Jonathan Haidt Strikes Again + What You Vibecoded + An Update on the Forkiverse

23:42Over time, I have just become more persuaded by the product safety argument. I have read the internal documents. I have talked to the people who work at these companies. I do not believe that they care or are investing in protecting kids the way they should be. And to me, that argument is just sort of starting to carry the day. But I was having a conversation with my sister-in-law about this stuff over Thanksgiving. We were talking about some of these issues. And she let me know that she kind of took issue with a comment I'd made on a previous episode where I said, you know, the one argument that you never hear anybody making is that Instagram is really good for kids, which I still basically believe.

24:16Yeah, I haven't heard that. And you've heard it from some. And my sister-in-law made a version of this argument to me, which is that, you know, for my nephew, he has an Instagram account. He's 13 and he is able to explore his interests, which include gymnastic and cooking. And so when she, you know, looks at his own usage of Instagram, she says, this like basically seems okay to me. My question is, what avenues do you hope that children use to explore their interests in a world where we do just yank that away from them? Yeah. So I think last time I was on, we talked about a related topic and I said, you've got to separate the internet from social media.

24:55Social media is a part of the internet. It's one of the worst parts. It's the one that's hurting kids the most. But look, all of us on this call. We're all old enough to remember the 90s when we first got a look at the internet. It was amazing. And, you know, if you're LGBTQ in rural areas, suddenly, like, you can find information. You can find people. I mean, it was amazing the way it brought people together. So, I would never take that away. I would never say, kids shouldn't be on the internet. So, do they also need platforms that use algorithms to force feed them whatever content was most upvoted by people based on the extremity of its emotions or expressions.

25:29Does your nephew benefit from having Instagram pick what he sees as opposed to having him type in what he's looking for? If you take away social media from kids, I don't see any loss. Yeah, I'm curious because like Casey, I am also pretty hype-pilled at this moment in time. I am pretty convinced of the arguments you're making. But I would say the one criticism I might have is like, to me, it feels a little bit like you are fighting the last war. Because when I go to schools, high schools now and meet high school students, they tell me like, we are talking with AI companions now. That is the thing that we are doing.

26:07And I have this sort of fear in the back of my mind that like, you will succeed at getting social media banned for under 16s all over the world. And then it will be like, there's this new threat that we weren't even paying attention to. And we will pine for the days when teens were using social media to at least, at least they were communicating with other people and not these like AI companions. So do you worry at all that you have sort of not kept pace with the state of the technology? No, this is a strategic move for this reason. AI is so new and it's morphing so fast. And in the research community, it takes us five, 10, 20 years to figure anything out.

26:44So we've been arguing about social media for a long time. I think we've got it. I think I'm gonna win on this issue. Now, it's a normal academic debate. There are researchers who look at the data and they see something different. But here's the way I'm thinking about it. If we can't win on social media, if we can't get consensus that this is bad and that government should do something, if we can't win on that, then just give up on AI. Just say it's a game over. Our kids are gone. We're never gonna see them again. The boys are gonna have sexy chatbots their whole lives. They're never gonna reproduce.

27:15So if we can't win on social media, then we definitely can't win on AI. And since we are winning on social media and since governments around the world are waking up to the fact that they have an obligation to protect kids. A lot of them have never done anything, especially our federal government, has never done a single thing, never ever, to protect kids on the internet. So governments are waking up. And so the faster we can win on social media and delaying phones and more play and phone-free schools, then we have a chance, a chance. At least we can try to make the case, just get it out of elementary school.

27:48Just don't let kids be talking with chatbots when they're little. Mm-hmm. Do you miss your obscure academic life at all? Does it bother you to be a public intellectual, an advocate, a man of mystery, a man on a mission? Yes, in that I'm working all the time now, and I really want to just take the summer off. I want to try reading books. I think if I read physical books, maybe I'll be able to finish one. But I I have had a feeling of efficacy, a feeling that, you know, I've been working on this for a long time, and I feel like now I've been gifted the chance to actually make a difference in the world.

28:25And it's a kind of satisfaction beyond anything I've known in my life. So I do miss a lot, but I'm actually really energized, and I'm actually pretty happy these days. That's great. You know, I'll tell you this story. when I was pitching my book early last year, I was going around to different publishers and you know you've made it when they, the only pitch they wanted was like The Anxious Generation, but for AI. It was like every publisher was like, I was like, no, it's not really what I'm working on. It's gonna be more of a history thing. And they're like, are you sure? Are you sure you don't wanna write The Anxious Generation, but for AI?

28:59I was like, yes, I'm sure. I'm pretty sure John's gonna do that. But anyway, you have made a splash. And yeah, if you have any tips on selling a book, I'll use them this fall. Okay. I'd be happy to read your book if you want someone to read a copy. Because I am moving. That's my next question. But you just told me you can't read a book anymore. So, you know, I don't trust you. Next summer, I'll try to read, send it to me electronically and then I'll feed it into ChatGPT and it'll give me a chapter by chapter summary. Good, good. That's great. That's what I'm going for.

29:33Change starts at home. I have to say, it's actually very comforting to me that even Jonathan Haidt is having Chad Chippity read books for him. Because obviously I do that as well, but I feel bad about it. But now I feel fine. This is the thing. No one has read a book since 2021 and they're just lying about it. People are reading one kind of book, which is romanticcy. So if I ever wrote like a social science treatise, I would try to put it in a world where like dark fairies were having sex with each other. Have you thought about that, John? Something to consider. Actually, that is actually the way we open up our children's book.

30:05Okay, it's not sex, but it is. but it actually is. It actually does open. Yeah. It does open with a story about dark fairies. Look at that. Evil wizards. Okay. By the way, I love the pandering of the adults. It's the anxious generation, but when you want to talk directly to the kids, all of a sudden, they're amazing. Yeah. For the kids, better hold out some hope. That's true. That's true. Yeah. All right, John. Thanks so much. All right. Thanks, Jonathan. All right, guys. Thanks so much for having me back. Take care.

30:35when we come back is Claude Code a new chat GPT moment we'll talk about what you all have been vibe coding including a website for door handles how are we going to handle that

30:58so 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. marketers have always had to choose build your brand or drive sales with youtube you can do both it's where the most trusted creators and powerful ai converge to create and convert demand for your brand that's why youtube drives higher long-term return on ad spend versus tv paid social or streaming there's no more choosing between brand or results with one platform you get both Learn more at g.co slash business slash YouTube.

32:35Well, Casey, it's been another big week for Claude and Claude Code, which I think seems to be having kind of a ChatGPT moment. You know, I texted you earlier this week and I said, is it crazy to say that Claude Code feels like the most important thing that has happened in AI since ChatGPT? I realize that may sound crazy to some of our listeners, but I feel like we can make the case. I think so, too. I think this is a big, big moment, especially for people who are sort of code inclined or code curious. We've continued to see many, many posts on social media about people's experiments with cloud code.

33:09It seems like it is actually creating something of an infrastructure crisis for Anthropic, which is also something that happened to OpenAI during their original chat GPT moment. They just, like, could not keep up with the demand and the site kept going down. But I would say the larger thing that has been going on is that non-coders are starting to experiment with this tool. Anthropic also released a version of Cloud Code for non-coders this week called Cowork, which sort of sits in the Cloud Desktop app and allows you to sort of attempt various tasks using the same sort of agent-like framework that Cloud Code uses, but in a way that's slightly less intimidating than opening up a terminal app.

33:47Yeah, and if you think about what the chat GPT moment was, it was a time when millions and millions of people realized simultaneously that you can ask questions and get pretty good answers, and you can generate text for many useful purposes. The Cloud Code moment, I feel like, is the next evolution where people are saying, I can now build something that is useful to me even though I don't really know what I'm doing. And whereas maybe six months ago, the results I would have gotten were pretty bad or would have required a lot of technical know-how, I can now come in and I can type in a box and I can get basically exactly what I want.

34:24And that is actually huge. It's huge. And I had a version of that experience myself too in the past week because the Read It Later app that I built, Stash. We talked about my vibe coding experiment last week. I got so many responses from people who were saying, hey, can I use this thing? Are you gonna like distribute this and put it in the app store? That I just decided, you know what? I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna release Stash to the world. And so I had Claude Code go in and like prepare a version of this for the public, build me a little landing page. You can now download it and try it for yourself at kevinruth.com slash Stash.

34:56And it is working better than I ever expected. And it remains sort of incredible to me that I did all of this as me, an idiot who does not know how to code. I was able to, in a matter of hours, build and release a working software product. You know, first of all, congratulations for the launch of Stash. People have been really excited about this. My absolute favorite was you posted about this on X, and somebody responded, will it parse my X bookmark graveyard? And you responded, I have honestly no idea what it will do. And I laughed so hard when I wrote that. I thought, finally, an honest software developer who just admits that we don't know how any of this stuff works.

35:33I have no idea how any of this works. I have no idea if it works. It works for me. But I am very delighted that I was just able to sort of vibe launch this software product into the world with, like, honestly, not that much work. It was not that hard. I did not use any special prompting tricks. I'm not even that good at using Cloud Code. And yet I was able to conduct an act of software engineering that now other people are downloading and using for themselves. I did have one incident that I want to tell you about, which is that I accidentally had what I believe is my first AI security breach, which was that when I launched the version of this public stash app that I was open sourcing, it did inadvertently reveal my credentials on several of the sites that I used.

36:18So I had to go back to Claude and be like, hey, could you scrub my personal information out of there? That's it. I didn't know you had any credentials to do what you do. But, you know, we want to talk about a few different things with Claude Code this week. And we want to begin with listener responses, because last week we asked you, hey, what are you building? And we were absolutely delighted with the response. We have gotten so many messages from you all over the past few days to our email, of course, but also in the Forkiverse, the Fediverse server that we set up that we're going to be talking about a little bit later in the show.

36:50But we just wanted to highlight a few of our favorites because I think they speak to the breadth of what people are able to build and also how little experience folks had before they started trying these things. Yes, and I think this is like more than just a kind of show and tell segment because for me, like there is something different about trying to do this stuff yourself versus just listening to us talk about another podcast. I really think that our listeners who listened to our episode last week and then went out and tried to vibe code things for themselves were a lot of them shocked by how easy it was, by how good the results were.

37:26And I think it, you know, for you, I was joking with you over text this week that it seemed like you were feeling the AGI in a way that maybe you hadn't before. So I think for our listeners, maybe this past week has been an experience of starting to feel that, feel the progress, feel the capabilities improving, feel that things that were impossible even a few months ago are now becoming possible. Absolutely. So as we get in to what we heard from listeners, it is important that I make the following disclosure. My boyfriend works at Anthropic, and I would go a step further and say, if you are feeling like this is edging into shill territory, I really do think you could probably do a lot of similar things with Codex, which is OpenAI's sort of clawed code equivalent.

38:08I'm told Google has one as well, but due to the ongoing disaster of Google marketing, I truly cannot remember what it's called. Maybe you could Google it. It's called Antigravity. Perfect. So maybe try that. The point is, these tools are now available, and they're really good, and we want to get into it and talk about what you all are building. And that's a good chance to make my disclosure too, which is that I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and perplexity over alleged copyright violations related to the training of AI models. Okay, so first up, we got some great examples from our listeners of websites that they have been building.

38:39We talked on the show last week about how we had each redesigned our own websites using these tools. One of those came from our listener Gina, who had never VibeCoded before, but after last week's episode told us that she had gone out and designed her own website. She says it took her about two and a half to three hours, and I'm going to look at it right now. Looks great, Gina. It's got some nice animations. She even told us that it has an Easter egg on it. If you hit Control-M, it pulls up what looks like a MySpace profile from the 90s. Very cool. Congrats on your new website, Gina. Yeah, super, super fun.

39:18Love the Easter egg there. You know, another website that we got came in from Sarah Haggard. She built a book site for book recommendations. It turns out that over the winter break, she wanted to catalog her book so that she could give her husband a list of books she already has read so that he doesn't accidentally buy her a duplicate. And she was able to do that, but then went a lot further and now has a website where you, the listener, can go on to sarahsbooks.com, S-A-R-A-H-S books.com, and she will make a book recommendation depending on what your mood you're in, if you want a beach read, if you want a story about women's empowerment, many other categories in there.

39:59You can create your own account. It is a full-featured web app, and I guess after she put it up, she got in touch with the founder of Goodreads, and now they're going to get together and have a fun conversation. So this is someone else who does not have a lot of technical experience, built something to scratch her own itch, and it is super cool. And I'll just say, there's something very romantic about vibe coding for your partner. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of alpha there. Yeah, absolutely. Go to your partner today and say, what would you like me to build you, sweetheart? And then just see if you can whip it up.

40:32All right. One more website. We heard from a listener who turned his family's Christmas letter into an 80s text adventure inspired by the video game Zork. This is from listener David Phillips. He asked us not to read out the name of the website since it's got information about his kids on it. But I'm looking at it right now. It looks very cool. Very good idea for the annual holiday letter. It's got like green text on a black screen. It's like very much conjuring like an 80s like CRT monitor. And a really fun detail that he puts on the website is that his stepfather actually worked on the original Zork game.

41:10And so this is actually kind of like a family tribute as much as it is a vibe coding project. And I just I love that aspect of it. Yes. We also heard from several small business owners who told us that Claude Code and other agentic coding tools were allowing them to build tools that they otherwise would have had to pay a lot of money to someone else to build for them. My favor of these was from Joe. He is a welder. Great AI-proof job of the future, by the way. And he said that he has no experience programming, but over the past few months, Joe told us that he has been teaching himself to build tools for his business.

41:46He said, quote, I built an MCP server that has turned my Claude chat window into a personal assistant. He said it's able to track jobs, help him create estimates, organize PDFs and contracts. He said he's even connected Claude to the 3D modeling program that he uses, which has helped him build complex programs for CNC, which is sort of the computerized cutting and etching technology that many builders use. He says he's used Cloud Code to make agents to search for potential work in his area and write a weekly lead generator for him. So I just thought this was a really interesting example of what might seem like a low technology business, but that is actually able to go out there and build some software that helps him get some more business.

42:29Yeah, and he added his email in a way that really affected me. He said, I really want people in my demographic to understand that this isn't I asked ChatGPT to write an email or can you generate an image that has the correct spelling? This is, to me, I built my own business infrastructure from scratch with an AI pair programmer despite having zero formal training and a high school education. Totally. Pretty cool. Another example we got was from Faye Bell, a listener who runs her own business selling wallpaper to interior designers. She told us about a special tool that she has been creating called the Wallpaper Calculator, which we can look at over here.

43:06It is at her website. and this is a tool that basically allows a potential client, an interior designer maybe, to calculate exactly how much wallpaper they need to cover a particular wall. This tool, she said, also generates a layout diagram so that clients can sort of visualize what the wallpaper will look like in their space. She said this is something that she's always been doing by hand in tools like Photoshop or InDesign, but now the clients could just do it themselves and save themselves the time. Yeah, and Faye wanted to let us know that she had no previous coding experience, and she loves that she can do this without having to pay any hosting costs.

43:44She doesn't have to buy this software from some third-party provider. Those can be really expensive services, and she just did it for her damn self. Yes. One more that caught our attention came from a dad who made a web app to track a hilariously specific chore he had asked his kids to complete. Simon wrote that it was the week before Christmas and his wife and he decided that their kitchen needed a tune up. So they ordered new handles for the doors and drawers in their kitchen. And it was 70 handles in all. And to motivate their children to help them with this project, Kevin, they offered the kids a dollar per handle changed.

44:21and he had noticed that in the past they had quickly lost interest, believe it or not, when given the handle replacement task. So this time he spun up a web app to log their efforts and we pulled up this web app and the first thing it tells you when you open it is that the project is now complete and all 70 handles were replaced. So this was a success. But basically there's a leaderboard for his four children and you can see who made the most money. they were able to cash out their winnings via apple cash to the bank or via chocolates which i love and it was ben who came in number one with 44 handles replaced vick came in at zero so i guess vick was was uh holding out for a higher wage to get involved in the knob replacement business but just again this is so like wacky and was this necessary absolutely not but what i love about this project is it speaks to a theme that I felt in so many of the things that listeners sent us, which is the joy of creation.

45:20It is fun to make things. It is fun to have a dream and to be able to quickly realize it. And so, yeah, I just love this one. What excites me is less the products themselves. It is that people, I think, are starting to understand the pace and trajectory of AI progress through using these tools. A year ago, you could not type into a box, make me a website for my family's handle replacement project or make me a tool for my small business that allows people to estimate the wallpaper needs of their project. And now you can. And I think unless you have really spent time, even a couple minutes using one of these tools, you really do not understand the state of the art.

46:00And so I think a lot of people, unfortunately, are in the same position that they, you know, we were in back when ChatGPT came out in 2022. which is like they are opining on a technology that they do not actually understand because they have not experienced it for themselves. And so for the listeners out there who are listening to this and saying, okay, well, these projects sound great, but what does this have to do with me or my life? I would just say there is no better way right now in 2026 to get a handle on what the frontier of AI progress looks like than to come up with a project, no matter how silly or trivial seeming, give it to one of these AI coding agents and watch what it does.

46:35I agree with that. You know, what I would say, Kevin, is, to me, this stuff is the flip side of slop. This is anti-slop, right? If slop is about a world where every surface online seems like it's being taken over by these digital creations that you didn't ask for, that you find confusing, they blur the line between reality and fiction, and they just sort of make you feel hypnotized and gross, this is the reverse of that. This is real people saying, I have a need in my life, and I'm going to go make it with my own hands. And we've always talked about AI as a dual-use technology. We do spend a lot of time on the show talking about its many downsides, which are huge and real and scary.

47:14But there is also upside here, which is at least in this moment, this can be an empowering tool. And so to me, I think one reason why I was so delighted to see all these listener responses was they spoke to the way that technology tools can still empower us. Yes. And it also gave me an experience that I had not had before, which is that I now understand how annoying it is to build and release software products in the world, only to have users tell you everything that is wrong with them. Like five minutes after I made my Stash app public and put it up on GitHub so that people could download it and use it themselves, I started getting feature requests.

47:51It was like, are you not impressed by the app that I have made and released to you for free? Already, I understand in a more visceral and embodied way the pain of our listeners who are product managers at big tech companies. Yes, but you also now just have a perfect thing you can say back to them, which is just fork it and make the version yourself, right? Go vibe code your own feature. Take it up with Claude. Yeah. So Casey, when you were texting me and talking about how amazed and impressed you were by this technology and how this felt like a chat GPT moment, what has been the most surprising thing for you since our segment last week about your experience with these tools?

48:26Well, I just keep having new ideas for stuff to build. Like I assumed that I would run out after coming up with one or two things. But every time I have an idea and I could just make it, it just gives me the confidence to go out and build like three or four new things. So I'm moving away from thinking like, this is a fun little like proof of concept demo and thinking of it more as like, this is just a tool that I have now. And if I have some sort of like itch when it comes to software, my default assumption now is I can probably quickly build some version of it. Yeah, I'm finding that I'm having to sort of retrain myself or we rewire my brain a little bit because my impulse when I like encounter something annoying or a problem that I'm having in my life is not to like go build a piece of software to address that.

49:06It's just like not part of how I live my life. But now I'm finding that like more and more times a day, like that sort of bell is going off in my head. They're like, oh, I could probably build something or Claude could probably build something to help me with this. So we are actually going to be doing a demo of how we vibe code with Claude Code. We're going to be doing that on our YouTube channel. You'll be able to see that next week. But if you are someone who has been maybe curious about this, maybe we've piqued your curiosity a little bit, but you're still a little bit intimidated by it, hopefully that will give you the tools you need to get started.

49:41When we come back, we're forking around in the Forkiverse with our friend PJ Vogt. Our co-founder PJ Vogt. Get it right.

50:19So 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. marketers have always had to choose build your brand or drive sales with youtube you can do both it's where the most trusted creators and powerful ai converge to create and convert demand for your brand that's why youtube drives higher long-term return on ad spend versus tv paid social or streaming there's no more choosing between brand or results with one platform you get both Learn more at g.co slash business slash YouTube.

51:44so teams move with speed and confidence. That's AI-ready governance. Governance that helps you go. Visit onetrust.com backslash AI. Well, Casey, listeners to the Hard Fork podcast will know that we released an extra episode this week detailing our experiment with PJ Vogt of the great Search Engine podcast and the new social network that we started, the Forkiverse. That's right. The Forkiverse has been up and running for just about a week now, as you will hear this podcast episode. And I have to say, Kevin, the response has been overwhelming. Truly wild. One of the wildest things I've ever experienced in my career.

52:23When you had this idea to run this experiment, the maximum amount of people that you can imagine wanting to join with us in this federated server that we set up was about 2 ,000 people. And today we can report here on The Hard Fork Show that more than 4 ,000 souls have now joined us within the Forkverse, threatening to overwhelm and perhaps destroy it. Yes. And we have already had our first content moderation scandal, some of our first technical hiccups. We were sort of speed running the life of a social media company in the year 2026. And so today we wanted to give some updates on how the Forkiverse is going.

52:59So we've invited back our third co-founder with us, PJ Vogt from Search Engine is here virtually. Thank you for having me. I've been called a lot of things, but never founder. How does it feel? Honestly, I'm surprised at how much I'm already learning about the internet by being a person who cares about even maintaining a very small community on it. I've only ever been a community member, not a community architect. It's strange. It's very strange. So let's talk about the flavor of the Forcaverse so far. It can be, I think, a mistake to start any kind of social product and not give people an idea of what to do.

53:40And I think one of the smart things that PJ did as we were setting up the Forkiverse was to give people a prompt. He said, hey, something you could do if you want is just post a picture of where you're listening to this podcast episode from. And so when I logged on to the Forkiverse, a lot of what I saw was just people posting really fun photos. And I think it contributed to the sense of, hey, we are not here to be super serious. We are not here to solve the great issues of the world. We just kind of want to hang out and meet each other. And so I have actually been delighted at the flavor of the Forkiverse because it really has seemed like a bunch of people who like the same podcast coming together and saying hello to each other.

54:20Yes. And I think because, PJ, you posted your version of the episode a couple days before we did, at first, the people who were trickling in were mostly like search engine fans. so I got to observe some things about your audience, which is that many of your listeners live these bucolic lives on farms in British Columbia where they're just listening to podcasts while they work in their woodworking studios. Your listeners really seem to be having a good time out there. I learned the same thing about my listeners. It was so cool. The amount of people who are like, I'm in a cabin somewhere far away working on my ceramics, and I was like, oh, it's so cool.

54:58I had no idea. And it solved for me one of the things that I don't like about podcasting, which is that it's so one way. I don't know. I'm someone who's sometimes suspicious of online community, that it actually can feel like community. And I will say that in week one of the Forkverse meeting both search engine listeners and hard fork listeners, to me, it does feel like community. It feels like a bunch of strangers, politely, friendly, jokely, kind of just being like, here's who I am. Here's who I am. I've really liked it. I noticed over the past week that people were using it to talk to Kevin and I about the most recent episode of the show.

55:32We heard a lot about people's vibe coding projects, which is something we had talked about in last week's episode. And so that was something else that was fun for me was when I got to visit the site, I just got to see a lot of people saying, hey, check out this website that I made. And it was really nice. Yeah. I think for a lot of people, like those sort of prompts or at least like sort of collective topics that can serve the function that like alcohol serves at a party, which is just kind of like the social lubricant that like makes everyone more likely to hang out and have a good time. So we should do more of that.

56:03Yeah. So that's kind of the fun stuff. Let's talk about the tedious, sweaty, behind the scenes work that goes into making the Fediverse possible. So Kevin, in the first few days of people joining the network, you were getting a notification every single time somebody requested to join. Have you figured out how to turn that off? No, I still get them, but now I've just filtered them out of my inbox because they were arriving at a rate of several per minute. And I was just like, you know, one thing that I like about the Forkaverse and the way that it was sort of set up, I cannot claim any credit for this because this is just part of the hosting service that we use.

56:41But it makes people write a little blurb about why they want to join. And so it was actually kind of delightful to have those blurbs. I accepted every single request, even when they didn't write anything in that box, but I did like it when they did. Well, give us some flavor of what sort of things were people saying? Why did they say they wanted to join the Forkiverse? And how disappointed do you think they've been with what they found waiting there? So some people just said, you know, I'm a fan of the show and I heard about it on the podcast and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A lot of people were expressing how burnt out and exhausted they were by other social media experiences.

57:16a sort of typical comment that I got just 11 minutes ago. Someone said, just wanted to thank you for this platform because I'm one day in and already having a civil discussion about Gen AI art, whereas on Reddit, Blue Sky, and even Hacker News, I would probably be immediately shouted down. So it does seem like people are grateful for just a new place to type that has a slightly different vibe to it. Yeah. As you say, Kevin, we have had just, you know, many hundreds, probably thousands of people logging on to have a good time, but the server is federated, which means that people can interact with us even if they have not joined the Forkiverse, right?

57:52People can follow us in the Forkiverse. Like I'm Casey at theforkiverse.com. If you have an account on Mastodon or some other spot in the Fetiverse, you can just follow me. And so we can hear from other people. And I would say that that has resulted in some content moderation issues. I was just surprised how quickly like the bad guys showed up. I was looking at the moderation reports. I think I took a screenshot of this one. There's a user who showed up from another server. This person wasn't a Forkoverzian, but they were causing trouble here, who sent the following messages in quick succession, all to accounts that seem like they are held by women.

58:28Hello, how are you doing today? Hello, my beautiful lady, how are you doing today? Hello, my beautiful lady, how are you doing? Hello, my beautiful lady, how are you doing? And it nice meeting you on here. Wow. So somebody who really kind of wanted to connect and meet new people in the federalist. A real sort of Don Juan. He was bothering users. There was also like a virulently racist person. Like he was using all of the slurs right away. And I was just like, how did you find us? Like we're a community for sweet people. Yeah, it is amazing. I received the reports as well and I saw one and I thought, yeah, I have a moment.

59:11let me see if I can take care of this. And it was somebody who had used just one slur, but I'd say it was one of the bad ones. So I had to block them, but I had to, I had sort of like the same reaction that you did PJ, which is like, truly, why would you spend any time on this? You know, it's like the idea that you would use part of your one wild and precious life to come to the fork of us and say these things to our users. Like what's going on with you? Now, I am curious whether either of you felt the sort of power of the so-called ban hammer. Like, Like, do you feel like you became drunk with authority, banning these users with no process for appeals?

59:46Honestly, yes. Like, I think there are certain places where you want to have a very, like, rigid principles-based content moderation system, like most of the big platforms that we would use. I would say, you know, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, you want them to have those kinds of systems. When it comes to, like, a fun experiment that some friends put together to see what would happen, I feel no attachment to that idea whatsoever. So it's like, if I don't like the vibe of your post and it bothered somebody else, like by default, you are just going to be gone and there are not going to be appeals. Is that bad?

1:00:19I mean, I agree with you, so I don't think it's bad. Like, I just feel like this clubhouse is small enough that we can be arbitrary as long as we're arbitrarily following some non-arbitrary rules. I had a moment where someone showed up from another instance, like another part of the Fediverse, a different Mastodon server. Do I have the technical nomenclature right? Yeah. Yeah, sure. And they were like, no one should go to the Forkiverse because PJ is problematic. He's bad. This isn't even real federated whatever. And it was a real moment where I was like, oh, my God, this person's not being very nice to me.

1:00:51I could ban them from the entire internet we've created. Hell, yeah. And I was proud. All I did was block them from my account. I was like, you know what? There's nothing in the rules that says that you can't be mean to me. You can be mean to me. But I felt the little whisper of the demon that has driven Elon Musk into, like, planets unknown. Well, that's very principled of you to not ban him. I don't know that I would have been so kind. Now, listen, we've been avoiding the elephant in the room for too long. Kevin, tell us about the Russian disinformation campaign that the Forkiverse has been a part of.

1:01:25Our one-week-old social network has already become entangled with a Russian disinformation campaign. This was an email I got from the Fediverse Trust and Safety Team, which is sort of a group of people who sort of oversee trust and safety in sort of a decentralized way for the entire Fediverse, not just our servers. They're doing the Lord's work over there. They truly are. And the executive director of IfTAS, whose name is Jazz, wanted to alert us to the fact that the Forkiverse is what's called an open registration service, one where anyone can sign up and register. And they said that open registration services, especially on the Fediverse, are being targeted by a pro-Russia propaganda network that they are calling, and this is the most delightful part, Portal Combat.

1:02:14Portal Combat? Yes, Portal Combat. So this is what they have called a Russian network that is creating hundreds of accounts on servers, including Blue Sky and Mastodon. And according to IFTAS and the French government, this network's main aim seems to be to get onto these open registration platforms and to start spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine, along with criticism of Western governments. And they were just kind of flagging this to us as a courtesy because our Mastodon server was growing very quickly. And they just wanted to say, hey, just FYI, this is happening to a bunch of other servers.

1:02:57but have you guys noticed in your moderation any posts or users that seem suspiciously pro-Kremlin? So I haven't, but like I don't follow all 4 ,000 people in the fork-averse, and this is a challenge of running a big server like this is that you typically are not seeing even a fraction of the content that is on the server. You're relying on user reports, and so unless a bunch of users said, hey, we're seeing a bunch of like suspiciously pro-Russian propaganda in our feeds. We might be unaware of a problem like this. So that's a legitimate problem. I have a question for you guys. Yeah, yeah. Let's hear it.

1:03:35I'm just curious, like, to me, the place where this has exceeded my, I guess, modest expectations is it is just a website that I'm surprised to find how much I'm enjoying checking, which I honestly did not think we would clear that bar. I'm curious if it clears that bar for you guys? Like if you're just as a user liking it. It has. And for this reason, so I spend most of my time on social networks these days on blue sky and threads. Blue sky is a very politics dominant network. So whatever the political story of the day is there, it feels like everyone I follow only wants to talk about that. And that's despite the fact that I've sought out people who are mostly posting about tech news.

1:04:15Threads, which some people call the gas League social network is a series of completely disconnected posts from people who, you know, they just lost their husband or they put on a dress for the first time in 30 years and wanted to take a picture of it and then occasionally post from TechCrunch. I happen to enjoy the insanity of threads, but I can't always say I know what to do when I show up there. When I go to the Forkiverse, I truly feel like I'm just interacting with people who like podcasts. And so I feel freer to just share like silly little jokes that might not feel welcome in some of the other places I'm online, you know?

1:04:56So the other day, I think it was this weekend and I was taking a look at how many people had signed up. And so I posted, good morning, the Forkiverse, another 200 people or so joined us overnight. And now the fire marshal is here. he's doing a sexy little dance wait a minute does this guy even work at the fire department and here's my point i couldn't have posted that on blue sky no one would have even understood what that meant but it felt really good to post in the four covers i love that we've progressed to the phase where our podcast is just us reading a series of four covers posts i got news for you most content is just people reading the equivalent of tweets yeah pj did you post anything on the four covers this week that you're especially proud of oh you posted the dress i posted the dress i was i'm trying to juice engagement so i posted the viral dress from what was it 2014 that was either blue and black or white and gold and i pretended like i just discovered it and i asked people to tell me what color it was wow so you i thought i was gonna be our resident uh growth goblin uh but it turns out that you are actually our growth goblin oh absolutely it turns out like i want i also got in trouble because i had a post where i said make this go viral which i was like kind of joking, but then people were jokingly boosting it.

1:06:11And a Fed-averse-ian showed up to tell me that the point of the Fed-averse is not virality and it's not attention. And if I'm trying to go viral, I'm misunderstanding the entire reason for being at the place right by myself. And honestly, it was fun to be scolded. That brings us to an important part of the conversation today, which is people who have been on the Fed-averse for a long time who have opinions about how we should be doing the Fed-averse. So I got us embroiled in a bit of a controversy over the past day because one of these folks who's been in the Fediverse for a long time sent a post to me that I didn't appreciate that was basically saying, you know, you guys are being very irresponsible with the server.

1:06:55you have now brought on 4 ,000 people onto the Fediverse, but you have said that you are just basically doing this as an experiment. And someday, you know, there might not be funding for the Forkiverse and it might go away. And these 4 ,000 people are going to be left high and dry. And so you need to lay out your plan to fund the Forkiverse until the heat death of the universe or shame on you was like basically the vibe that I was getting. And I'm reading this and I'm losing my mind. I'm saying the thing is four days old. Also, do you know what's really easy to do? create a new fricking account on the Fediverse.

1:07:27It'll take you five minutes. Like worst case scenario is really not that bad. Yeah. Now I'm sure some people are going to wonder, you know, we just spoke to Jonathan Haidt about the dangers of social media. Now here we are promoting, you know, this, uh, this, this social media, um, platform for other people to use. So I guess, Kevin, PJ, like what is our feeling if you are 16 and younger, should you be allowed to access the fork of verse. No. And in fact, when we were setting up the server, there was a thing in there that says, what is the minimum age for people on your server? And I set it to 18 because I'm a responsible person.

1:08:01Now, am I doing anything to verify that? Absolutely not. Have we installed any of these like Australian style sort of AI powered age determination tools? No, I have not. We are working on the honor system. But if I see you posting about your labuboos and your Minecraft server and your middle school math homework. I'm kicking you off. All right. Junior. So you heard it here first. You do not access the Fork and Verse if you're under 18. Do not access it from school. Do your homework. Listen to your parents. Yeah. No phones till you're 30. No phones till you're 30. You heard it here first. You have to have a 401k before you can have a phone.

1:08:41If you don't have lower back pain when you wake up in the morning, stay the hell off the Fork a verse. All right. So let's move right along here. We've had our first content moderation scandal. There's, of course, the Russian influence campaign. And the dress is generating a lot of discourse. I think the question now is, like, what next, fellas? Like, we accidentally got 4 ,000 people in a room. What do we want to do with them? You can tell they've thought a lot about it from the Blake expression on their faces. I really hope you're watching this on YouTube just so that you can see the dull stare.

1:09:19I was waiting for PJ to respond. PJ's our chief PJ's our growth goblin PJ what next? Okay so I'm looking for are you guys familiar with the concept of a scissor statement? Yes sort of a statement that sort of like neatly separates one group from another. Yeah yeah it's like it's a divisive piece of content that immediately everyone has to take a side. There's obviously we live in a country that is constantly producing things that are like sister statements. Um, what I am looking for this week, myself personally, are things like the dress, like benign is a hot dog, a sandwich, like almost like corny millennial era.

1:09:59I'm just trying to generate conversation that people want to participate in that goes beyond, Hey, I'm here. Who are you? Like, I'm trying to get people in discussion, but not discussion about the vast and intractable problems of the Republic. I'm just trying to get past small talk to fun talk. I think we should do a thing that's sort of like, search engine listeners are like this, and hard fork listeners are like that. You think we need beef between the shows? I don't even know if it has to be a beef. It just has to be like stereotypes about the listeners. It's like, what kind of clothes do they wear?

1:10:38And what kind of cars do they drive? and that sort of thing. Yeah, these are good ideas. I like that. Well, we've already learned that search engine listeners categorically live in the woods and on farms, whereas I think the hard fork listeners have a little bit more of an urban flavor to them. Part of the laptop class. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Here's a question. Have we achieved our goals with the Fediverse or is there another goal yet to reach? I want more growth. I want this to become a place that is beyond just, like, I think we've already succeeded past goal one, which is like, it exists. People enjoy it.

1:11:16I enjoy going there. You guys enjoy going there. I think goal two is like, can this be more than a public community board for two podcasts? Even if it just means a public community board for three podcasts. Yeah. We would take the Joe Rogan show listeners if they want to sign up. I want to hear about their meat smoking tips. I want to hear about how they're bow hunting elk. I want to know their peptide stack. Yeah, what are you injecting if you're listening to that show? Well, speaking of that, you know, one of the most frequent questions that we get over on the Fork of Burst is about how many people can fit in the server before it explodes.

1:11:51We had originally told them we think there can only be 2 ,000. There are now 4 ,000. What is our answer to that question? So I dug into this a little bit because as the site was growing, as we sort of saw the dashboards keep ticking up as it looked like we were approaching our limits, I reached out to Hugo, the very nice man who runs the Masto Host hosting platform that the Forkiverse uses. And I sort of said, hey, it looks like we're growing faster than we anticipated. Are we going to have to upgrade our plan soon? He basically said, no, it's not like a hard cap, but if you exceed that number of active users for some sustained period of time, we will have to talk about upgrading your plan.

1:12:30So we are not yet at the point of having to shell out for an even bigger bespoke plan. And I will say our users on the Forkiverse are being very nice and courteous. Some of them heard what we said about the maximum files upload sort of storage size that we have, and they have been uploading very grainy, low-resolution photos. This is my favorite norm in the Fediverse, is people uploading downscaled black and white images to try to help us stay under our storage cap. Like, truly, every single person who has done that, you are a hero of the Forkiverse. That's true. Yeah. So can I like offer maybe a little bit of a downer note on what has otherwise been a very exciting week for the Forkiverse, which is that all of this growth scares me.

1:13:16Really? Like I see people showing up to this website, having a great time. And I just think we are going to invariably let these people down. like I do not want people entrusting any part of their daily fulfillment and routine to our little stupid hobby project because like we are not like devoting our entire lives to this and I just worry that somebody somewhere is going to be let down or hurt because of something that we have done or more likely failed to do I think that's a fair point I would also say Kevin you and I have now been letting people down for over three years on this podcast. They're used to it.

1:13:54Here's what I'll say. If you are running a small business and you're thinking about maybe putting your Forkiverse handle on a business card or maybe painting it onto the shop window, maybe give it a year, see if it's still around. Don't rush into anything. This absolutely is an experiment. Things could go wrong. I think we can commit that if we decide to wind it down, we will have some kind of off board. Like we will explain to you how you can transfer your account onto another server. You know, we will try to be responsible in that regard. But like, I personally am like, if this is like a fun throwaway thing that I do for a year and then never look back, maybe that was just a good use of my time online.

1:14:33Yeah, I mean, it does make me feel a little bit of sympathy for the sort of social media barons that we have covered and talked to over the years who I think live in fear of their most active and invested users sort of revolting against them. We've seen this with YouTube. We've seen this with Instagram. We've seen this like many communities grow so large and so fundamental to people's lives and businesses that anytime they make like a little change, even if it's like a couple pixels here, a couple pixels there, like sets off this cascading chain reaction of failures for like everyone who depends on this has vital infrastructure.

1:15:09And so for the moment, I am glad that we are not vital infrastructure for anyone. And I'm a little nervous if we ever start to edge in that direction for anyone, even if it's as simple as, this is a place I like to go every day while I have my coffee in British Columbia. Do you worry that visiting the Forkverse lot could radicalize teenagers into listening to podcasts? God, I hope so. All right, well, we will have further updates on the Forkiverse as events continue to transpire. But PJ, I want to thank you so much for helping us put this project together, for making such a great episode about it.

1:15:48If you haven't listened to it yet, go listen to the search engine episode that they did. You can actually find a version of it right here in our feed. But yeah, we will be back at you at some point in the future. Once the Russians successfully conquer the Forkiverse, you'll hear about it here. You will hear about it here.

1:16:10Thank you.

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1:18:22One more thing before we go for any of our L.A. listeners. We wanted to let you know that on Tuesday, January 20th, Times Opinion is holding a live event on the first year of Trump's second term. The editor of New York Times Opinion, Katie Kingsbury, and columnist Jamel Bowie and Ross Douthat will be taking stock of the administration's biggest actions and what it all means for the country and the world as we know it. So we'll be including a link to the event in the show notes. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Viren Pavik. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love and Will Peischel.

1:18:55Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurrin. Our executive producer is Jen Poyan. Original music by Leah Shaw Damron, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. Video production by Soya Roque, Rebecca Blandon, Jake Nichol, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hard fork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, and Dahlia Haddad. You can email us at heartfork at nytimes.com with what you've been seeing in the forecomers.

1:19:44Thank you.