The author of the quarterly Twitter Migration report (and indieweb.social admin) shares his expertise on thorny issues, including the exodus from X, navigating disinformation, and why moderation is better in a decentralized world.
The Fediverse is not a monolithic place. It’s constantly evolving and being shaped by smart, passionate people who want to make sure that the open social web is better than the social media we’ve had before.
One steward everyone should know is Tim Chambers, the co-founder of Dewey Digital out of the Dewey Square Group, a public affairs firm in Washington D.C. Tim is the author of the quarterly Twitter Migration report, which tracks the exodus from X and other trends unfolding as a result. He is also the server admin of indieweb.social, a 1,500-strong instance on Mastodon where he learns by leading.
Tim brings an informed perspective on many of the most important elements of life on the open social web. Highlights from this conversation include:
💰Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon
🔎 You can follow Tim on Mastodon at https://indieweb.social/@tchambers
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at https://flipboard.social/@mike, or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the Fediverse, at https://flipboard.social/@mike@flipboard.com
💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
The culture of the Fediverse is not one thing. It's constantly evolving, filled with smart, passionate people who very much care about where it's all going. These people want to preserve the qualities that make the metaverse a better place than the social media we've had before. Things like trust, safety, privacy, connection and conversation matter here.
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media. Each episode host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement. Someone who sees the Fediverse has tremendous potential and understands that this could be the internet's next wave.
One steward everyone should know is Tim Chambers. Tim is the co-founder of Dewey Digital out in the Dewey Square Group, a public affairs firm in DC. Tim also produces the quarterly Twitter Migration Report, which is essential reading if you're following social web. He is also the server admin of indieweb.social on Mastodon.
Today, Mike's talking to Tim about everything from the exodus from X to navigating disinformation to why moderation is better in a decentralized model.
We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Tim Chambers, welcome to Dot Social.
Tim Chambers:
Hello, sir. Good to be here. Very excited to be here.
Mike McCue:
I've really been looking forward to talking to you about everything that has been happening. You know, I of course, you're well known for the Twitter Migration Report, among other things, you know, running indieweb.social, and but the the Twitter Migration Report, you know, which you came out with? What was it about a month ago?
Tim Chambers:
Well, actually, it's been quarterly reports all the way back to the very beginning. So the very first report was actually four weeks after Elon walked in with the sink, and after the purchase happened in October. So it's been a year long set of reports.
Mike McCue:
I'm excited, because I think that, you know, the Fediverse really is something that needs to be evangelized. And a lot of people don't know what it is, or if they do, there's just a lot of different things to think about how the world will operate, the world of social media will will operate going forward. And that's one of the big reasons why I thought it'd be fun to talk to you. When did you first start your love with?
Tim Chambers:
No, that's a great question. Actually, it was very early on, I think it was about 2019 or 18, that I first started joining the Federalist and started to learn what that was about, and starting to kind of understand some of the tech behind it. And it was about five years ago that we started into web social, which was sort of the next stage of learning, right? This was just building that out. So that really, my team and myself could understand it the best way possible, which is to start trying to build it.
Mike McCue:
Tell us a little bit about what your team does, what you're focused on. Is at that got you going with the Fediverse.
Tim Chambers:
Okay, that's great. I'm from my day job. I work at a public affairs firm in DC, called Dewey square group. My group focuses in on a few types of clients. We do old school web development, as you can imagine all the things that go along with that web dev, social media advertising, online, social media management, online ads, everything. And then a second whole section of what I do is targeting and tracking disinformation, that would be coming at the kind of clients do he has, and giving them the earliest possible warning of what disinformation is coming at them, and the earliest possible sense of what countermeasures they can do. And the Fediverse, and everything involved in it, as you can imagine, really applies to both sides of that. And that's also where the Twitter Migration Report came. Because once the purchase happened, the whole landscape really changed. And myself and my clients all deeply needed to understand which end was up. After that I speak to you today bringing the sense of a developer and a researcher, and someone who deeply understands the harms that the mainstream platforms have had, in terms of disinformation, a lot of those were systemic to the platforms. And then a love for the Fediverse because I see a chance to rebuild a better social home, a better social place and a lot of the harms that have been happening on the mainstream networks, it is possible that these emerging networks as they become mainstream, can do better, can create a better structural incentives and can be a safer, better place to do social.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, and that is a noble cause. Of course, we have to understand what the problems are in order to prevent them from happening. Right I one of the things that's been a little A challenging I think, is that a lot of the Fediverse development has been cloning the existing applications and user experiences, right? There's, there's a desire for people who are coming over from Twitter to have it work, like the way they expected Twitter to work. So there's a mix of challenges. On that front, when you think about the most important things that we should be keeping in mind, as we build out this new world, what are some of those for you?
Tim Chambers:
First off, I think you're exactly right, in the sense that the early efforts in the Fediverse have largely been can we create sort of a clone of what came before? I think that's kind of been the norm a technology the first films were basically film stage plays. So there's commonly the idea that you you start off mimicking the medium that occurred previously. I think there is huge amount of room for innovating in the user experience of microblogging. I think that microblogging is well, well beyond Twitter, or now x. And even X is trying to become an everything app. So it's trying to move beyond just pure microblogging itself. And I think when you look at emerging experiments in the Fediverse, even in microblogging, you could see that evolution starting already. I'm a big fan of something called Phanpy.social. Like if you go to Phanpy dot social, which is particularly gifted designer, just creating a new UX for Mastodon and the Fediverse for microblogging in that space. And to me, that's one of my favorite of any of the user interfaces across any of the platforms, even the major mainstream Threads, Twitter, etc. And then I also think from the trust and safety perspective, there's a great deal of work and understanding and building out what a distributed Trust and Safety Network is when you have a Fediverse of 20,000 servers as we do today. Or as that grows to be hundreds of 1000s of servers, and how that itself could be better than the silos have in their sort of centralized Social Media Solutions.
Mike McCue:
You know, you're touching on two super important areas, right, the user experience and the back end, moderation, starting with the back end moderation for a second to dive in on that a bit. When you're looking at the way the Fediverse operates. You have all these instances run by all sorts of different people, companies, you know, et cetera. Do you believe that this is inherently a better model for managing misinformation than a sort of pure centralized model? Or, you know, are there inherent strengths and our weaknesses to this approach?
Tim Chambers:
Sure. I mean, disinformation is a gigantic challenge to every platform of every type, centralized or decentralized. I am persuaded by some early research that shows the benefits of decentralization or at least the potential benefits of decentralization in this space. They specifically looked at the idea of how many moderators occur compared to the users. And the idea that on the Fediverse, with 20,000 30,000 servers today, depending on how you count it, you have at least that many moderators, most servers have more than one. And then comparing that to the centralized silos, where places like any of the meta platforms or Google etc, the numbers that they have the numbers that TikTok, even when they have 1000s of people on their trust and safety teams. And by the way, they've recently been cutting those dramatically. Even so, the Fediverse has the opportunity to have a much better ratio between moderator to user. And I actually can give you an example from just my own experience. So in the web social has 11,000 registered users, which kind of surprises me I was doing that as a pure labor of love and an experiment. It's kind of cool that it's grown to the point. About 1500 of those are monthly active users different number shows up every month, but that's about that. And we have three moderators. So if you look at that our moderation for active users is somewhere around 500. Like one moderator for every 500 people. The Digital Services Act has required the major platforms, the very large platforms that are operating in Europe, to be able to say, Well, how many of your active users and then how many are your moderators? And I believe the number from Twitter was only 2200 moderators serving all of Europe. Wow. And the number of moderators from TikTok. Serving all of Europe, my memory is that it was about 6100. Wow. So there is this sense where you could have a much higher least a potentially far better trust and safety army in a defederated model than you could in a centralized model.
Mike McCue:
That is a really, really interesting observation that, you know, also presumably, more localized as well, right?
Tim Chambers:
Yes, I think you're exactly right on that.
Mike McCue:
Because a lot of times you don't know any centralized moderation teams, they don't know whether something is disinformation or not.
Tim Chambers:
Yeah, imagine you're on the team that is, you know, in charge of, you know, pick a country France, like you have the entire country that you write that you and your team are moderating against my, on the Fediverse. In many cases, it's medium to small servers that have very specific communities. Sometimes it's good to themed communities. So not only would you have moderators that know the local scenario, and the local languages, in depth, you'd have moderators that know the topic areas that many of the people are doing, and in theory, they would be able to sniff out and authentic content much earlier. And one other factor, again, using my example, all of our users know, our moderators, and there's direct relationships between them. There's no sense where that exists, other than submitting a form, you know, to Facebook or submitting a form to YouTube, there is no relationship between the moderators and the users that can be on the Fediverse. Wow, now. So like, I think all of those would be in the plus column. There is a negative one, the Fediverse a challenge in that because they are a labor of love. And you could make the argument well aren't many of these moderators, just amateurs, and in many cases, they are people kind of like myself or others, that created something because they just wanted to build a community. And they are not, in some cases, actually not mine. But in some cases, they are not trained in trust and safety things. In that regard, there is an effort that I'm helping advise that I think is really important, I wanted to put into your field of view called IFTAS, I-F-T-A-S. And that is an effort at a sort of one organization that can help any admin on the Fediverse that is looking to up their game, and to get support as a moderator. So that can include best practices, how to do what you need to do as a moderator, general, like recommendations or thoughts on how to do block lists, all of the sort of nuts and bolts of being a moderator, but also to share best skills, and that if disinformation attacks were to happen, that there could be alerts where different moderators can speak with one another.
Mike McCue:
Right, because collaboration for moderators is incredibly important. That's right. I mean, there's there is a certain amount of collaboration that happens now with see Sam,
Tim Chambers:
and actually, I would say, there was a story, I could tell you that we have the muscle memory inside the Fediverse at doing at scale moderation. A number of years ago gab.com, forked the Mastodon source code, and intentionally said, like we are planning to federate deeply into this new emerging network. Wow. Yes. And for those listeners of viewers that don't know, gab, they are a free speech, extremist organization, that is their self described who they are. And there is a high degree of Nazi and other hate content that is perfectly fine from their perspective to be hosted off of gab. And so they're entering the Fediverse immediately would be violating the terms of use and the in any of the servers that had signed on to the Mastodon server covenant, right, which is a best practices covenant that many many admins sign on in terms of how to and what to moderate. In instantly, the Fediverse was able to kind of talk with one another, share notes with one another, I was able to help that. If you ever do a search on a hashtag isolate gab. I, myself and a number of others led the charge on how to alert and educate everyone on just what was happening. And so that anyone on the Fediverse for whom gab would grab content would instantly violate their Terms of Use. Were able to know that know what to do and collectively, all of those servers blocked them. Wow. Our our overall effort was it's a free Fediverse They have the right to speak but it is also the Fediverse has built into it. respect for freedom of association Shouldn't as well, that point of
Mike McCue:
Respect for freedom of association is such a great point. Because you know, sometimes you think terms of social media or community as being one thing, one homogenous thing, and it isn't. It is inherently decentralized, right, and who you associate with who you want to spend time with, that should be within your control. And that's one of the beautiful things about I think how the Fediverse has evolved is to, is to give people that control.
Tim Chambers:
I completely agree it was a beautiful part of what the original creators of the Fediverse did. And if you think about it, it also built on the ethos of sort of the web in general, is very much a part of that whole sense of what the web should be. I would also note, by the way, that a year after the Isolate gab movement happened, the gab.com people basically decided this was not working the gave up and ended up like turning off Federation. So it it fully was sort of the first stress test, I believe, now of the Fediverse dealing with content at that scale. And it is something that I think especially those of us who are there, like carry with it as lessons for the future.
Mike McCue:
One of the things that I've been struck by is when I go to, you know, Mastodon or Flipboard, dot social are sort of standard Flipboard instance, and I just look at the Fediverse. I don't see all this toxic content and misinformation. And when I go to Twitter, it's a very stressful experience, because you're just inundated with misinformation. And you when you think about like, well, what's do where, where am I seeing that? Right? It's it's trending, the trending column. It's the four you feed posts being, you know, put into the for you feed. It's people that I followed, mostly just to try to keep track of but it have kind of gone haywire. I remember when the banking crisis was happening, and Silicon Valley Bank was going out of business, I was on a flight to South by Southwest. And I made the mistake of just logging on to Twitter and checking it out. And it was just the most stressful moment I've ever had on Twitter, everyone was shouting at everyone else. And it was, it was just creating more of that chaos and fear that had led to some of the very problems that were that Silicon Valley Bank was, was dealing with, right? When people get, you know, fired up, and they say this bank is going out of business, and then they all run to to take their money out. You know, that's where misinformation, disinformation has this incredible. That's one example of the really problematic effects. Had I not even looked at Twitter, I would have had a perfectly fine plane ride, you know, and would not have been anywhere near stressed out or worrying about the banking system. And you know, so I, you know, that was the day I took Twitter off my home screen, and put it deep into my into my home, on iPhone. And now I only look at it purely as a research thing just to understand what's going on. And it's amazing, the difference between my Mastodon experience and that Twitter experience.
Tim Chambers:
Yeah, I think I think what you pointed out there is the structural nature of this, what I mentioned earlier, a lot of the harms, the disinformation that is spreading, and then just the general, as you were kind of describing negative or toxic content isn't purely accidental. A lot of it is in the design of the major platforms. Yeah, as you see them focus so much on being purely ad driven to the point of every algorithm is there to keep you as plugged in and angry or at least engaged, whatever as much as possible, to keep you on as long as possible. And then to sort of micro target you to be able to sell the most targeted ads possible to you like that combination equals the kind of experience you just add, and add equals that I think in varying degrees to all of the platforms. But now, especially lately, inside of x, there is a phrase that Ezra Klein used that we thought was brilliant and sold immediately. It was called Exodus shock. And he said that every so often very regularly, there's something that happens inside of X that causes this exodus shock, something and the wave of individuals start to leave or start the process of migration at various levels. And that was really what our Twitter Migration Report was all about how to how to best quantify and track with zero opinion, like just purely the facts of what's happening inside of x, that particular three month window. And then as meticulous as we can with data, what is happening in terms of people starting to or fully migrating to other places?
Mike McCue:
When the people that have joined in the dot social is that yes. Are there any folks that joined that from the Twitter migration? Or were they all you know, they joined earlier?
Tim Chambers:
What's kind of interesting is we can say, pretty definitively we are 1% of the Fediverse. When you track the amount of people that we are and the amount of activity that we have, that's about where we are, but that's a big enough sample to be able to watch the whole. Yeah. So absolutely. When we, when the waves happen that we marked in the Twitter or X migration reports, we saw those exact same waves in indieweb.social, just to micro degree, but it was still adding hundreds of users a day during this sort of big waves and adding dozens of users a day during the medium ones.
Mike McCue:
And how did the moderation change? If at all? No.
Tim Chambers:
Sure, sure. So it was a there was community management beyond just migration, there was a lot of community management of just welcome to this thing called the Fediverse. Like, here's how it is, here's how it's different. Here's how it's similar. And then in terms of moderation, we purposefully overbuilt and are doing so again, in preparation, whenever we think Threads will federated, that we will be overbuilt for moderators for whatever spike may come. I will say this, it surprised us at exactly when and how big that spike was. And we probably grew by 1000 or two users very, very quickly. Right after, like the October November timeframe around the purchase. And then in waves, since it was just something you could scale like so that wasn't it wasn't anything that another moderator or two could not help with. And that kind of speaks to our earlier part of the discussion about distributed moderation has its strengths.
Mike McCue:
Right? Are these full time moderators?
Tim Chambers:
No, well, full time, if needed, but so far, we've not needed more than part time.
Mike McCue:
And they did I hear you right, that they're doing more than just moderating. They're welcoming people, they're kind of connecting people.
Tim Chambers:
Community management is how we think of it.
Mike McCue:
You must know Mike Fraser, who runs the Canadian social instance, one of the things that's really interesting that Mike does is he told me, he follows every single person that joins the instance, and tries to maintain that relationship with every single person to build that sense of community.
Tim Chambers:
That's brilliant. That's brilliant. It is amazing to see the different communities form. And it is amazing to see how each one has their own personalities. There's about 10 different servers that if I wasn't running this, I'd be on theirs. And it's great that it is not as it is not siloed. Yes, we have our own communities. Yes, we have our own sort of personalities to each one. But we can connect up and become part of the whole, which is, you know, that was the whole point. And
Mike McCue:
When, when the one of your moderators, let's say decides to terminate a user's account, let's say that we're blocking users somehow, does that signal then carry over to other instance owners in any way? You know, in other words, is there any sort of mechanism for somebody just like, well, I just now I'm going to go create my toxic account on some other instance? Has there been any thought given to how to how to take one clear signal that this, this user should be blocked and prevent it from happening in other instances?
Tim Chambers:
Right, I understand totally. And that is a risk inside the Fediverse that, and I have seen examples where one bad actor was not only blocked by a large number of other servers, but removed from the main server that he was hosted on, and then quickly set up another and another and another. And then, you know, functionally on the Fediverse, he could have set up his own server and then run it on his own, so that he would, there is no I am not aware of any tech currently that in any sort of automated way would defend against that. But to me, that's where the concept of the community of admins comes in. And how this is something you could alert across sets of admins through if toss or through online, just communications in general across everybody,
Mike McCue:
I assume you've had your fair share of people have tried join as a spammer. And just, you know, how have you been handling that? What's that been like for you?
Tim Chambers:
Without question, there have been several waves of spam accounts created across a lot of different servers. On mine, for a long period of time, we didn't we have we were purely open. So we would allow anyone to immediately sign up and have an account very quickly on we could have picked up at least for us the best practice at being open, anyone can try to join. But we have a very simple single question that we asked them, which is why do you wish to be here? And it is kind of amazing the number of pure bots or automated spam or accounts that answer that question with a sales pitch for their product. So so that that simple act alone of putting up a human question, let us get rid of 99% of that issue. By the way, one other larger thought, I mean, not as simple as what I just described more of a longer term scenario. And one of the ways where I think it's fascinating to see things like the indie web, and web and blogging movement, joining the Fediverse. I do think now that WordPress has fully joined the Fediverse, with their activity, plug work pub work, that some of the work that they'd already done in spam, comments might apply. I haven't seen them even starting to think about this. But in my conversations with a number of different technologists, it seems like they're Akismet project, which was built forever ago, to deal with spam in blog comments, there may be pieces of that, that could help automate spam management inside the Fediverse.
Mike McCue:
I am a big believer in using a lot of automated tools like that to identify potential problems, and then what you're really doing, I don't, I think it's really challenging if that's what you just rely on. But But I think if you have people in control of these systems, who are moderators and they understand, you know, what, what it means to moderate, what you're really doing is you're creating bionic moderators, right. And enabling them to moderate at greater scale. And, and preventing at being able to capture problems sooner. So before they propagate through the network and harm is done.
Tim Chambers:
I do think by the way that assuming that Threads does federate, in, that that will be a thing that the Federation, the sorry, the Fediverse needs to manage, on our side, that I could imagine that there would be spammers that would create content now that they would have a much larger target of the Threads universe to go after Threads. So I think that's a thing that we on our side of that fence will need to be ever vigilant on. And it's something we need to do anyway. Do
Mike McCue:
You believe it's a good thing, net net, that Threads is going to federate? Is there a right way of doing it? Wrong way of doing it? What are you looking for there?
Tim Chambers:
Sure. Well, inside the Fediverse, in general, there's a lot of opinions and a number of people, especially in the early waves of the Fediverse came to the Fediverse to get away from corporate social media in general. So there probably will be a set of people who immediately are like, I don't want to federate with Threads. And I'm, I'm not going to at a server level or as an individual level. And I think in general, that's fine for them. That's sort of freedom of association, which we mentioned earlier. There's another camp inside the Fediverse. That is saying, I don't think that Threads will ever federate their their conversation about this is just language until they do they haven't and it's not real. And that would say I doubt that it ever will be real. And there is I guess, precedent for that in big tech companies. Apple originally said that they would have the iMessage protocol on Android. And they kept never doing it. So that could they may be right. I am in the camp now where I believe they will. They are all of them saying the right thing all the way up to Zuckerberg. And every chance they get to say the right thing. At every level all the way to the tech teams they are. I've actually had some conversations with some of the tech leaders where I was suggesting they could do some early breadcrumbs to show early nods towards the Fediverse. And they want example was I said you could adopt real equals me function inside the Fediverse that allows you to validate your account. And that would be a simple way to begin to do open social web validation of accounts. Something you'll need anyway. And, to their credit, very quickly, they got that live. So now you as a Mastodon, user can can cross validate your account with your Threads account in ways that are not proprietary. So those things all are sort of trust building, I still would say until they do it, it's talk. But it feels to me like we might be in only Nixon could go to China moment where a very centralized player, maybe the most centralized player, is about to open up to a decentralized social media. And I'm willing to see what that is. And I'm hopeful that it that it goes well,
Mike McCue:
It does seem as though they really are serious about federating and earnest about it. And I think that's a great thing. And, you know, you're, you're the, it's almost like the warm ups that we've had so far in terms of how to deal with moderation and, you know, dealing with, you know, the Gabs of the world and so on, you know, is helped a lot to prepare for this, this moment, and there will be other services that are large and have large numbers of users that will federate. And some of those users are going to be fantastic to have in the Fediverse. And some of those users are going to be a problem. And, and so there's going to be, you know, it just pressurizes all the systems and processes that we've that have been put in place so far. But I do I do think that like, you know, the the your experience that you've had, you know, talking with how you do moderation on your, your service and on your instance, and other things that we've seen so far with a lot of people joining, you know, the the level of toxicity that I've seen in the Fediverse is relatively low. And it's really, it's really quite remarkable just how the, it seems as though the decentralization model is finding a way to moderate I, you know, you're there's there are legitimate, specific, focused efforts to make that actually happen.
Tim Chambers:
There's a great quote from Matt Mullenweg, where he says people don't want to drill they want a hole in the wall. And I think it's in this analogy, people want a better social home. And decentralization is the way or one of the best ways to date at how to do that if you build the structures and the incentives, right? And then keep building them, right. Yeah. I also do like what the Mastodon team is working on now in terms of like evolving reply control. And I think that there's just tons of room for innovation. And I probably seen more innovation in the last two years, inside the Fediverse, than in many sort of commercial silos in the last 10.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, well, you I think you're getting at another really key point, which is that concept of decentralizing the innovation, right. I've, I've, you know, I've worked at startups, I've started companies, and I've worked at big companies, right. And I, it always is like this sort of, I was at IBM. And then I started my own company. And then I was working at Netscape, which was acquired by AOL. And then I started another company and work for Microsoft. And one of the things I've noticed in that, you know, contrasting the big versus small company thing is, big companies have budgets, and they can only allocate even though Microsoft is huge, you can only allocate a certain number of headcount to a certain thing, and it has to have a clear ROI. And there is a massive amount of competition for that headcount inside of a company like Microsoft or Facebook. And so what happens is, the innovation ends up being really tied to just like, however much the company believes in funding that thing, right, which is actually many times actually less than what a startup would allocate, right? The size of my Flipboard team, you know, is probably bigger than, you know, another team that was trying to do something similar, had big giant company. Because we're, we're 100% focused on this. And what's what I think is really interesting about the Fediverse is that allows a lot more innovation to happen from a lot more people and, and they can run their own instances, you don't have to build your own social graph. You don't have to build a whole new Facebook or sort of, you know, a mini version of Facebook just to get your social, you know, concepts working, right. You. There's so much that's already been built, you've got open source. So yeah, I do think you're right that the the pace of innovation as it relates to social media and the social web, I think is going to continue to accelerate and way better than if it was just we stayed in a centralized world.
Tim Chambers:
Without question, and then how to communicate that across each other how to tap into open source efforts so that everybody can benefit from everybody. I am noticing the mammoth app, which actually I helped with on some of the innovations they were doing on smartlace, opening up their source code, which I think is awesome. And as they launched their version two, seeing all the other applications in the Fediverse, space applaud was kind of amazing. And you are not stuck with one UI, you are not stuck with one technology, you're not stuck with one server, the firefish, server interoperating with the Mastodon servers, interoperating, with miski, interoperating, with everything, there is an incredible sort of soup on which to draw from. And they're also was a particularly boring state of affairs in the mainstream, or siloed commercial space for so long, that I think there's a lot of pent up creativity. And all the other platforms are basically becoming tick tock forms. And there's just not much else to solve there. If that's their goal, then it's interesting, what else can be built? Yeah, what else can come out of this? Yeah. And literally, who knows? It'll be it'll be a fascinating mix this year.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I agree with you, I think we are potentially starting to exit the world of just cloning, centralized systems, and moving into the world of really, truly innovating on now the very fact that we have an open social graph that everything is decentralized. You point about, everything's just becoming tick tock in the in the wildcard world, I so agree. And, you know, everyone's a generalist in that world, right? Everyone has video filters, everyone has, you know, direct messaging, everyone has their version of, of, you know, a four U feed etc. And, and they're just all just variants of the same thing. And whereas with the decentralized model, you really can have people specialize in a particular thing and do an amazing job at it like you could have, I could see somebody build unbelievably cool video filters. And that's all they do every day. And it just works inside of the Fediverse. Right. And they don't have to build all the other things that you need to have in order to even just have a service up and running.
Tim Chambers:
One other piece, by the way, that I'm very hopeful for this year, is the build out of a robust activity pub test suite. I've been helping sort of cheerlead for that and to pull resources together for that and working with a team on that. And it seems to me an incredibly, it might seem like techie boring thing, but also equally, super important, both for the job that you just mentioned, to be able to sort of drive that so that not everyone has to build their own version of some sort of test environment. But also, as more and more platforms enter into the space, as WordPress has. And as we think Threads may, and then others will, there needs to be and currently isn't a very robust test suite so that people can say what interoperability means. So happy to see we'll starting to move on building that test suite out and in on my blog, and on my social will be like reporting in on that as it goes.
Mike McCue:
It's just another, you know, another example of how decentralized innovation is really probably ultimately going to cause much bigger ideas to come from the Fediverse. In the in the coming, you know, year or two, then anything that we see from the walled gardens in terms of any major new breakthrough, or innovation and how social media should work. And that's incredibly exciting tools like that, enabling that to happen. But another thing, of course, that I think has been a challenge in the Fediverse is for any kind of commercial funding or commercial development or, you know, real, you know, major investment dollars, you know, in that world. What's your take on this? Is this always going to be just a grassroots kind of thing? Is there a pathway that you see, for this becoming a bigger, more mainstream? You know, this is the way that social media happens.
Tim Chambers:
I mean, I think I think you're already seeing a ton of different business models happening. I mean, you're leading some of that. So Flipboard social, being run by you building out obviously the client with more and more and more Fediverse functionality. He is awesome. I'm watching very closely, what other commercial efforts are doing have medium has launched their version of that where it's empowered by their trust and safety team, how Mozilla is sort of quietly building out their community that will launch at some point. But the more they do, the more interesting it is, as you see that, and that might integrate into the browser, or then identity systems in interesting ways. And so those are all full on commercial efforts, as you see wordpress.com, enter into the space that was welcomed. And I think there is a, whereas early versions of the Fediverse might have been concerned or allergic to this sort of thing. I think that was about 8 million people ago, I think there's been waves of new people joining in new cultures and software development related entities started to wake up to this and join. And I think there's a sense where done well, if you prove yourself to be a good actor in the Fediverse, you're welcomed. And May 1000 business models bloom. Yeah. Yes,
Mike McCue:
I, you know, that is certainly consistent with what I've seen, Tim, the Fediverse is a very welcoming place. And I think that the for good actors, for people that are listening and engaging and trying to understand it. It's been a very positive experience. It's very clear why a lot of people not just in the Fediverse, but just in general are disenchanted with the walled garden, big giant company, social media model, right, we've seen the damage that misinformation does. We've seen, you know, toxicity, the surveillance economy, the privacy violations, that people have been, you know, abused, their loyalty has been, you know, taken for granted, or, or or, you know, used in ways that are very problematic. And so I think people are naturally skeptical of any kind of, you know, business coming in and spending time, you know, setting up shop in the Fediverse, what are the things we can do to advance the cause of the metaverse by following the first principles that, you know, the Fediverse is built on? Now, you know, I think some folks are very concerned about things like algorithms and algorithms inherently aren't bad, the way they've been used, has been a real problem, in many instances, how we think about algorithmic Discovery Search, you know, things like that, I think are really important for the growth of the Fediverse. You have to do that in a way that that builds trust with the community, what is your take on the role of search and discovery and algorithmic models, you know, as it relates to, you know, the Fediverse?
Tim Chambers:
Well, it's interesting, because, again, a few years ago, that concept of search was a controversial one inside the Fediverse. But again, I think culture has changed more and more people have joined. So there is, there's shifting views on that. And then when Mastodon 4.2 launched, and they had, arguably, maybe one of the best search functionalities, like far better, for instance, then Threads search today. It was opt in search. So users, each user had to opt in to allow themselves to be searched. But the adoption, there was no counter reaction against that, that was welcomed. So I think there's no reason. And I think, broadly positive effect, and no dramatic or at least no notable examples of that being abused. So we always have to be on guard for that we always have to be looking for edge cases or things that could be need fixing in search. But so far, I think that was net net very positive. In terms of algorithms, I do, I'm really psyched by the algorithms that I think are very, very Fediverse friendly, in the mammoth client, and in others. I actually in the blue sky side of the open social web, I think their use of finding create and share your own algorithms is a great idea. I think that's something that the activity pub world should immediately copy. And actually, I think should take it one step further, I think you should be able to create your own algorithms as a user, share them with people, but then have a sort of a settings button that any user could take that see how the algorithm works in a relatively basic way, and tweak any of those settings to their precise desires, and then be able to share that version. So I think all of those things would be would be experimented with. And I think many of them would be welcomed, especially if they're done in the spirit of users still have the power to control them. And it is not something forced upon them. It is not something driven to just make them engage more, in frankly, really good algorithms might make them engage slightly less, because it might help them find what they want faster, and have a more calm Tech experience, if you're familiar with the content ideas. So I think I think those are the kind of things that could almost only happen on the Fediverse, as a lot of the other platforms would be no, any algorithm has to keep you here, if they were a commercial one has to keep you here as long as possible. And seeing as many ads as possible.
Mike McCue:
I think that is a fantastic point. I love the concept of these custom feeds that blue sky has been working on and the idea of a feed marketplace, algorithmic transparency, let people use as much or as little of these algorithms as they want. Based on their own choice, I really do agree with you. That's a big deal. Well, as we start to wrap up here, what what is your, you know, what are some of your big observations you look forward to the next year, either on the Twitter migration front, or moderation, you know, how the Fediverse, you see, you know, playing out, right,
Tim Chambers:
And it is a presidential year. So you will be dealing with a wave of disinformation and probably crazy, like we've never seen across all the different social platforms. So a few thoughts. One is, from the X side, it seems a Vegas odds would be that the Exodus shocks continue. So we probably will continue to see waves of people looking for other places. Our reports show over the last year, that is primarily benefited Threads, Mastodon and blue sky roughly in that order. So I believe that will continue. We are seeing interesting things like for instance, there is a group indivisible, that has just joined the Federation, and they are organizing people to post on x. Last, they have a site called X last.org. Saying that if you feel like you need to stay, then do but posts, but create content on other places first, and let your ex users know that you should, that they should go to these other places to find content first. So watching how all of that, efforts like that, and many others work as users decide where they want their social home to be. I think that we will see in 2024, an incredible continued evolution of the open social web. And I don't think it's an accident that the three services I just mentioned, were all either in the ocean, Open Social Web or aspire to be. I think you'll probably see bridges between blue sky and activity pub start. And I'm looking forward to that. There was one effort specifically from bridge Lee fed that I am giving counsel and advice to and some testing on. I am very excited to see that happen. And the idea that the Fediverse and the blue sky universe could really just be two protocols that can interoperate seamlessly. I am also very excited about Wikipedia, a very quiet thing that happened this year is that Wikipedia joined the Fediverse. They did so in very fascinating but sort of unnoticed way or noticed but just within a smaller community. They created their own account. They created their own server wikis world. And they built in the same sort of real equals me identity service that I mentioned earlier, that thread supports into Wikimedia, the software that runs Wikipedia, along with WordPress, I think the Wikimedia software, adopting Fediverse standards and becoming an open social web platform is super exciting. And I really hope that things develop there. I'm going to do everything I can to help martial developers to do that, inside of the WordPress space, I am continually amazed at what Matthias has built and at automatic. I am looking forward to seeing that evolve. I think it's very crucial that the activity pub plugin that they built becomes what's called a canonical plugin. And for those not in the WordPress space that isn't built into the WordPress core tech, but it's almost it's a very central plugin that and I think moving that up into the food chain inside of the automatic world is a crucial goal and I'm going to be helping cheerlead for that and then just continuing to use indieweb.social as a test case for all of that We're going to be integrated into all the work at if toss. So that will be an early test case for a lot of the distributed moderation stuff that they will help with, and tying in to every other bit of innovation we can.
Mike McCue:
That was an epic sweeping you next year and the work coming up, Tim, that was awesome. It's exciting times, man. And, you know, the work that you've been doing to evangelize the Fediverse to learn about it to push some of these ideas forward has just been incredibly inspiring to me. And I know to a lot of other people. So it was just an absolute honor to have you on the podcast and just what a great conversation. I'm really excited to keep collaborating and learning from you in the coming months.
Tim Chambers:
It's all good and welcome being a fellow traveler, and thank you for your inspiration in the work that you're doing. So here we go.
Well, thanks so much for listening.
You can find Tim on Mastodon at tchambers at indieweb.social.
Big thank you to our editors Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
To learn more about what Flipboard is doing in the Fediverse sign up via the link in this episode's description.
You can also follow Mike on Mastodon at Mike at Flipboard dot social.
See you in the Fediverse!