting his own accounts that he wants you to see cat turd and so on in your timeline. They're doing that, right? So they are the most extreme example, which is actually kind of useful, because we know that this can be done. Some people like, Oh, that would never happen. That is happening right now. And so it's so important to to create an alternative to that. And I think that's the beauty of like, you know, I said, Go to mollywhite.net you can open up your browser and you can see everything that Molly is posting. But if I said, you know, go check out Molly on Twitter, well, maybe that'll work. Maybe it won't, right, and maybe that'll work in the future. Maybe it won't. So I think that's a really amazing thing. But now let's talk a little bit about Twitter and discovery and social networks and social media. So how did you get discovered as somebody, as a writer? How did that work for you as you're if you're just getting started, it seems a little daunting to just like, get a website and start posting to it. How does anyone gonna know that that content even exists?
Molly White:
Yes, yeah. I mean, I think that is really the challenge, right? The there's the technical problem of, you know, creating the website, but then there's the problem of getting people to find the website, which is in many ways as challenging, if not more challenging. And I don't think there is, like, one weird trick to getting your newsletter to blow up. You know, I could probably sell a course or something like that. But, you know, it's really not that simple. But I do think that there are, I think that there are things that people are looking for right now, especially that they are not finding, especially if you are a writer, a journalist, especially people want to read real writing by real people who have interesting things to say, who have new takes on things, new thoughts, who have a strong degree of knowledge about a particular area, or they know who to talk to to learn about that area before they write about it, and that like, it sounds like, oh, that's journalism 101 like, that's actually kind of hard to find right now.
And so, you know, starting out and writing that kind of thing and creating that kind of material, especially if it's in a topic area that is not being covered very much. I mean, that was kind of, I think, like my success writing about the crypto world was just that, like, at the time, nobody was writing critically about crypto, you know. I mean, there were, I don't want to erase a bunch of people who have been writing about crypto for a long time. But it was not the New York Times headlines about, you know, is this all a scam? They were too busy writing, you know, this is how web three is going to be the future for your business. And everyone was like, i This doesn't feel right. And so when someone showed up and started saying, you know, maybe there's not actually much there, there a lot of people really resonated with that. And, you know, I was not trying to engagement farm. I was not trying to follow all the SEO tips to get to the top of the Google search results. I was shit posting on Twitter, and I was writing stuff that people wanted to read. And, you know, I think genuinely, that is enough to to make people interested, to make people want to hear. What you have to say is, you know, being genuine, doing good work. And you know, writing the things that people really need to hear. Yeah, and and with your technical background, you were particularly effective, and are a particularly effective critic of crypto, which makes your writing even all the more you know, effective.
Mike McCue:
So, were there people that recommended your writing to others? Is that? Did that help you, um, get discovered? Were there critical folks out there who had, you know, followings and they recommended your content?
Molly White:
Yeah. I mean, there were, you know, early on, when I was first starting out, I was just writing web three. It's going just great. This was pre Citation Needed, pre newsletter. I was still working full time as a software engineer, doing, like, totally different stuff. But there were people who saw my work who thought it was interesting and who boosted that work in various ways, whether it was sharing it on social media, there were journalists who found it, and you were like, this is new and interesting, and they wrote about it, and people found it through those types of venues. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of it came from just the sort of organic type of discovery that, you know, sort of reminds you of the good old days of the web, where you would read a blog and they would write, you know, you would you follow this blog for a while because they've written good stuff, and, oh, they just wrote about something that they saw in a different blog. And so you go look at that blog, and maybe you add that to your feed, and then they write about something that they saw, that that was good. And, you know, you end up with this sort of network of people who are doing really interesting writing. And, you know, I feel like that's sort of how I began, you know, it was just people sort of organically finding my work. You know, I was not paying a PR guy to go, you know, talk up, web three is going just great.com. Like, that was not the origin story, yeah. And like, I think the quality of the work speaks for itself, and that's what a lot of people want, right? They want to do good work and have it, you know, succeed on its merits, and get discovered on its merits. And, you know, this network of bloggers that you talk about, I mean, that is like a social network, right?
Mike McCue:
Yeah, that that's one of the things that I think we just came from the Fediverse House, which shout out to the Fediverse House, you should check it out to Speakeasy. And this is the topic of discussion. When we look at the fediverse, it's all about connecting people who want to be connected, regardless of the app that they're using to discover the kind of content that Molly is writing on. And get that network of bloggers who want to share great writing people do care about it, for them to be, you know, able to share like that in an unimpeded way, regardless of whatever app they use. And that's really exciting part of the discovery piece for, you know, for being a great writer, and it's Molly has been, you know, I've certainly discovered Molly through friends, through other people, through other writers. And that's something to remember, that, like, you can have great work, be discovered by other great writers and get, get become, like, you know, be able to actually be a real writer making a living, and that kind of gets to the next point, which is monetization and generating, you know, doing this in a sustainable way. So you were a full time engineer, at what point did you feel like, okay, I'm actually going to turn this into more of a profession.
Molly White:
I don't think I ever made that decision, I kind of tripped into being a writer, I think, where it's kind of a weird like compulsion, in some ways, I so I've been editing Wikipedia for almost 20 years now, which is a horrifying thought, because I'm just one of those people who like, if I run into something new, I want to learn about it, and one of the ways that I do that is I write about it like one of the first things I ever wrote to do with crypto was the Wikipedia article on web three, because it didn't exist. I didn't know what web three was. I think I one of my earliest tweets about crypto was, I just wrote the entire Wikipedia article on web three, and I still don't know what it is.
And like, that's just sort of my knee jerk response to running into something new or confusing or irritating, or anything that sort of stirs an emotion as I just write about it. And so when I started reading about the disasters in crypto and seeing how the crypto industry was really targeting mainstream, sort of lay people, and trying to convince them that they should invest in this next big thing, that's what I did, is I just started writing about it, and it was not supposed to be a career. It was not supposed to be a side hustle. It was it was literally just me looking at it and going, well, I can't write a Wikipedia article about this, because no one cares about like, degenerate ape token or whatever like that is not Wikipedia article level stuff, so I can't do it there, so I guess I'll do it here. And I made a little website. It was mostly like, I was like, this will just entertain me and a couple of friends who think this is dumb, and that will be the end of it. And then I just kept doing it. And sort of, separately from that, I had been working at this software job for a long time. It was a great company. I loved it, but I had been there for like, six years, which, if you're a software engineer, is, like, so long to be at one company. And so I was sort of getting to the point where I was like, maybe it's time for me to move on and sort of spread my wings a little bit.
So I was like, you know, I'm just gonna take a little bit of time off. You know, I was kind of burnt out. It had been COVID times I was working from home, and I didn't have enough other stuff that I was doing, so I was just working all the time. And so I was like, I'm gonna take a little bit of time off, and then I'll go get another software job. And then I just never did that second part. And I ended up, you know, I was, I was really lucky, honestly, in that some people at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab had seen the work that I was doing on crypto. They thought it was important from sort of a separate angle, where they do a lot of work with digital digital archiving and sort of data preservation. And there's a million people who tell you that you need a blockchain to do that. And so they were sort of looking into that type of stuff and and they gave me a fellowship for about a year to do that work. And then by the time that was done, I had started the newsletter, and I realized that this could actually be how I just live my life, which is, you know, I wake up in the morning I say, what would be the most interesting thing for me to do today. Sometimes it's write some code for one of my websites. Sometimes it's talk to someone who just got scammed out of $100,000 in crypto. Sometimes it's write an article about the Bitcoin strategic reserve that the President is apparently creating. And that's just how I do my you know, that's just my life. Now, there was sort of never a point in that where I was like, I'm a writer now, and I still, every once in a while, I'm like, maybe people will sort of forget about the work that I do and I'll just go back to software. It's kind of nice having just like the sort of like escape hatch. If everything goes totally to shit, then, well, at least I can still write JavaScript for a living.
Mike McCue:
yeah. Well, you know, I mean, your your writing, is shaping the future, and that I can say for sure, and the fact that you're able to make a living on it is like, it's like, living the dream. That's amazing.
Molly White:
It is, yeah. I mean, I am really lucky to be able to do what I do, and I never in a million years, what I'm expected to be doing it, I fully thought I was going to be a software engineer for the rest of my life. But sometimes it just feels like there is something more impactful than what you were doing at that at that moment. And that was how it felt when I made the choice to take the fellowship. I was like, You know what? It's a year, and maybe after a year, crypto will have blown up, and it will be more important for me to go back to writing job scripts. But for now, I'm just gonna do what feels important. And that's sort of what I've just done since then, is I do what feels important, and somehow I'm, you know, I put food on the table, and my dog's bowl is full, and I'm happy.
Mike McCue:
So So do you have, like, do you remember the first dollar that you earned from your writing is that framed on your kitchen wall somewhere?
Molly White:
Yeah, I don't know if you can frame like a Stripe transaction, maybe a little bit less, by the way, that would be a great idea for stripe. Yeah, you should totally do that. Just mail you $1 bill, exactly. Yeah, no. I mean, I do remember when I first started the newsletter and, you know, basically decided, all right, I'm gonna see if people, if this is something people are willing to pay for. Because, you know, for a long time I was just writing web three is going just great. I wasn't making any money off of it, which was actually really, really powerful. Like, it was nice to be able to tell people like, I don't make any money off of this. I am not being paid to write this by big banks, or, you know, whoever people think is like, nefariously funding my work. But you know, at some point you do have to make a decision on, you know, am I going to essentially work two jobs all the time, or am I going to try to find a way to make this sustainable, and actually, you know, be able to devote the amount of time to this that I want. And so I do remember, you know, when I first said, you know, all right, I'm gonna start writing on a regular basis. If you feel like pitching in, that'd be awesome. And then I was like, looking at my email, and like, people actually signed up. And I was like, holy shit. People actually care about this and think that it's useful, or have appreciated the work that I've done to date, and so they want to chip in a couple bucks or whatever it was, like, I think I still have, like, serious imposter syndrome over it, where I'm like, I don't really know why anybody pays for it, but they do, and that's really cool. That is amazing. That is amazing.
Mike McCue:
Well, let's open it up to some Q and A here from from folks, and feel free to use the mic there so folks can hear you.
Audience Member:
Hi, yeah. I'd like to know about the costs associated, because having a domain name, having a website that's way more expensive than just having, like, an Instagram account or whatever, right? And how do you balance that? Like, okay, you have more opportunities to make money too, and ask for money in a way you can't, maybe on like, Tiktok or something.
Molly White:
Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting equation. I mean, this is a little bit cliched, but, like, no matter where you're publishing, you're always paying for it in a way, you know, and whether you're actually cutting a check to, you know, domain registrar or a hosting provider, or whoever it might be, you're always paying for it. It might be that you're seeding your your data, you know, you're staring at ads all day you're, you know, the extraction from the people who are reading your work. So there's always some degree of money involved. But I actually think it's a lot cheaper to shell out. You know, I pay what, like $17 a year per domain, or something, which isn't too bad.
My hosting is maybe 100 bucks a month or something like that, and that's mostly mail sending. I mean, it doesn't cost much to host a website. And so, you know, I actually do think that the monetary barrier it exists to be sure, you know, it's not something, that it's not non existent. But I think people sometimes think it is a lot more expensive than it is. I also try to really highlight the fact that a lot of the smaller publishing services that are out there are way cheaper than some of the big names. It's often hidden in the pricing structure. So you know, if you took to call out Substack, they charge a 10% subscription fee, which means that, if you have, you know, if you're lucky enough to have people who want to send you money for your writing, and they pay $10 a month, you know, and you get, say, $1,000 a month, $100 of that goes to Substack. And that is a huge, huge cut. If you make $10,000 a month, like you have made it, this is your full time job, you are sending a full $1,000 a month to Substack. Whereas there are a lot of indie platforms like ghost or WordPress or button down or beehive or, I mean, there's a million of them, a lot of them charge flat fees. And so people see that upfront cost, and they're like, Substack is $0 for me, whereas ghost is $9 and therefore it's cheaper. But the tipping point on that is so, so low. And so I just encourage people to really map that out, because a lot of the time there are services out there that are really, really excellent, and they really do not cost that much money to piggyback on that.
Audience Member:
I'm kind of, I like, went through all my stuff, like, right before I was coming to South by, and I have kind of the same issue. Like my Instagram. I want to be a creator. I want to be doing, like, in front of the camera, writing. I ultimately, like, ended up going to Substack, because I feel like it's just like a plug and play. I'm not a technical person whatsoever. So I wanted, obviously, all the traffic, like, I have my domain, I have everything. I got into my like, Squarespace, and I was like, I can't I'm overwhelmed. I'm gonna break something. So if you have any advice that's, like, the first question, you have advice specifically, like, what someone who's so amateur that doesn't have the coding background, like things and resources and tools that I could use, or that we could use to build that site like you're talking about. And then the second part of that is the monetization. So the reason I did this sub stack was because I was like, okay, I can build my audience on here. I have my subscribers. They just added, like a little podcasting thing that you can add to it that will, like, read the article. But I just kind of started utilizing it as, like a podcasting thing, really easy again, like plug and play, and then I'm already starting to get subscribers on there. So it's like, that's kind of the catch 22 I'd love, like I said, what you're doing, just if you could give more color, more detail, exactly like how you did that, if you can.
Molly White:
Yeah. So I mean, I did a really sort of custom setup for myself, just because that's where I'm comfortable. But there, there actually are some platforms out there that are really, really plug and play. So, I mean, I'm a big ghost fan. They're not paying me. I really, just genuinely love them. They are ghost is amazing. Yeah, that's who you use currently, yeah. So I self host ghost. It's open source. You can just do it yourself. But they have a hosted plan, which is really just like, sign up, Substack style, you know, just start writing. I mean, some of the software out there is really, really high quality, and honestly getting better every day. And I strongly recommend something like that, for sure.
Audience Member:
Awesome. And then the monetization piece like, so you said you like Stripe, for instance, is that, like a whole other thing? Does Ghost have that?
Molly White:
Yep. So most, most newsletter platforms out there, actually, this is one of the most amazing things, and it's almost like they just didn't remember to turn it off. It's like, don't tell them. But it's actually so easy to switch between newsletter providers compared to, like any other social media, like I can't just up and leave Twitter and take all my followers with me, but I was on Substack for a long time, and I decided I didn't want to be there anymore, and I left. And none of my subscribers probably would have noticed if I hadn't written about it, because everyone uses stripe behind the scenes, and it just ports right over. They're all they subscribe to you. They don't subscribe to Substack, which then pays you. And it's a really powerful model, and it's a model that I think we should really be demanding of pretty much any service out there. I would even go a step further and say that we should not have stripe be the one payment processor that everyone uses. We should have options, and we should be able to switch between those options if they no longer serve us. But that degree of interoperability and that freedom to leave was so powerful that I mean, I would be stuck on Substack if it wasn't for that. And I have plenty of complaints about Substack, don't get me wrong, but I have a lot of respect for some of this stuff that they do as well. And one of the biggest things is the fact that they do let you leave. If it's not working for you, you can just leave, and it's really not disruptive to you or to the people who read you, which is so key.
Audience Member:
Thank you so much. That was worth the badge.
Mike McCue:
That's awesome to hear. And by the way, Molly, I think there's two other things that would be great to relay here that are related. So talk a little bit about RSS and the importance of that piece.
Molly White:
Yeah, so I am the biggest RSS fangirl in the world.
Mike McCue:
Do you guys know what RSS is?
Molly White:
RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication. It is just a format that most web readers know how to read. And if you publish something, if it's a Substack post, if it's a tweet, if it, well, maybe not a tweet, if it's a toot on Mastodon,you know, if it's a news article, it doesn't matter. You can enter the URL to that website It into an RSS reader and get every new article from that website you can create. It's basically like your own personal morning newspaper, where, if you follow 10 newsletters, and you don't want to, just like have your email inbox flooded with these, these newsletters, and you don't want to open 10 different tabs to go to each different one, you throw it in an RSS feed, and you read your feed every morning, and it's all right there for you. And if they decide that they don't want to publish on whichever publishing platform they're using, they just leave. As long as they have the domain, your RSS feed will be unchanged. And it is so so powerful to be able to have that degree of control that is not dependent on any provider. Doesn't matter which server you're using, which service provider, which publishing platform, because it just uses that one simple format and it will always be available. Yeah.
And then one other thing that I'll recommend is, first of all, make sure that you've turned on the RSS switch for your blog. Sometimes the platform you're on has it off by default. Make sure you turn it on, so that way Molly can discover your writing, right, and other people like Molly can discover your writing. The other thing too is, look, you should create an account on the social web in the fediverse. So for example, an account like on Bluesky or on Mastodon. This is, this is another way of you owning your followership, getting you don't have to switch off of Twitter, but you can create a new account and get people to start following you there, because those are your followers, and they will be your followers forever. And that is a big deal. And I would just build on that a little bit to say that a lot of publishing platforms are allowing you to federate directly. So WordPress, for example, you can federate ghost is working hard on it. You know, there are a handful of other platforms that have learned that it's really important that people have places to read what you write that are not just their email inbox and whichever social network you cross post to, and I'll just say, and you're getting a lot for your badge. Now, one other thing I'll just throw in there is,
Mike McCue:
I run an app called Flipboard, and if you haven't heard of Flipboard before, it is an amazing place to discover great writing, great videos, great podcasts, especially when they're in RSS and especially when they're on the social web. So people on Flipboard, there are millions of users who follow topics. They don't follow people so much. They follow like, Oh, I'm interested in, you know something. And so if someone writes about that thing, it is likely to show up in front of that user. So it's an amazing way to get discovered, especially when you're a new creator. And so making sure that you you're in RSS, making sure that you create an account on the social web, and then once you have that like, make sure that you go create a Flipboard magazine which is compatible with all that stuff, and more people will discover your stuff. So it's it. There's so many great tools to get discovered out there that are totally open and don't, don't impede on your ability as what you want to write about and how you want to be as a writer.
Audience Member:
Hey, I've got a two parter, but I'll say it quickly also, and you can kind of craft your response when you talked about you've got content at mollywhite.net, and then you do post to Twitter or Instagram, it still feels like you're giving up some control or ownership on those platforms if you do that. Like to hear a bit more about that and the number two, so much of what you're talking about ownership and then monetization, it still feels like a nice use case to me for a decentralized, immutable solution. So I'd like to hear also your your anti web three discusser here, tell me, share with me a little about both those two.
Molly White:
Yeah, for sure. I think it depends. I actually not to like plug my own writing, but I have an article on digital ownership that goes into this. A little bit about it really depends on how you define ownership.
So for me, I own what I write, even though, you know, I own what I've been writing on Wikipedia for 20 years, even though I've been publishing that under a free license where anyone can take it. A lot of the stuff that I write is freely licensed, and anyone can copy it, they can republish it, they can put it in a book and sell it. For all I care. I still have control over that in the sense that this is mine. It is attributed to me. I take ownership of it in that sense, and republishing it, syndicating it to me, is not a relinquishment of control. It is really just sort of republishing. I would say so to me, it's not in conflict, but I do understand that there are people who believe that you know, unless you know they have the full control to publish something, delete it, edit it, you know, take it away from people. That is not control. For me, that is not how I define it.
When it comes to decentralization and sort of publishing, you know, on a blockchain or something like that, there are certainly services that that promise to do that for you. It is not something that I find particularly compelling, because it is really not solving the problems that I have.
You know, generally speaking, a block, you know, an immutable blockchain, is very good at making sure that if I publish something, no one can ever change what I've published on the server. I have never run into that problem before, where I published a blog post and then I came back to my website the next day and someone had changed it. You know, that is not the threat model that I'm dealing with, really, and so it's never been particularly compelling for me to put my work on the blockchain. But you know, for some people, maybe that is their threat model and that's valuable to them, and I encourage them to do that.
Audience Member:
Hello. Hello. There we go. I have one and a half questions. First of all, OG Flipboard user from the original iPad days,
Mike McCue:
Awesome!
Audience Member:
And actually also a Ghost user. And there's a British hosting company called Midnight, which is slightly cheaper, nice and ghosts, I broke my self install many times. So I just like, same like, I just like, I can do. So one quick, this half a question, Is your website? Is that a stack that you created, of, like, is that what tools you made that yourself the Yeah, so Molly white.net, is just me and a text editor, you know, like, from, was that, like, the updates you post, you're not going into h, are you going into HTML and writing stuff? Or you have, I have a little editor that I wrote myself that is so buggy for humans that don't do that. What would you do? What would you suggest for that kind of to replicate that kind of
Molly White:
Yeah, so I was actually just talking before this with Mia. So for people who don't want to write their own social feed, which I assume is the vast majority of people who are normal people, there are actually a lot of really cool micro blogging services out there that will allow you to post in a very similar sort of feed style, where it's like small chunks of text or photos or whatever. Micro dot blog is a really cool one. Highly recommend, that you can syndicate out if you want to. You know, even WordPress, people will will do that type of publishing, and then you can syndicate out very easily. There are a lot of ways to just sort of get started and then find a solution that you know is perfect for you. So maybe the meteor question is that's cool. You're broadcasting to all these social networks, that tech, that technology that's existed for quite a long time, and all the closed social networks. Like I'm thinking, for example, at the end of the day, LinkedIn is a social network that nobody likes to post on, but they do, and nobody likes to read on because they feel like they should, right? But that's the way LinkedIn works. So you have to post to these closed networks. I mean, Bluesky and Instagram promises to go on the fever, so that's cool, or threads, I should say. But there no one's there. Like, if you look at the fault the people say on Bluesky, if you look at The Verge, I think it's like 40,000 or, like, not a huge amount of people. And if you're using those social networks for engagement and discovery, you kind of have to be there. So just pushing stuff out to those networks is not sufficient. You need to engage with those networks. So how do you think about, like, cool? You're efficient at posting now. You're across 39 different networks. You have to go you have to go. You maybe can't get on the closed social networks, but you can get on the semi open social networks. How are you surprised what you can do if you're motivated? Okay, but how do you think about that? Because you ultimately need to engage on these shitty networks that maybe you don't want to spend your time on, but that's where your audience is. It's cool to be on it on Bluesky. You're shaking your head maybe, maybe not, but tell me I'm wrong. No, no, I 100% see what you're saying there. And I actually think that one thing that's really important is to understand that it's, it really cannot be unidirectional. It cannot be just me screaming into the void, you know, like, what's the fun of the shower? Thought, if someone doesn't come and make a funny joke, and then you laugh and you respond and, you know, that's the point of the social web. It's not just me influencing from on high. You know, that's sort of like it has to be a bi directional thing. And for me, if I'm not willing to have those engagements with people and just interact with people, then I don't cross post there. It's not worth it to me. I don't want to just be standing at a microphone like preaching to people. It feels gross to do that. It feels influencery, you know, like we use influencer in the title. I don't really think of myself as an influencer, because it has that weird connotation of, like, inauthentic, just sort of like engagement bait, like, you know, but the reality is that, you know, it the word influencer is very much like the word content creator, where, like, everyone is kind of an influencer, and everyone is kind of a content creator, and you can be that thing.
Authentically by having those conversations, by shitposting back and forth. And so you're right that it is impossible, through, you know, my website, to to have both sides of that conversation. I have thought about, you know, it would be easy enough, in a technical perspective, for me to make that possible. I don't necessarily want to, because I feel kind of gross about taking people's comments from a website and putting them on my own website. So I don't do that.
But one thing that I do do is, every time I cross post to any social network, I link to it, and then in those you know, if you go and look at the Twitter version of what I've written, I'm talking to people. I'm making jokes with people. I'm having those conversations. The same thing is happening on Mastodon, the same thing is happening on Bluesky. And yeah, occasionally is a little annoying, because you'll have the same conversation in two places and they can't talk. But I bet they will soon. I bet Mastodon and Bluesky will be pretty easy to put together, and pretty soon it'll be Twitter. That's the weird one that doesn't have that. And I think that's going to be incredibly powerful. And I was just going to sort of comment about the quality versus quantity things, so that the numbers on Twitter seem good, but the level of engagement that I see, at least personally I can say on Bluesky and Mastodon, is probably 10x what I get on Twitter, you see the same thing, 100% Yeah. So, so you're saying we need to put bots on those platforms? Yes? Well, it's not just bots. It's the quality of engagement, right, overall. But you're right. The Bots thing is a big deal too.
Audience Member:
Hello. So there are a lot of musicians whose primary medium is obviously audio and video. How would you approach digital sovereignty with an emphasis on Discovery, if those were your preferred mediums.
Molly White:
So it's certainly not my area of expertise. I mean, I do publish audio, in the sense that I record spoken versions of all of my newsletters, which, if you write a newsletter, highly recommend doing that. It is such a great way to reach people who do not have the time to sit down and read 3000 words, but who have to wash dishes sometime and they want to do something when they're doing that, don't the AI voice is annoying to most people. They can tell, I promise it's getting better, but they can still tell, read it yourself. It takes a couple hours to record an edit, and it's worth it.
But I would say that, you know, the technology is really going to be the same. RSS is what podcasts are built on. You know, you can share your your songs on RSS the same way I can share my newsletters. You can share, you know, you can post them to a website that you control, and then share them across social media, you can publish a video to YouTube, where you get people on YouTube who follow you, but you can also publish it to PeerTube, or any of the other sort of open video platforms where you're reaching people who care more about, you know, privacy, for example, that they don't want to use YouTube and So, you know, there is this sort of this technological ecosystem out there that's available to you where you can use just sort of a grab bag of what's out there, find what works for you, find what you know resonates with people, and then, you know, do it in a way that you find comfortable, that is, you know, a degree of control that you find acceptable.
Audience Member:
Thank you.
Audience Member:
Hi, so I work for a magazine, and we're currently dealing with this issue where we want to switch from 1e commerce platform to another, but we don't own our subscribers, like you were talking about owning your followers. So I'm just curious if you have any ideas about federating like E commerce platforms, because that seems to be not really as much of a thing right now, but probably should be, yeah. I mean,
Molly White:
I think that it's sort of what I was alluding to earlier, where this is something we should really be demanding of the platforms that we use. You know, if your you know, e commerce website is sending emails to people. That means there's a list of emails somewhere that should belong to you, right? Like you're the one who's been creating the products that you sell to them. You are the person that they're subscribed to because they want to read what you have to say. There is no reason that that should be unavailable to you as someone who is using that service. And so I think it's really important that we demand that these platforms make those things available to you. The same thing is true if you have a payment relationship with a customer, that should be a payment from the customer to you, not a payment from the customer to the platform that then, you know, out of the goodness of their hearts, gives you 90% of it or something. Are there any platforms that you think are doing a good job at that right now? So there are open source e commerce platforms. I haven't used them myself, so I'm a little hesitant to recommend anything. But you know, there are platforms out there that are taking a good.A you know, approach to this that that have those things in mind.
Audience Member:
Thank you.
Audience Member:
Hi. This has been a great education hearing you. I'm Peter Gordon. I actually teach in Full Sail University's film MFA program, but I'm here to learn about all this stuff. My question, well, actually have one and a half questions, I guess, like the other person said, my question is, really, have you just, have you thought about doing video in addition to all the writing, and if you have, and what do you think, and would you start doing that more? Yeah, I have, that's what the youths like I hear these days. And
Molly White:
I gotta stay hip, I think, yeah. So, no, I do do video once in a while, it is a lot of work. My enormous respect to people who do video on a regular basis, because, God, there's a lot of work that goes into that. But I do think it's a really effective medium for some things. You know, I think, I think my strategy has always been to decide what I want to tell people, and then figure out the best way to tell it to them. And so sometimes that's a newsletter, sometimes that's a website, like web three is going just great. Sometimes it's a video. And so I have done, you know, I have a YouTube channel where I've done longer form videos where, you know, if I want to teach someone, like, for example, I did a video on how to become a Wikipedia editor in 30 minutes. That's a tough thing to teach in a newsletter, you know, or in a tweet, but in a video, it's pretty easy, and it works really well. And so, you know, those are the types of things where I try to use video. It's something I do want to do more of, because I do think that it's important to meet people where they are. And there are a lot of people who are watching videos and not subscribing to email newsletters. You know, that's just a fact of the world and and so, you know, making sure that what I have to say to people and what I want to teach people is getting to those people is more important than, like, what I personally am most comfortable doing, but it's challenging to do. You know, it's a totally different medium. It's a totally different set of skills. And so it's been a work in progress for sure.
Audience Member:
Thanks. The other one is, what breed of dog do you have?
Molly White:
I like to call him the rescue special. He is. He is, according to one of those DNA tests that his sibling from the litter got, he's a pit bull, Husky German shepherd. And then, like 14 other things, and I got him when he was four months old. They told me they thought he would be 30 to 40 pounds, and he is 80.
Audience Member:
Thank you. Thank you.
Audience Member:
Hey, Molly, hey, great, great session. I'm a journalist. I went from print to video sew, and I have a studio in my house, so I feel your pain, trying to translate what you can easily write down and your thoughts, and then trying to translate that into a video and educate people on a subject. I write about big tech. I specialize. My articles are centered on surveillance capitalism, threats posed by tech based hybrid warfare from China and at this year's South by Southwest, I've been covering AI copyright infringement, the lawsuit, namely the one that Scarlett Johansson has filed, and I've been interviewing content producers, directors, Actors and so forth. And I just kind of want to get your thoughts on that as well as I want to validate what you said all the publishers I work with, and I work with a lot around the world, as soon as I get my media contract with them for freelance work, I redline out the fact that they could own my IP, and I own all my IP, and if they don't want to publish me tough crap. You're not getting my expertise on the subject matter, so, but I want to get your subject matter on AI copyright infringement, what's going on, plus your a little bit of thoughts on surveillance capitalism, because aside from web scraping, they're collecting all of our information off our phones, our texts, our PDFs, all of our content. So we're being hammered when we put our websites up through web scraping, and then when we're trying to communicate on our connected devices, all of that is also being surveilled in data mine for profits without compensation. Yeah, so I guess I'll take the first one, first, which is AI and copyright.
Molly White:
Personally, I don't think that copyright is the weapon with which we should fight the AI battles. You know, if it comes to AIs being trained on your work, I don't think trying to use copyright as the legal basis to challenge that is particularly effective. I would strongly support or strongly recommend that you read Cory Doctorow’s work on this. He gave a really good talk a couple days ago. I don't know if you're able to make it, but, and I'm not sure if it was recorded, but it was on is titled something like tensions with generative AI and creators, where, frankly, copyright is not a tool that best.
Benefits creators as much as people like to say it does. Often, copyright is a mechanism for people to sign away the rights to the things that they create, not to preserve them for themselves. And I think that we would be better suited to trying to attack the issues around AI such as that they meet, they may be with things like labor law and, you know, the rights for collective bargaining to, you know, set the terms under which I am comfortable with an AI company using the work that I create to train their systems. But, you know, frankly, I was born and raised in the Wikimedia movement, where we believe in creating the sum of all human knowledge, which is freely available to everyone to benefit from. And sometimes it's challenging for people in the Wikimedia movement to grapple with this, but that does mean big tech too, and like I am, the last person to celebrate big tech and it is sometimes painful for me to think about the hours and hours and hours of writing that I've done on Wikipedia being used by big tech companies to make massive profits without any credit or without any compensation. But frankly, that was the point. It was to create free knowledge for people to access, whether it's going to wikipedia.org, and reading the article, whether it's going to chat, GPT and asking the question, if that knowledge gets to them, I'm happy. And so using copyright to try to constrain the availability of information to people is really not something that I support when it comes to surveillance and ownership of your own data, I think encryption is an incredibly important tool that everyone needs to have in their toolbox, making sure that your messages are end to end encrypted. Fighting for the right to strong encryption and not allowing policy changes that threaten encryption is going to be huge, and then fighting for a very strong privacy law, which we absolutely need. That's one of the things I'm advocating for, is an electronic bill of rights. And I provided a policy change proposal to Congress through my senators on an electronic bill of rights to protect us from the threats posed by surveillance capitalism and everything that's going on.
Mike McCue:
Very good. Well, thank you. Thank you everybody that's all the time we have. I want to thank you guys for attending and great questions and Molly, thank you for leading by example and all you've done for the Internet and by extension, US and writers everywhere. Thank you, and thank you for all of the amazing work that you've been doing with the open web and the federated social web. It's really incredible. Thank you Molly. Thank you everyone.
Well, thanks so much for listening. You can find Molly at mollywhite.net
You can find Mike at @mike@flipboard.social.
Big thanks to our editors, Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
If you're interested in the topics covered in this podcast, check out Surf, a new product from Flipboard that lets you surf the social web and create your own custom feeds. Learn more at surf.social.
Until next time, we'll see you in the fediverse!