Can We Build a Better Social Network?

0:00So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Well, Casey, we've got something different for Hard Fork listeners today. We are dropping in a special Tuesday episode, and this is an episode that we've been working on for a very long time.

0:40We're very excited to bring it to our listeners. It might be, Kevin, the first episode in the history of Hard Fork that took more than one week to make. In fact, it took more than one year to make. So more than a year ago, we started chatting with friend of the pod, PJ Vogt, the host of the great Search Engine podcast, which both of us have been on. PJ's been on Hard Fork as well. And we started talking about this experiment that we wanted to run together, the three of us. And so today's episode describes the results of that experiment, and it involves the Fediverse. That's right, Kevin. And honestly, it kind of started as a joke.

1:19You'll hear it in the episode, but based on the response that they got over there, it kicked off more than a year of reporting and getting together in person, clowning around, and we're just so pleased to be able to present to you today the adventure that we've been on. Yes, and we should say Search Engine did most of the work to string this all together so nicely. They produced this episode. We are sharing it in our feed because we think you'll all be interested. But this is really the results of one of the most fun experiments that I personally have done in the past year or so. Yeah. And it truly is just a great way, if you have not yet heard Search Engine, to listen to what they do.

2:00They are master craftspeople of the podcasting forum. And if you haven't checked them out yet, I think you're really going to enjoy what they do. Yes. Many people are saying that Search Engine is America's second best technology podcast. And I should say I agree. All right. Well, to kick the story off, Kevin, let's kick things over to our good friend, PJ Boat.

2:46Hello, and welcome to a new year. Search engine's big resolution for 2026? We are looking at ways the internet could actually be fixed. The problems with our internet are so well-known, it feels dumb to summarize them. Like, who is the person left alive who needs me to explain to them that our 2026 internet is dominated by a few social media platforms who are brilliant at harvesting our attention by appealing to our worst instincts? We all know this.

3:18We've all experienced the kind of gooner's remorse after we've spent more time than we meant to mindlessly thumbing a feed that makes us feel worse about ourselves, our friends, the world. So it's cliche to complain about this problem that's only gotten worse for the last decade. But this week, this year, we're talking about it because we are curious about solutions, even possibly quixotic ones. And in that spirit, I actually want to revisit a moment that an earlier, maybe more cynical version of me tried to brush past on our show. It first came up on air way back in May of 2024. I was interviewing Casey Newton, co-host of the Hard Fork podcast, the writer behind Platformer.

3:59We were having a depressingly familiar conversation about the Internet. And I asked Casey whether there was anything hopeful around the corner, anything that made him feel optimistic. I have the best, worst, dorkiest answer to that question, PJ, which is that we have to finish building the Fediverse.

4:23Really? Yes. You mean like, so, okay, the Fediverse. You're already so upset that I'm making you talk about this, and that's fine. You should be. We should all be upset that we have to talk about the Fediverse. Talk about the Fediverse. But in a way that my mom can understand it. Yeah. Yeah, so the Fediverse is a way for people to take back the internet for themselves. It's a way to have an identity and connect to other things that are important to you online, and just not worry about having to fight through a Google algorithm or a Facebook algorithm. In fact, you can bring your own algorithm if you want to.

5:05I'm already doing such a bad job of explaining what the Fediverse is. Casey was, I have to admit, doing a not-so-great job of explaining this thing, which to me was a warning. Casey's very good at explaining internet phenomena. If he was flailing here, maybe the topic was just too dense for a podcast like ours. I wasn't sure how to handle it. And so in that episode, on mic, I made this half-hearted promise, which is that if we got lots of listener emails asking for a more in-depth explanation of the Fediverse, then we would look into it. I really was not expecting much feedback at all. Instead, we got so many emails, more than we'd ever gotten on any topic.

5:47Just the whisper of a notion that some better internet was out there and that all we had to do was finish building it, that was something people were very curious about. So that year, I started talking to some of the people trying to build the Fediverse.

6:03The story these people told me went like this. Basically, all of them, as different as they were from one another, had a shared view of what had gone wrong with our internet. The way they saw it. In the 90s, even in the early 2000s, our internet had truly been an open place. Infinite websites, infinite message boards populated by all sorts of people with all sorts of values, free to live how they wanted in the little neighborhoods they'd made. If you wanted to move homes on that internet, say, switch your email from Yahoo to Gmail, it was mildly annoying, but not a huge deal. But then social media arrived.

6:42To access those platforms, you usually needed a dedicated account. Once you started posting on that account, you were now in a game to build as large a following as possible. And if you were able to build one, you never wanted to leave that platform, since leaving would mean losing your audience. users filed quickly and happily into this more closed internet and along the way they handed a lot of power to the moguls running it the moguls set the rules and we had to put up with them if any of us had issues our choices were to functionally leave the internet or worse complain on the very platforms themselves turning our anger into just a little more money for the people we were angry with.

7:24But the architects of the Fediverse, they had a more radical idea. The vision they held was that they could take control of social media out of the hands of the Musks and Zuckerbergs and reroute it back towards more open internet, where no mogul would ever have the same kind of power they do now. That was their wild dream. And they were working on nights and weekends for no money, just building out the digital infrastructure that a Fediverse would require. Establishing shared protocols, building an open standard, coding the first federated social media platforms. All of this was audacious. The scale of their dream combined with their meager resources.

8:06These were people trying to build a Millennium Falcon in their garage out of old car parts. And as of today, that Fediverse, it exists. You can visit it. And if you do, you'll see that it functions differently from the internet you're used to. On our normal internet, if you want to follow a friend to read their tweets, you have to sign up for an account on x.com, Elon Musk's platform. You have to follow his rules, you have to trust him with your direct messages. By default, you're offered posts in the order his algorithm chooses. On the federated internet, if you have a friend microblogging on a federated platform like Mastodon, you can follow their account from anywhere in the Fediverse.

8:47You don't ever have to join Mastodon itself. And if your home platform does get bought by some temperamental tech mogul, you can leave. And given a little technical expertise, when you pop up at your new federated internet home, you'll have all of the followers you did before. It is exciting. It is also still incredibly hard to understand and harder to explain. If I wanted to really get the potential of this and the pitfalls of it, I would need to experience the Fediverse for myself. So I went back into the studio, this time with Casey and Kevin Roos, his co-host on the podcast Hard Fork, to discuss and experiment.

9:27Oh, Casey, yeah, you're muted somehow. Oh, thank God. This is the ideal setting for a podcast. Don't change a thing. Can you hear me now? Yes. There we go. Hi. We did it, fam. The three of us were all millennials. Old enough to use words like fam, but also old enough to have grown up on a more fun version of the internet. To have seen it change. And we believed it could still change again. But if the promise of the Fediverse was utopia tomorrow, what we wanted to know was, what about today? And Kevin had had an idea about how to find out. I think we should start a social media platform on the Fediverse.

10:08In the Fediverse? Is it on or in? Anyway, we'll find out along the way. But wait, why do you want to? What will be the point? And by the way, I don't really think you're talking about starting a new social network. You're talking about like creating a server on the Fediverse, right? Like a place where other people, you know, whether it's listeners to Hard Fork or listeners to search engine, whoever, they can come and they can create accounts there. But like, then what? I can tell you some then what. Yeah, then PJ can tell us then what. For me, if right now, you know, very early into our, I don't even want to say reporting, like understanding of what the dream these people are trying to describe is.

10:41Like my understanding is that basically one of the problems with the social media internet we've built is that the platform you show up on is going to guide acceptable behavior. Like Twitter is going to make you think in bumper stickers. Instagram is going to make you realize that everyone you know is like thinner and on vacation or whatever. And that the sort of boundaries of what kind of person we can be and how we can interact with each other are set by the platforms. And that while there might be people with healthier or just different ideas about how these platforms could work, because you want to go to the place where everyone you know already is, those new ideas don't circulate very often.

11:19And so what I find interesting as a testable game, and not just like sort of like a stunt that we could do because we're journalists, is, well, as someone who really truly has become almost Amish in my dislike of social media internet. With you guys, what would it be like to try to make a clubhouse that has rules that actually feel healthier? And what will we learn about not just like, obviously, it's very hard to make a good internet. I don't think anyone's done it. But like, how good are the tools with which someone perhaps smarter, more patient, or more committed than us might be able to do it?

11:55That's what I find interesting about it. I will say, not to be a bit of a hater, but like, I think we will learn what most people learn when they set up web forums of all kinds, which is there's a lot of different kinds of people. Some are annoying. There's two or three that never stop talking and they drive away a lot of good conversation because they infuriate everyone, right? Some people show up just to sort of test the rules and like put hate speech in the chat. We know what happens when you like put out your shingle and say, hey, there's a new web forum here. But that is so fundamentally pessimistic, Casey.

12:26I have to call you out on that because that is the way that our platforms today are designed. That is the behavior that they sort of encourage either explicitly or tacitly. But like, look at Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia is a collective internet experiment that shouldn't have worked. If you just like put that idea on a whiteboard in like, you know, 1993, people would have been like an encyclopedia that everyone can edit. That's going to be a total disaster. And yet today is like a monument and like a thing that people hold up as an example of what the internet can be. So I maintain some optimism about this.

12:58If you just put the right guardrails and boundaries and guidelines in place, if you cultivate the vibe of this space, it can't actually be good. To me, what is interesting about this is less about who will show up and what will they say on the network, but what can we connect our server to, right? To me, this is the promise of the Fediverse. It's not like could we set up an internet forum where people were nicer to each other and only said like pro-social things about the future of democracy. It's what happens if you're able to link it to some publications that publish news that you think is interesting and link it up to maybe another social network like threads and see content from people who are posting there but nowhere else.

13:39And then some next generation things like they're actually like publications that set up their own servers and are sort of publishing directly to this feed. And maybe there are some other interactions there. To me, this is how we actually move away from the internet that we're on. It is not like, can we get 100 nice people in a room together? I'm sure we could do that. It is after we get the 100 nice people in the room, what else can we show them? And can it be more interesting than random Instagram reels that were picked for you by an AI? Because like that is the present and the future if nobody else comes up with something better.

14:15Part of what I heard Casey saying was that to him, the worst case scenario for the internet might be essentially where we already were. Which meant any shot at changing things, even an unlikely one, at this point, you had to try it. Better to risk being a fool than commit to being a cynic. So, he was in too. Three people who had spent years critiquing social media companies would now become social media micro-moguls. We would build our own little piece of the Fediverse. Which I thought shouldn't be too hard. You can actually just go to Mastodon, the website, and use their platform to set up your own little microserver, what they call an instance.

14:54A lot of people are technologically savvy enough to do that. And in this case, by a lot of people, I really just meant Kevin, because I assumed Kevin Roos would do most of the work. Kevin, something you should know about him, he loves to experiment with new technology. He does this constantly at his job covering tech at the New York Times. For instance, not so long ago, he spent a month only communicating with AI chatbots to see if they could replace his human friends. There are tech journalists today who are unsure if they even want to try new technology like AI. They think it'll get a moral stain on them.

15:27Kevin's a tinkerer. He thinks by doing. What's our go-to-market plan, as they say? Like, how do we actually get this thing out and get our first users? Yeah. Well, I asked Claude. And it said that the first steps include choosing a memorable name and securing a domain for our server. We have to establish community guidelines and decide if our server will have a specific theme or topic. Decide who will handle server administration and content moderation. And then we have to actually start doing stuff like setting up a server and a hosting provider and DNS records and all of that. You know, it's times like this that I'm grateful that I chose a boyfriend who is a software engineer.

16:16I feel like he's going to be huge for this. Oh, that's great. Now, I should actually disclose that I have some relevant history here, which is that when I was in middle school, I was the webmaster of the third largest Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan site on GeoCities. Wow. And now fast forward to today and there's another vampire sucking the life force out of the world. And it's called meta.com. And that's where we come in. Yes. We're the slayers now. I don't know if that's going to work. This is why we pay Casey the big bucks. You got to swing hard or not swing at all. There was one more decision to make before we could get up and running.

16:55Our fledgling platform, our little slice of the Fediverse, it needed a name. Casey had a pitch. So I have one idea that I would say is sort of very particular to one podcast as opposed to being really particular to both podcasts. But we could call it the Forkiverse. I mean, I tried to do a blended name and came up with Search Fork or Hard Engine. Hard Engine. Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different internet. That's on Casey's incognito tab. I could live with Forkiverse. It also feels like it's not just a reference to Hard Fork, but like you're forking off the internet. Exactly.

17:44So we had an idea. We had a name. We were ready to start. What would we learn trying to build our piece of the internet? We'll find out after these ads.

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19:59Let's create smarter business, IBM.

20:16Hello? Hello. Can you still hear me, PJ? I can still hear you. Dreams are coming true. Can you still hear me? Yes. This was a few months later. Kevin Roos, as I'd hoped, had become our chief technology officer. And he was here to report on the work he'd been doing. I was in the studio in Brooklyn. Kevin and Casey were connecting from the New York Times San Francisco office. I came down to the studio. Where's the studio? It's in a closet in the New York Times San Francisco Bureau that was built for Ezra Klein that he never once used, and I once asked him about it, and he was like, wait, they built a studio?

20:55Kevin, what do you have for us? So, since our last meeting, we have built a Mastodon server. Really? And by we, well, and by built, I mean ordered from like a managed hosting service. I did not personally build anything here. And by we, I mostly mean AI because I was a little bit daunted by this project. And so I've been testing this operator thing. Have you heard about this? We were talking, I should say, last January, which in the pace of AI development feels like approximately two centuries ago. But anyway, that long ago week, OpenAI's operator was new. Yeah, operator is OpenAI's new thing where the AI can actually do stuff for you, but it doesn't usually do it very well.

21:47It can take over your mouse and it can type stuff in, but it's not so good yet, is my understanding. Is that understanding wrong? I think that's a mostly correct understanding, although in this case, it did do this extremely well. So I told it about our project, and I said, go out, buy me a domain name, set up a whole Mastodon server, and configure all the settings. Yeah. You gave the AI your credit card? PJ, we're living in the future out here. We trust AIs more than other humans. So I gave it this task, and then I came back like 20 minutes later, and it had done most of what I asked it for. I still needed to like, you know, input some stuff.

22:26But we now own the domain name, theforkiverse.com. That was available for$1 for the first year. Then I assume it goes up to like$7 ,000 or something. And we also have an account on something called masto.host. Okay. Which is a fully managed Mastodon hosting service. So it's basically, you know, it's like Squarespace, but for social media sites. And so I bought us a plan,$89 a month. I will be expensing that to the search engine accounting department. I should hope so. And it gives us the following things. Very high federation capacity. Okay. 50 processing threads. Okay. 40 gigabyte database. Okay.

23:14400 gigabyte media storage. We only have 400 gigabytes of media storage for our entire social network. Let's just say that uploading images is discouraged on the Forgever server. They just have to be very small. No 4K. No 4K. No. No 4K. And it can hold an estimated 2 ,000 users. Okay. So that was the largest plan. I could have gone with the moon, planet, star, or constellation plans, but I went with the galaxy plan. So that's what we got. So the galaxy plan gives us a social media network that in size kind of resembles like a late 90s message board. Yes. But it can connect to all the other social media networks.

23:57That's the high federation capacity or whatever. Exactly. One clarification here is that, of course, we can connect only to other open federated platforms. So a Forkiverse user can see posts from open platforms like Mastodon or Flipboard, but can't follow someone on a closed system like X or Instagram. Anyway, we had a high federation capacity, meaning the Forkiverse can easily exchange traffic with other federated platforms. I feel like we're rebooting to the last version of the internet that I felt like uncomplicated joy about. So I'm fine with this. That's the dream. That's the hope. That's what we're trying to do.

24:34Go backwards. Also, I just want to say, I tried to use Operator to do cool things too. And when I tried to order groceries, it tried to send them to the grocery store that I was ordering from. So that's how far I got with the AI. So I would like to invite you both to open a new tab in your browser and go to theforkaverse.com. Okay, I'm at theforkaverse. Oh, so you want me to just go to theforkaverse.com? Yeah. I see.

25:04I just got a warning saying that my connection is not private and that attackers might be trying to steal my information. Okay, well, I can't help you with that. Nope. We just got to ask Operator about that. I also got an error message that said that my... I think the New York Times... We're blocked! The New York Times firewall is blocking us from going to the Forkiverse. So out here in independent media where there's no rules and you can do whatever you want, I'm on the Forkiverse. Do you want me to tell you what I'm seeing? Yes, please. Okay, so first of all, there's a nice little graphic. I don't know if that's a Mastodon graphic or a Forkiverse graphic, but there's like, it's sort of anime and there's like a bunch of elephants.