PJ Vogt didn't set out to build a social network. But when the Search Engine and the Hard Fork teams launched the Forkiverse — a Mastodon instance for their listeners — thousands of people showed up, and something that felt like actual community followed.
Dot Social’s Mike McCue talks to PJ Vogt, host of the Search Engine podcast. PJ is also a co-founder of the Forkiverse, a Mastodon instance launched with the Hard Fork team as an experiment in community and a concrete way to show how a decentralized social network can work.
The conversation is a timely reminder that the internet is still something we can — and should — build together.
Highlights include:
01:50 The Forkiverse origin story
06:37 “The best way to talk about this is to try it”
14:30 Reactions to The Forkiverse
19:52 Social media as IRL social gathering
22:13 RSS podcasting: strengths and how fediverse helps with hard parts
25:08 Thinking about further integrations
27:52 Great promises of the fediverse
30:04 Slowing down and trying new things
33:04 Next steps for The Forkiverse
36:20 PJ’s answer to the “media apocalypse”
39:22 How PJ got discovered
42:10 Search Engine’s amazing sound design
45:00 The quality of media now
46:46 Reasons for creators to join the fediverse
Mentioned in this episode:
🔎 You can find PJ @pj@theforkiverse.com
✚ Connect with host Mike McCue at @mike@flipboard.social and @mmccue.bsky.social.
🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the open social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new product 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.
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the open social web. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to leaders and builders who believe that decentralization makes for a better internet.
Today Mike's talking to PJ Vogt, host of the Search Engine podcast. PJ is also a co-founder of the Forkiverse, a Mastodon instance he launched with the Hard Fork podcast as both an experiment in community and a concrete way to show how this technology works.
Mike and PJ get into the origin story of the Forkiverse, what surprised PJ when thousands of people showed up, and why he thinks the Fediverse is a timely reminder that the internet is still something we can — and should — build together.
We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Mike McCue:
PJ Vote. Welcome to Dot Social. It's great to have you here, man.
PJ Vogt:
I'm so happy to be here.
Mike McCue:
And welcome to the fediverse.
PJ Vogt:
I have been enjoying my tentative first steps into the fediverse.
Mike McCue:
Well, as your reward for being in the Fediverse, you get to be on one of the world's geekiest podcasts. This is a, this is a place where we talk about, you know, federation instances, all things fediversian. So, welcome.
PJ Vogt:
Being on a geeky podcast is one of the few places in the world where I feel at home.
Mike McCue:
Well, you know, I think the first question I think is the one that everybody really wants to know, which is now given the meteoric rise of the Forkiverse, is it going to be the Forkiverse.com Are you going to drop the, the,
PJ Vogt:
oh, that's a good question, I guess. So, I guess that is like a natural part of the evolution of any, you know, gigantic social network, is that at some point that
Mike McCue:
exactly? Yeah, it's.. it's.. I was, I think, with a lot of people absolutely blown away, and incredibly excited that that you guys, you and Hard Fork, Casey and Kevin, decided to do this with, with the Forkiverse, and you know, I'd love to hear the origin story of it, and you know, one of the, one of the things, for those who don't know, PJ is the host of the Search Engine Podcast, he's been a longtime podcaster, and the Search Engine Podcast is designed to answer questions that keep you up at night, it's deeply researched. It is magnificent storytelling and beautifully, beautifully presented. And that podcast, there was an episode, I guess it was what, two years ago, where you asked the question was, you know, what are we going to do about the media apocalypse on the internet, right? And that was the first time I ever heard you mention the Fediverse. Had you had you heard about it prior to that?
PJ Vogt:
I don't think so. I mean, if I'd heard about it, it had been filed into the category of things that, like, I think all of us encounter in one context or another, something that feels intimidatingly complicated, that you, you know, a billboard seat on the highway, and maybe you're going to need to know about that place, but you're going to put it off, because maybe you don't have to learn about a complicated thing. So, if I knew about it, it'd not come into the focus of my imagination, and the reason that, for me, and it happened on Mic, I was interviewing Casey Newton, and he told me about it, but the reason that was the moment where it snapped into me, stepped into focus as a thing that I wanted to know about, is because he was saying this might be one of the possible solutions to the mia and muck of the internet as we're finding it right now, and so at that point when somebody says there might be a better way for this place that you love and have complicated feelings about. At that point, I felt like, okay, I guess I have to learn.
Mike McCue:
And what was I remember you saying, look, hey, to your listeners, if you, if you're interested, you want to learn more about this, let us know. If you want to talk more about kind of geeky things like the Fediverse, and so, so what happened then?
PJ Vogt:
Well, if I'm totally honest, that was kind of a dodge, you know, being a podcaster is a kind of pseudo democratic profession where you can tell listeners that they're going to get to weigh in, and then you can kind of decide you're in control of the inbox. The show looks like it's my brain, but it's like my editor, Shruti Pinnani, are the producers who make the show, Garrett Graham and Emily Maltaire. It's like it's a hive mind and sort of a PJ Vogt suit, and so at any given time, like different people might be differently curious, and I was on the less curious side of it. But what happened was both internally, like Shruti in particular, was really curious, and then also the listener response was really, really pronounced, like we got a higher volume of emails about that episode than almost anything we published, and we publish on topics often that are more normal email generating discourse objects, you know, we did a GLP-1 piece two weeks ago, like the. Into the thing, where you're like, yeah, I know people have strong feelings. I was surprised at the depth of feeling, and I think what that suggested to me, and which I think was true, is that, like, the Fediverse has a large moat around it of obscurity, of, I don't know, like you have to learn to get there. It has friction. It has friction in a way that most of the internet that is really popular doesn't, but people are so poisonously tired of the frictionless internet, and where that frictionlessness takes them. To me, the volume of email said, like, hey, people are willing to learn about something that might be kind of difficult to get to or difficult to understand, because they're just so hungry for alternatives at this point, and that was how I felt too.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, yeah, and I think people feel like they're losing something, they're losing agency, they're losing community. It's harder and harder to discover really great storytelling on the internet now. I listened back to that episode again this morning in preparing for this, and it struck me how prophetic it was. There's so much that has played out, in fact, even more, probably at multiples of what you and Casey were talking about, as it relates to AI, and you know, the where these social media platforms are going, and the toxicity involved in them, and so it was, it was, yeah, it's very timely, and it's, and it's incredibly timely now, two years later, so you, you started to, you started to do some research, then I guess on the fediverse, from that point,
PJ Vogt:
we started poking around. We started.. we, so we kind of.. we started to build an episode that was the kind of episode we're used to building, which was like we were talking to folks who've worked on ActivityPub. We were like, 'Let's.. let's sell this as a.. like, how do you tell the story of something complicated? Okay, you can tell this as a culture story about people. So we started talking, and we had these like wonderful stories and wonderful interviews with folks who'd like actually work to help bring this into existence. I'm bad at pronouncing last names, which is messed up because I have a hard to pronounce last name, but Evan Prodromou,
Mike McCue:
yeah,
PJ Vogt:
Prodromou,
Mike McCue:
yeah,
PJ Vogt:
who was like,
Mike McCue:
yeah,
PJ Vogt:
could a part of the internet have a better ambassador, just like brilliant, friendly. He really gives you that feeling when you talk to him, of like, I want what he's having, internet wise. And Evan was both really helpful as, like, an off-mic resource, but, like, we started kind of building, just like a well, what, who are the kinds of people who were so annoyed by the internet earlier that they started working not to try to make a bunch of money at a startup, but try to like build something different, and it's funny, the interviews were fantastic. It's very rare that we have fantastic.. we talked to Christine Lemmer-Weber, too. Yeah, great, she's amazing. It's like rare to have great interviews and then not build a piece around it, but there was something about it where just like, wasn't quite cohering. It was like we were asking you to care about something, you, the median listener, here's this: you agree with these people on the problem, but we're asking you to spend 45 minutes with them, hearing about them building something that you're going to be confused by the whole time. It's like the American tax system sucks. There's these people with a different idea for how to do taxation, but you can never picture the tax system, so it's just like hard. It was like hard to build, and it was never quite getting made. And then I'm sure it was Sruthi's idea at some point, like I'm saying we, but it's probably Sruthi. We were like, well, what if we just like, what if it's a different kind of story? What if the way we learn about this, show it, do it. Maybe it was Kevin's idea. Anyway, someone had the idea. The best way to talk about this is to try it, and we should try it with Hard Fork, because Casey was the person who told me about it, because Kevin is, I think, like a brilliant tech experimenter and like self experimenter, and also because it felt true to the spirit, as I understood it, of federation, like you know, podcasts can't literally federate, but what if we tried to do this as like a joint intellectual project instead of one person, you know,
Mike McCue:
yeah, and then that led to the episode, was it January of this year?
PJ Vogt:
I think that seems completely possible. I never sure what month it is. Yeah, so we, so then we made an episode where we announced what we were calling our new social media platform, which is puckish self-aggrandizement, I hope the Forkiverse, but we opened up an instance on Mastodon for listeners to both of our shows, we got a huge volume of people behaving kind of the way that I guess I had been hoping they would behave, which is like the sort of less discourse poisoned less. Less sort of spammy. I'm describing this all in negative terms, but the internet that I remember falling in love with, like people making silly jokes, connecting over shared interests, or the real feeling of like the excitement of building an invisible community with strangers, instead of all the feelings that for me social media has evolved into which don't almost ever feel that way,
Mike McCue:
right. And as a podcaster, you know, how did you feel about that? Like, all of a sudden you're now talking to your audience in this more interactive way.
PJ Vogt:
It's funny, I felt both excited because podcasting is a sort of one way broadcast, and I have a real curiosity about the other side of that broadcast, and also I mostly, I really, in a both like what is good for me way, but also in a like what kind of citizen do I want to be way, I really try not to use social media, like I'll use it as a here is an episode of the new show, if you want to listen to it, way, but I think that you know, like, if I think that, for instance, micro blogging has been kind of generally not great for us, I don't want to complain about it on Elon Musk's micro blogging website all day, so I try not to use it, I use it sparingly, when I use it, I feel like I'm relapsing,
PJ Vogt: 11:20
So it was weird, even though I actually think the fediverse is really different. I think, for instance, on Mastodon, the fact that you can build a non-algorithmic feed that is not intentionally causing like pain and discourse to make you click more, like I think that's a meaningful difference. I think it, that the architecture of the internet really informs the way that the communities and structures treat each other, but I just had this kind of real anxiety about being back in even I thought a much saner, more thoughtful version of a place that I feel like I think better and act better the less time I spend there, but so yeah, I guess I'm more describing a psychological thing for myself. I felt anxiety because it reminded me of the internet. I don't like the experience I was having on it, was not that experience.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, and I remember, in fact, it was really fun listening to that episode in January where you guys are like different snippets of time building this thing, and I loved how, like, your first experience being on there, and there was there was nothing in your feed, and there was nobody posting anything, exactly. And then I thought, what was really great was the way you guys described how the fediverse works, where, hey, you can follow people who are posting from threads or from PixelFed, and so I thought it was probably the best kind of explanation of the fediverse to your median listeners and to others who haven't really heard of this or don't know what it really don't know what it really means, just by kind of walking them through the steps of like, okay, now I'm following people, now I'm seeing some stuff, and now there's people replying to me, and now they're following me, and it was, it was really cool,
PJ Vogt:
It was fun. I mean, it made me understand that, you know, one, I don't know what anybody's job is on the internet anymore, like, the jobs have gotten weird, but, like, one of the ways that I shorthand my jobs, I'll say, you know, I'm kind of a tech journalist, kind of, and, but most of what being a tech journalist right now is, is sort of trying to document the strange and scary power being wielded, right, but it was nice to be in the other mode, where you're just like, here's this newish thing, here's how it works, here's what it feels like to use it, we don't need to particularly like hold it to account, like it's no one here is a billionaire trying to like put anything in your brain, like this is just this is a kind of website you could visit. It was in many ways this felt like the good version of nostalgia. Like, yeah. Do you remember a time where we were had made some different sort of turns in the road, and, and in that way, to where you're just like, here's the thing, you can use, here's what it'll feel like to use it, here's where you can sign up.
Mike McCue:
I also really liked that you guys each had different roles to play. You're, you're, you're the growth guy, and you know what was really cool is that you grew it by talking about it to your audience, as opposed to some viral growth hack, and upload your contact database, and you know, spam everybody in it. You really, I think, how you grow helps shape the community, right? So, obviously, I think you knew that you were going to be talking about this on your podcast, what did you think that the reaction is, and how did that mesh with what actually happened?
PJ Vogt:
I was surprised at the amount of people who showed up. I think we had like 10,000 users pretty quickly, and I was surprised at how well people behaved. Like, we had there's a little bit of moderation work to do, you know, you had. Like I don't think there's any room small enough that you're not going to have sort of trolls and weenies show up, but it was very few trolls and weenies, and it was mainly just it was nice that it felt like it worked, that like you can have a discreet community, like I think it, I think I expected, I think I feared it's easy to fall into a kind of nihilism about the internet, that there's something about the architecture of itself that, like, inexorably leads to the same place, and I think I was worried that we would recreate it in miniature, and that's just not what happened, like it just really was, you know, curious nerdy people having the thrill of connecting with curious nerdy people, and it, it was the delight that you get, it was the anxiety and the delight you get when you host a party where you, you're like, I hope people have a good time, I hope this is a good guest list, I hope like nobody steals my silverware, but then the sort of like the mild, like euphoria is too strong a word, but the joy when it goes off, okay? And you're like, oh, I think these people like each other, I think some of these people are gonna make plans without me, you know? I think that's what it felt like,
Mike McCue:
yeah, yeah, and I loved the photos, I remember at the end of your, your episode, there you encourage people to post a photo when they were listening to your, your podcast, that was super cool, the range and dynamic dynamism of all those photos, oh wow,
PJ Vogt:
yeah, and it's always the thing, I mean, like, again, like podcasting is great, but it is, I mean, you and I are talking, and then all these other people are gonna listen. I love podcasting, but I hate how bounded it is by that. And it was just nice to start to hear from listeners. I think one of the things that social media in general kind of struggles with is there's so much talk about community and the importance of community, and the excitement of community, and I really care about community, but I think sometimes when people say community, they actually just mean audience, like I want a community that that listens to the things I make and buys tickets to the shows that I do, I do want that community, like, but that's an audience, and what felt cool about what seemed to be happening on the forkliever verse was community. It's like people are answering questions for each other, people are making connections. The podcast was a signal flare to tell people there was gathering happening somewhere, but once they began to gather, it felt like the thing was evolving the way you want communities to like it had some discernible values, it had definitely a discernible vibe. There was a flavor to it, like you could, you could talk about the filling that room not just as a place to promote content, and that that was, I think, more than I had hoped for, and really cool to see happen, and I think I don't know, to me, that is the I don't want to say lost promise of the internet, but the sometimes obscured promise of the internet, and something that I find more easily in the fediverse. The downside being it's hard to get to, and you have to explain it to people, but if people can find it, if they can get there, it feels very special,
Mike McCue:
yeah. And I think you know, you simply saying, 'Hey, go to the Forkiverse.com from your podcast episode. People, it's easy to sign up, it's not
Speaker 4
hard. And then
Mike McCue:
everyone is like, kind of knows what to do. That's an experience that's kind of like old school Twitter, and you know it is. It was really cool to see the range of folks joining. The other thing I thought was really interesting was you launched this with two podcasts, right? So you had two different, you know, groups of listeners coming together. I actually did. I posted a survey in the Forkiverse, of course. I got a Forkiverse account that day, and sent a picture of where I was in. I was in our little gym, you know, working out when I was listening to the podcast. So I sent a picture of some weights, and so, but then I posted this poll, you know, I said, Which of these are you, Search Engine, Hard Fork, or both, and 45% of people said they were Search Engine, 17% say they were Hard Fork, and then 35% said
PJ Vogt:
both. That's really cool.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, and like, you know what's really wild about that is, like, almost 70% of people were one, or they didn't know about both, right, or they, they, they knew one or not the other, so I, the cross pollination of audience, but also, you know, the opportunity for people to discover another podcast,
PJ Vogt:
yeah, and like, you know, it's like, it's, it's weird, a lot of times I analogize, analogize social media to. So real life social gatherings, and there's this, there's a writer I really love, named Sheila Hetty, as she's like a Canadian, mostly essayist, or that's not true, she writes essays and trades fiction and auto fiction, but she wrote this book years ago called The Chairs Are Where the People Go, and it's this book that's sort of about a friend of hers who's really good at social gatherings and community, but it's funny, it's like on its surface it's literally how do you throw a fun event, and like one of his points is don't put all the chairs up front in the standing room in the back, put the chairs in the back in the standing room in front, so people can sit on the floor, like the chairs are where the people go, and it's just like this little architectural thing that's reminding you that the architecture of a place shapes its behavior, but I felt reading the book at the time anyway that there was kind of that it was a little more philosophical than it was totally admitting, and there's this other part in the book where they say that what's really wonderful about a great party is that you'll have all these people arrive with actually like what you would kind of describe as like ulterior motives, like maybe there's somebody who's looking to meet someone to date, maybe there's somebody who's wants to network to find a job, whatever, everyone's actually coming in because there's something they want, but their combined wanting, if the place is set up right, generate something much bigger than what any of their combined wanting would suggest, and I think that's sort of in what you're describing, which is like, yeah, it's like one of the promises of social media is like you can promote the thing you want to new audiences, but then when it works, something else happens, you know what I mean, like something cooler and less narrow, although also the joy of, like, promoting your stuff to more people, or I think the people that like this might like this, like that. That is like that's what brings a person like me in, in a lot of ways. Just like, my, you know, I'm a Casey Newton has this joke that he's an email salesman, which I think is really funny.
Mike McCue:
Yeah,
PJ Vogt:
and I'm like a recordings of my voice salesman, you know, wandering the internet, just sort of like hawking my wares, but then you know something else gets made, and that something else I think is just valuable.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, there's like a holistic sensibility that comes together when you have like Hard Fork and Search Engine are two very different kinds of podcasts, but I, I would imagine it appeals, certainly for me, that's the case. You know, there's a certain, like, if I like hard work, I'm probably going to like Search Engine, and vice versa. It's the personality of you guys, but also the, you know, the, I mean, it's the overall vibe of both, and even though they are quite different, I do really love the idea of those different audiences being able to talk to each other and weigh in on different things.
PJ Vogt:
The strength of RSS podcasting, like, not sort of what podcasting seems to probably be evolving into, but podcasting, as I'm used to it, is that once people find you, it's really sticky because it's subscription, but the finding is really hard, and so it's it has this pro and it has this con, and an experiment like this is great because it helps solve for the part that's hard. Like, I love hard work, I listen to hard work. I will sometimes, as a person who makes stuff, listen and be like all the other people at this party who I can't see. I think some of them with like Search Engine, and I wish I could wander in and try to be charming, or whatever. And so it's nice. I mean, it's like it's nice that you can do it in this other sort of forum.
Mike McCue:
You guys kind of joked about, like, oh, we could add Joe Rogan's podcast in here. What other podcast could we add? Is that a growth strategy?
Speaker 4
It's
PJ Vogt:
funny. I mean, I'd be really surprised. I think a lot of things in the world would have to be different before Joe Rogan joined the Forkiverse. Honestly, there was a moment where I was like, should we be talking to just like other podcasts that are, you know, how do I describe this neutrally, just like more that have more obvious cultural similarity to us, more like, and also just like more like it's funny podcasts right now, the kind of podcasting I'm doing, not all podcasting, is at a more indie sort of bootstrappy size, which has its challenges, but which I actually really like, and the Forkiverse and the fediverse. There's just.. there's something sort of genetically similar about the the scope and the mission of those things.
Mike McCue:
It's very interesting too, because I haven't really seen you do this much yet, but you know how you ultimately could use the fork verse to inform a podcast episode, or vice versa, you know, you know, posting episodes into the Forkiverse, or posting, you know, additional material into the fork verse that that was part of an episode that you did, or you. Know these are all these all seem like really interesting other places to experiment. Have you thought about that kind of stuff, like you know, more integration into the into the podcast themselves?
PJ Vogt:
I haven't, and I should. It's funny, I'm just like, where does my resistance? I don't know, I haven't. Yeah, it's a good idea. It's a good idea. I, it's like, I think I've, I think, because I've interacted with it the way I'm like in my head, I'm like, do whatever you would have done on the internet when it was good. The way I used to interact with the internet when it was good, my opinion was that I tried to be as rarely promotional or as really talking about my own work as possible, I was really like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna have an anti-promotional attitude here, which I don't, I don't know that that's actually as necessary on the Federverse, because I think that was like the non-Federverse social media is just much more commercial, and so it's this funny game where listeners, the audience wants authenticity, but you're not actually there to be authentic, you're there to sell, and so the way you then sell is to not sell and be authentic, like that was like the millennial stance towards promoting your digital content in 2014
Mike McCue:
yeah,
PJ Vogt:
but on the fediverse, like, it's the endeavor itself is not particularly commercial, and so you don't, I think it's actually okay to be like, and I think people on the fediverse are just thrilled to see people engaging with the fediverse, engaging with it deeply, engaging with it differently. So, I think, I think the honest answer is, I haven't been doing that, because I've had some unchecked assumptions about social media etiquette that I'm transporting from a different internet onto this
Mike McCue:
one. I'll tell you, though, as a listener, you know, having listened to an episode and then seeing you post additional stuff about that behind the scenes, you know, insights or an article you read that was particularly insightful, or you know, maybe another podcast episode people would love to, you know, what? What podcasts do you listen to? These are all things that I think people would absolutely love to hear in the Forkiverse, right?
PJ Vogt:
You're totally right,
Mike McCue:
and you know, not in a promotional way, just in like an informative way, you know, you're, you have people are attracted to the ideas and thinking that you have, and Casey and Kevin as well. I think that's one of the, that's one of the great things you get about being, you know, part of the Forkiverse, right?
PJ Vogt:
Yeah, and I think it's like the thing to always remember when you're like a person making things on the internet, is the people following you are curious about your work going there. Yeah, they're happy to have more of it, and if they change their mind, they can follow you, like
Mike McCue:
they join the Forkiverse, man. They are into
PJ Vogt:
it, yeah. They've demonstrated infinity for Hard Fork in search,
Mike McCue:
yeah. Well, and there's an insight there too, because I think that, like, a lot of what's wrong with the internet, increasingly, is this surfacey thing that you have, people don't go, you don't, it's much harder to go deeper on things, and even with AI, and you can ask it follow-up questions, it's still going to be surfacey, and you don't really get at the real sort of core work, and you don't get storytelling that helps you understand it better, and, and so, being able to discover that deeper, those deeper stories to me is like one of the great promises of the fediverse, because it's not there, they're more likely to be seen, and, and so, and I think when people are really into something, they really do want to go deep, they really do want to understand it better, right? And it's harder and harder now. It's all YouTube Shorts, and you know, TikTok, right?
PJ Vogt:
I really struggle with it, because I, the place where I don't know where to land intellectually is a middle-aged, you know, and it's a trap of middle age to the second you hear the sentence come out of your mouth, things were better when I was younger, you're just like you're in trouble, like your brain is doing what it wants to do, and which I really see as my job to avoid, like I believe that I believe at its core I think it's like a premise that I always have to challenge, and I look at the internet as it exists, and like I have a memory, I'm cursed with a memory, and like I don't know there I can enjoy myself and find things to enjoy that teach me things or that inspire my curiosity or that tell me a story on TikTok or on Instagram Reels. I'm not saying that there are not smart people making worthwhile work in these forums, but the forms make it much harder, and most of what is there is really.. I feel not just like, oh, this isn't. For me, like, I feel gross after using it, and I don't want to, what I.. what I'm sort of.. what I've been just trying to figure out, and I don't have answers, I have just have questions. Is I remember what I liked, and I also think that nostalgia on its own is just an insufficient answer to the present, but I also don't want to be so open-minded that I pretend that I think like channel serving for four hours, the absolute most like lowest common denominator like manic content is like what I want to lend my mind to, and part of what appeals to me about the fediverse, and like, I think the greater movement that seems to be around it is one of the things I see it asking is, well, if the problem with the internet is that it's gotten too good at giving people what they want too fast, you know, maybe we want something slower, maybe we want something that, like, almost intentionally has friction, but then the problem is, like, how do you reach people with that? Like, how do you.. one of the ways that people find Search Engine, which is so funny to me, is if you go on TikTok, every so often someone will post a TikTok where they're like, these are podcasts that will help you cure your brain rot, and those ideals, and I'm really appreciative of that. And it's funny, it's, you know, it's like a cigarette that has an anti-cigarette advertisement on it. I mean cigarettes, right? If you lung cancer, but like people are using stuff that creates in them the desire to something, find something else, and what that something else should be, and how it finds those people who want it. Those are like questions I find myself asking the internet more and more and more.
Mike McCue:
If you're really curious about something, you just want more about that, you want to go deep, and I think that's part of what gave rise to, you know, indie creators who were like, look, instead of just writing about this thing in a newspaper magazine once in a blue moon, and kind of just doing one article about it, I'm going to go and, like, build an entire, like, go deep on YouTube and, like, get really get into this for, for every day, that's that's the thing I think with the Forkiverse, hopefully you know that can be like this really great place for experimentation, and you know there's it's no cost to experiment with this stuff and try, try different ideas out here. How does how does podcasts intersect with communities?
PJ Vogt:
Yeah, and you're reaching an audience that has demonstrated an appetite for something new, and who has demonstrated like a real affinity for the work that we're doing at Search Engine, the work that Casey and Kevin are doing at Hard Fork, and so it's a very good place to try new things, which is one of the things that we're always looking for,
Mike McCue:
are there other next steps that you have in mind for the Forkiverse? Are you,
PJ Vogt:
I'm thinking a lot about community and rooms, and I'm thinking a lot about how do you build things that describe without falling victim to the things I don't love about the internet, and the things I don't love about the internet that are present, even when the internet's not there, like not literally there. And so, yeah, it was funny. It felt appropriate to start, like it's a rough sketch towards something, something, but it felt appropriate to start talking about live stuff on the fork reverse, because in my head the fork reverse is like the social network for people who believe there's something fundamentally wrong with social networks, but also want to meet other people like themselves and know that social networks, unfortunately, are a great way to do that. It's funny, I fell out of habit in the beginning, the four covers had this momentum of just like it's a new thing,
Mike McCue:
ah, right.
PJ Vogt:
And then you know, like everything that's ever put on the internet, there's a K curve,
Mike McCue:
yeah,
PJ Vogt:
and so it's quieted down, and weirdly, that made me want to start posting it, not so much because I was trying to spike the growth curve back up, even though technically that's my job, but more just that I like online spaces that are a little bit weird and a little bit quiet, and so I've been sort of poking my head quietly back out on there.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I love it. Yeah, some of these scissor statements, you call them scissor…
PJ Vogt:
…statements, like it's a, it's a statement that immediately kind of like sorts everyone reading it into two possible categories, like the most benign scissor statement was the dress, which either like blue and black or white gold, and then the most malignant sister statements are like everything that's been posted on the internet since Donald Trump became president. So I was like, as a sort of a joke, I was, I was trying to start non particularly spicy, non particularly poisonous. Fights discourse, discourse. Let's try to generate discourse on the forkverse.
Mike McCue:
Well, I'll tell you, as a member of the Forkiverse and the fediverse, I love it when you guys post stuff like that, especially stuff that you're only posting on the Forkiverse, you know. And that's just that's great. That's why people are there, they get a chance to hear more from you and, and others as well, and so I love it. Keep going, get Kevin, get Kevin to post more.
PJ Vogt:
I will, he's a.. I know he's deep in his book. Maybe I'll, maybe you can post some excerpts once he's ready.
Mike McCue:
Go exactly, exactly. Yeah, people love, you know, creators and want to be part of their journey more, and you know, a lot of times, if it's only just one, they only get to experience that creator in a podcast episode, that's great, but they definitely want more. They want to know what, what are, what are you guys listening to? What do you, what are great podcasts that you recommend? Well, okay, so to kind of bring this to, you know, a point here. You started by asking the question, what are we going to do about the media apocalypse two and a half years ago, or whatever. Do you feel like you have now started to find some answers to that question, or do you have hope?
PJ Vogt:
I definitely have hope. I definitely have hope. I think that I have, like, three views on this, so for a certain kind of person, and like a category that includes me, which is like people, you know, I started working during, like, right after the financial crisis, 2008 so a pretty tough media market. I was there for a moment where there's a little, there's money sloshing around, and you could make things, and sort of investors who thought they were going to make money off those things that were mostly wrong would fund them, and it was great. It was like you had lots of budget, and you could spend it on work for listeners, and that moment's over for now, and so now I'm in this moment where I think there are some of us who are fortunate enough to have found followings in sort of the higher tide, and the question has just been like, well, how do you make money in a different environment that's more independent, and we're finding it out, the answer is through a mix of listener support, you know, mainly that is about people wanting to support the work we do, but we try to make it worthwhile for them, and an ad model, it's the ads are not as valuable as they were in 2019 but like it can still, between the two of them, you can make a healthy, ethical business where you are not beholden any much to one revenue source in a way that you know distorts what you're doing, and it's actually like it is hard, it is hard scrabble, it's super rewarding. I actually really like it, and I have a lot of conversations with people like me who are figuring that out, so that's that's good. The thing that I find more worrying or more pessimistic is I feel that I am able to do that because I have been doing this job for 20 years and there are people who've been following my work for many years and I don't know if I were 21 what institution I would intern at where I would learn, I don't know what the beginning of the ladder that I am precariously in the middle of looks like that. Said, I think that's the story of the internet, and I think that's the story of media, which is that things are always being destroyed, money is coming in, money's coming out. I think this is a moment for people to make things of pain and contraction, and I don't want to minimize that. There's really talented people I know who are looking for work, even to find things they don't love. That's happening, but for people who are young, who are trying to figure this out, I just know that when I started trying to make the things I loved, there was no clear ladder, and I just kind of looked and looked and looked and got lucky and found mentors and worked really hard and in that order and found a way and so I think like it is possible right now it is hard everything's always changing and the people who figure out ways to do it are always arriving I don't know how a new person does it but I think there are ways.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, how did you get discovered?
PJ Vogt:
I was a college student who loved This American Life, and I would listen to every single episode on burned CDRs, driving from Philadelphia to Montreal, and I applied to be an intern. They improbably accepted me to be an intern there. It was like the best six months of my life. Maybe it was such an amazing learning environment, such generous teachers there, and so that was like my foot in the door of audio. And then I was a temp employee at a WNYC show for you. Years and then staff employee there for a few more years and then started trying to work on my own idea with a friend for like what I wanted to make differently, I think like I was getting to a place where I felt like there was a gap in terms of what I wanted to hear and what I was hearing and I started trying to make stuff that sounded like that space,
Mike McCue:
and so that was Reply All.
PJ Vogt:
It was actually TLDR, which is like, oh, wrote a reply all. So we, Alex Goldman, who I worked with, it on the media, we had there's this like the station had a contest where they said anybody who works here, and he doesn't matter what your job is, you can pitch a show, and if we like the show, we'll let you make it, like you work in the mail room, doesn't matter, and they ran the contest, and then very reasonably the people they picked were people who had great ideas and a track record, and we had no track record, and I don't know whether the idea was great or not, but they liked it enough that they told us they liked it, and my boss at the time, Kathy Rogers, she was like, you guys can actually still make this, you just have to do it as kind of a nights and weekends thing, and so that was like, how do you tell stories about the internet in a way that people who live on the internet don't feel like a lot of things are being explained that they already understand, like, can you just treat the internet as a place that is not sort of a foreign country to the listener, and so we started doing that. It was really different in that it was like I was editing it, I didn't really, I was figuring out what to do, how to edit stories in front of an audience, not for one, and it's like it's primitive and rough and whatever, but that was the building blocks of figuring out reply all, and then after reply all crypto island, which sort of the building blocks of figuring out Search Engine, but yeah, it's now been, I mean, I've been working in audio since 2008 and I've been making sort of work on the internet for the internet about the internet since 2013 or 2014 it's been a long time.
Mike McCue:
Wow, yeah. And the sound design on Search Engine is so fantastic.
PJ Vogt:
Armen Bazarian, he is
Mike McCue:
unbelievable,
PJ Vogt:
Just unbelievable. He, the his ability to make like he, so he's not here in New York, um, he's in Canada, and I make this joke with him where I'm like, I feel like we're playing chess by mail a little bit, like Shruti will have this idea in her head for how to structure a story, and there's like a music she's hearing, I'll have an idea for the words that I wanted to say, like the writing, and then Armin will just like his sound design, it is this like other voice in the story that's so I don't know, he just he has like both like I think a real town for Musa, but also like you can really feel his feelings in it in a way that I really love. Sometimes a story will come back from him and I'll I'll just like hear it differently. We just did a two part series on driverless cars and both their development, but also this, this real question about what they're going to mean if they really deploy for human workers, but also human lives. And his music just did something in this story that I hadn't heard until I heard it with music. It was really cool. It's a nice feeling to work with people that you're in awe of, and I'm really. there's nobody on our team who I'm not regularly looking at, just being like, how does your mind do that at that speed? It's crazy,
Mike McCue:
and it really, you know, you get this, you sort of feel transported to another place in mentally, you know, you, it's it's hard to describe, it's like you just, you finish the podcast feeling smarter, and like that was a healthy good thing that I just did for my brain, right?
Speaker 4
And
PJ Vogt:
that makes you so happy to hear
Mike McCue:
it. Is it? Is it? Is like that is that is it. And and it just that sound design and the way you pause and break up the story and how it all connects, it's just fantastic. Yeah,
PJ Vogt:
well, I just.. I so appreciate that. I just want to make sure, like, I just say so much of that is like I really feel like, because it's my voice, and like I contribute to the show. I work here, I work here very hard, PJ Vogt:
that feeling that a story has taking on a journey intellectually, and it started with a question, and you wondered about the question, and then it went a bunch of places you wanted to go, and then you landed somewhere else, feeling like you'd arrive. So much of that is our editor, Sruthi Pinamini. She just has this like real magic for.. and it's funny, I'm a decent editor, and we've worked together for years, and we've just gotten to a place where she's just like outpaced me, and she'll, she'll just sit down with raw material, where I'm like, I enjoyed it, but I don't know always how to evoke that feeling that I think we evoke in our best, and she just, it's crazy, she just sees it, it's really, we're really, for I'm really fortunate to get to work with the people that I work with.
Mike McCue:
When you think about the media apocalypse, I guess in some ways change is good. I think that the quality of media now, compared to let's say 30 years ago, there was nothing like Search Engine, maybe there was NPR, I know, all things considered, but
PJ Vogt:
I mean that is one of the traditions we're aiming at. I hope that when you think about what's good and what's bad, I hope we're one of the points for what feels good, and I hope that for people that are trying to make stuff, the stuff I love, the podcast I listen to that inspire me, it's not just that I admire their craft, it's that I think there's an audience of people who want to sit in this room that this person has built for me, and I hope that people who listen to Search Engine, who make stuff or want to make stuff, understand that the audience that we're trying to satisfy, they exist, they're out there, like not everybody wants stuff that is imagining the cheapest, most bored version of them, like there really is hunger out there for work that respects the listener's intellect and time and curiosity, and there's both, like, you can build a business appealing to it, like it's, you don't have to starve, and it's like immensely rewarding. It's immensely, immensely rewarding to try to build the internet that you want to find, you know,
Mike McCue:
yeah, absolutely. And you know, if the future is more Search Engines, more PJs out there diving into the things that they're deeply curious about for their audiences, that's a great future. And I think, you know, the great from my vantage point, collaborating with all the different people that are building the Fediverse, I'm, I feel like I'm part of Team Fediverse. I'm helping to build, you're now part of Team Fediverse. All these different people are collaborating together. Some of them have been building the web for a long time. I was originally at Netscape. There's other people who are just brand new building things, and that mix is all geared around making more Search Engines happen, and you know, there's the discovery component, there's the community component, there's the monetization components, there's some fantastic work going on now that will allow this world to thrive and to be somewhat easier, not quite as hard to do, but I think, and ultimately, the thing that's so exciting to me about the Fediverse is that it is the first time we've had a standard for human connection online. I mean, yeah, when I was at Netscape, that was kind of the thing I wish we had done was come up with a model for how people could just a standard for how people could just be connected online with a follow graph and stuff, and because we didn't do that, that hole was filled by the major social media walled gardens we have today, and ironically, I mean, we just wouldn't, if we had done that, that we would not be, we would not have a whole host of the challenges we see today with social media. What we did, what was the case, is that we created things like RSS, which podcasts are built on, and so now you can listen to your podcast anywhere, right? And so I do think that there's an opportunity for we in the fediverse, who are building, to to collaborate with you and other creators to build, you know, the the capabilities and the user experiences that ultimately allow more people to discover more great podcasters, and for more great pastors, podcasters to build a sustainable, you know, you know, concern around that, right, and actually build something that, that, that has years of life to it, and so that's really exciting.
PJ Vogt:
Yeah, and the thing I would say to any creator who's like thinking about whether or not they want to join the Fediverse. Is that the two things, the two pitches I would make. The narrow one is there's audience there, and the audience is just like a nice audience, just like sweet, enthusiastic people, and like the kinds of people you would want to enjoy the things you make, but also the thing that Fediverse reminds me, as an internet user, which is the thing I'm always trying to remember as an internet user, is like everything that stinks about the internet right now is that it invites you to only be a consumer and to be the worst kind of consumer, like half adult, barely paying attention, you know, the worst synapses in your brain firing, and the internet still, even this year, in 2026 is something that we built, like we all build it, and we can build as much of it as we want, and we can build it however we want to build it, but the Thetaverse, once you join it, I think is a place where it does a better job of reminding you that you can and offering you ways to do it, and I think that's really worthwhile. I think it's, I think it's, it has given me a little bit more a feeling of. Agency that I'm not just like a subject of this internet, and I really recommend
Mike McCue:
it. Yeah, wow. Well, PJ, thank you for everything that you've done as a creator, podcaster, and now also as a newly minted fediversian.
PJ Vogt:
Thank you. It's very nice place to be.
Mike McCue:
Thank you, PJ. Thank you for spending time talking about all this.
PJ Vogt:
Thanks for having me.
Well, thanks so much for listening! You can find PJ @pj@theforkiverse.com. Mike is at @mike@flipboard.social
Big thanks to our editors, Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
If you're interested in this podcast, you might want to check out surf.social/discover to explore thousands of community feeds being built on the open social web.
Until next time, we'll see you in the fediverse.