ActivityPub is the next big thing in social

22:33And then from there, it's just interfaces, right? If you want to pay more money for a really nice interface, fine. Otherwise, take the cheapest, built-in-iest one you can and move on with your life. But this kind of made me interested in the future of weather apps. I I also got a bunch of data from the folks at Sensor Tower who track all the app downloads that said weather app downloads in like the week after the Apple weather disaster went like through the roof, like 10x in some cases. And so all of a sudden there's like zest in this space again. And I'm sort of hopeful that for the first time in a decade, there's going to be like actually interesting weather stuff going on.

23:09Yeah, I hope so, too, because it's like it's fun to get excited about them and try different ideas and different things about. So I think it's definitely challenging now that, you know, when the weather apps are working, they've gotten a lot better. So like the default ones are not as stripped down as they used to be. And then, of course, the price challenge that we mentioned earlier. Like I think Hello Weather is actually one of the more affordable options. I did a little bit of research before coming on and like Carrot is$20 to$30 a year, depending on the features that you want. Hello Weather is about$13 a year.

23:37What's key about both of those is that there's no real tracking of you. Like you're just paying the developer money and like that's how they're making money. Everything else, whether it's AccuWeather, Weather Channel, Weather Underground, Tomorrow IO, they charge you money and they track you. So like they are like like your data is like going out there. So but even AccuWeather is$20 a year and the Weather Channel is$10 to$30 a year. So like these aren't really free anymore. And if they are free, it's probably not a great experience. You're definitely right that there are some people who like really, really need lots of information about the weather or just people who sort of care about it.

24:10Right. Like it is it is weather is a lot of people's hobbies. It's a perfectly valid thing to like spend a lot of time interested in. Totally cool. But I think the question is for like the sort of average everyday, like, do I need to wear a coat today person? The question of what is there that I would pay for is a really complicated one, especially because I think Apple weather has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years. I still think it's not as good as like Hello Weather and Carrot and some of these other ones, but it's like it's gotten a lot better. It's much closer to those than it was.

24:37And so I kind of feel like for you as a now Apple weather user, like, do you have a sense of what it would take to make you actually like foot a bill for a weather app at this point? Yeah, I don't know. I guess it would have to be like a really a design that really grabs me and is like really enjoyable to use. I know I've played around with carrot weather before and I can like recreate the dark sky interface in it, which is pretty cool. It's not$30 a year cool to me. So like, you know, it's cool, but not that cool. And like, ultimately, the thing that I liked the most about dark sky was the local notifications, which Apple weather kind of does now.

25:10Again, I haven't like scientifically tested them out though. So like, I can't say like whether they're right all the time or not. Like, but do they feel right? I feel like the vibes are really important. Yeah, the vibes are important. Like, you know, I get the notifications say like rain will be, this weekend was a really good example because it was like super rainy here. And so it kept going on and off. And so I was getting notifications all day long. Like rain will start in your area in 20 minutes. You know, rain will be stopping in 15 minutes and stuff like that. And it seemed like pretty accurate.

25:34But there were times where I will open the app and it'll say it's raining outside and I look outside and it's not raining outside. So like, you know, it's not definitely not perfect. But yeah, it's tough because it's like, if you can't sell me, like how are you going to sell the average user? Really doesn't care. Yeah, if you've lost Dan on your premium app, it's safe to say you've lost everybody. I want to try something though, like now that I've done the Forecast Advisor thing, because I really hate the Weather Channel app. Like no offense to anybody that makes that app, but I really don't like it.

26:03Yeah. But apparently that's the best data. So like I need to go find a third-party app that has that data because the Apple weather app doesn't use that data. And I got to go find one that maybe taps into the weather channel app without having to use the weather channel app. That's for the best. Well, luckily I have AccuWeather in all of my many apps now, except for the built-in one. So I'm good to go there. All right. Well, if you find a cool one, let me know. And the other thing I heard from lots of developers is that every WWDC is like total chaos time because a weird quirk of being a weather app developer is that everybody demands that you support all of Apple's weird new stuff.

26:37Like when widgets came out, they were like, we have to have the best widgets. And when live activities came out, it was like, you got to make it work. And so it's like, every time I think it was the hello weather guys who told me basically like they get nervous right before every WWDC, because it's like, what weird thing are you going to force us to work on this summer? Every single Apple event includes a huge amount of work for us. Like we're watching WWDC and we're like, that's some work. I mean, that was the excitement of weather apps is like they would be using the tools that were available and experimenting and trying things out and you could reliably like live activities is a really good one that really hasn't propagated to a lot of apps yet but there's probably a weather app out there that uses it or widgets is a really great example or whatever it was 10 years ago that was like the new feature whether it's uh you know flat design or gesture-based uis or something like that like you could experience that first in a weather app before it went to like all the other apps that you rely on all day long.

27:31Totally. All right. Well, when Apple launches the AR headset and blows up the weather ecosystem again, we'll come back and do this again. That sounds like fun. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to spend the whole rest of the show talking about the future of social media and why that future doesn't look anything like Twitter and Facebook. We'll be right back.

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29:10Sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter or following a counterintuitive instinct or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision. Like when the founders at Palo Alto Networks wanted to redefine cybersecurity for the modern age. Everybody thought we were crazy. Nobody would use the cloud for cybersecurity. And when I hear something like that, I say, of course I'm going to do it. If everybody believes it shouldn't be done or it cannot be done, then it's a good reason to do it. Or when mobile gaming giant Supercell could only rewrite the rules of the industry after failure in the company's formative stages.

29:46Many of the best things we've learned have actually come through failures. These are Crucible Moments, turning points in a company's journey that made them what they are today. Hosted by Sequoia Capitals, Ruloff, Botha, Crucible Moments is back for a new season with stories from Zipline, Stripe, Palo Alto Networks, Supercell, and more. Subscribe to Season 3 of Crucible Moments. New episodes are out now, and you can catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 at cruciblemoments.com, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Crucible Moments today.

30:27Welcome back. Here's the theory for you. I think when we look back on the overall story of the internet, Elon Musk buying Twitter is going to turn out to be an inflection point for the internet. Not because he saved Twitter, because that sure doesn't seem like it's happening, but because Musk's acquisition seems to mark the end of an era in social. For so many years, we've had these big platforms, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and now TikTok and YouTube, and they became our portals to our friends and in many ways to the Internet as a whole. But that structure seems to be going out of style.

31:00In its place, at least according to a lot of people in the tech industry, might come a whole new way of thinking about social and even the Internet as a whole. And now this is where I have to use a term that I hate, which is the word fetiverse. I hate the word fetiverse. It's this awful term that describes a really important concept, a decentralized version of these platforms in which your content and followers and friends don't all belong to a single company, but can be created, shared and interact with across platforms and servers. It's more like email, really, where you can use your Gmail account to message someone on Outlook or AOL than it is the current state of social.

31:37It's a huge change. Underpinning a lot of what makes the Fediverse, again, that word, work, is this protocol called ActivityPub. It's a simple web standard finalized five years ago that basically creates a structure for moving content around, so that in theory, any app could create content that any other app could understand and read. There are lots of ideas about decentralized protocols right now. You might have heard of Blue Sky, the decentralized Twitter, or things like Noster and Farcaster, and there are even a handful of other ones, but ActivityPub is the clear leader right now. In part because ActivityPub is the thing that makes Mastodon work, and Mastodon is so far the biggest thing in the Fediverse by a long shot.

32:19The idea underpinning all of this of decentralized social media is old, almost as old as the web itself, and it's been tried and failed several times over. But some really smart people think it's going to happen now in a really big way. One of those people is Mike McHugh, the CEO of Flipboard, which is a newsreader app that is now all in on the Fediverse. Before he founded Flipboard, Mike also worked at IBM. He was an executive in the early days of Netscape. And in general, he has been thinking about and building the future of the web since basically the beginning of the web. The guy knows his stuff, and he thinks the Fediverse is what's next.

32:55I've been reporting on the Fediverse for months, and Mike has been one of my favorite people to talk to on the subject. as is my co-host, Nilay Patel, who is kind of obsessed with the possibilities for Activity Pub. So I grabbed them both and we're going to try and figure out where all of this is going. Hi, Nilay. Hey, man. How's it going? Hanging in there. Mike McHugh, the Flipboard CEO is here. Hi, Mike. Hi, guys. We have a lot to talk about, but Mike, I want to start by reading you a quote back that you said to me because that's super fun when people throw words that you said to them back in your own face.

33:24And because I've been thinking about it a lot. We talked a while ago for this big Activity Pub story I wrote. And you said the following, you said, I was there in the early days of the web. And this whole thing with ActivityPub is as big a deal as HTML was back then. This is the single biggest opportunity I've seen for the web since the dawn of the web. And I want you either right now, this you can say, you know, I'd had too much coffee. I was too excited. This is I went too far. Everybody calm down, or you can double down. And then we can go from there. So I'm going to give you the chance confirm or deny this is as big as you said it was.

33:54Yeah, I'll double down. In fact, I think as we talk about this more, you'll see why. This is probably the most exciting opportunity I've seen since the 90s as a founder, as an entrepreneur. So this is a very big deal. All right. I think we should probably just start at the beginning here. One of the things Neil and I have been debating for months is like how to talk about ActivityPub. Because there's like, we live in this world where Mastodon is very powerful and a lot of people are talking about it, but it's also like not nearly sort of in the stratosphere of the other social networks. But then there's this thing underpinning it, which is this activity protocol that feels like a very big deal.

34:28What's the case that you make to people like as you're as you're doing what Neela is doing and just like running around yelling the word activity pub to anyone who will listen? What's the story you tell them? Like, why is this a thing that you're convincing people you work with who have lots of things to do that this is a thing worth thinking about? Well, it is the future, not just of social media, but of the Web. Activity Pub, you know, when I think about it, I think there are two things that it does. And one of them is to create an open social graph that becomes a part of the web, which in and of itself is a very big deal.

35:03The other thing it does is it creates a common two-way streaming platform or architecture that allows services to be interoperable. So what this means is that all, as we've seen, all these social media platforms basically just become other versions of themselves. They all have vertical video now. They're all copying each other. They all build everything into this vertical stack that's totally proprietary. And if you leave and you try to do a new one, you've got to rebuild your social graph. As a creator, that's a big issue. As a brand, as a publisher, that's a big problem. So what this reminds me of is the days of AOL, before the web really happened.

35:43Everything is built vertically. If you want to do would put something up online, you'd have to go do a business development deal with AOL. And all of the innovation is locked in by one company. So they're only doing as much as that one company can do. And with this activity pub breakthrough, what it really allows is the web to flourish again and to kind of reopen up all of that innovation that currently is really controlled by just a handful of social media platforms today. When you say interoperable, that means I post something to Mastodon, it comes into Flipboard, I hit like in Flipboard, and that like shows up on someone else's Mastodon that's following me.

36:25Well, so there's that level, and then it goes deeper. I'll give you an example. Let's say Barack Obama, who's not on Mastodon, he's not on Flipboard, but he is on Medium. So as Medium integrates activity pub, you will be able to follow Barack Obama on Medium. When he posts something, you'll see it. When you comment on it, and you'll see it from Mastodon or from Flipboard, when you comment on it, those comments will flow back into Medium. That's one level of interoperability. But then it goes further. Who's Barack Obama? Is this the real Barack Obama? What about verification and identity? Right now, we rely on these individual walled gardens to provide that service.

37:04But there's an opportunity for a new company, a new third party. Maybe it's not even a company. Maybe it's a nonprofit that gets created that their whole focus is to do verification. You could have a whole other set of companies, multiple companies or multiple entities or developers that do moderation, right? So what you have is you're not just decentralizing the user experience, you're decentralizing the innovation, right? You're allowing all sorts of new ideas and new opportunities to do verification incredibly well, or moderation incredibly well, and have a lot of choice in how that happens.

37:40What you just described sort of intellectually makes total sense to me is how the internet should work, right? That these things should not be all in one place, controlled by one company, especially for things like the creator economy, right? Like it's crazy that you have to have essentially 12 different businesses on 12 different platforms. Like that's nuts. Definitely. This is how the internet should have been built 25 years ago, right? That like the, I think the open web would be a better place with this stuff built in. And we've had versions of this conversation about security and about identity.

38:04And like, we got a lot of things wrong about the web in the nineties. And before that, that wouldn't it be great if we had gotten them right then life would be a lot easier but what you just described even that thing with barack obama being on medium is such a like break in how we think about the web and the internet that it almost feels like the hill that all this stuff has to climb even in just how people like understand the vocabulary of it is so big that i almost wonder if like that hill to climb back to yes of course this is how it should work is so great that it might not even have a chance that like if we had done it back then, it would have been awesome and it would have been different.

38:40But we've just veered so far from that now. It's like trying to reinvent the QWERTY keyboard, right? Like maybe you can do better, but nobody cares because this is what we've been doing for all this time. Well, I think it'll happen in stages. You're already seeing the beginnings of it because of what's happening at Twitter, right? That is one moment for people to say, well, actually there's a better way. There will be more of those moments that will come. And I think that over time, as more people that you care about that you want to follow who are posting interesting things, that will ultimately drive a gradual increase.

39:15And then at some point, there'll be a tipping point. I don't think we're at that tipping point just yet. I think we're in a phase. But that tipping point, I think, will come when you have a critical mass of creators, publishers, interesting people to follow who are on ActivityPub. Let me ask you about that critical mass. So Twitter, whatever's happening, Twitter's happening, Twitter. But Twitter is the smallest of the social networks. In fact, the reason that it is in the position it is in right now is because it was so small and so mismanaged and made so little money compared to Facebook, compared to Instagram, compared to YouTube.

39:50Isn't the critical mass of people you need to attract from those platforms? Don't you need to get the YouTube community onto an activity pub based YouTube or the Instagram community onto something like Pixel Fed, which is an activity pub based Instagram clone? Yes, 100 percent. You know, you've got to get people like you guys, people like Marquez Brownlee, people like Barack Obama. You know, you need a collection of interesting people to make this whole thing work. Remember back in the early days of the web where, you know, on AOL, you used to be able to go to AOL and you'd see all these little boxes.

40:26If you go back and look at some screenshots of AOL, which I did the other day, it's mind-blowing. There's all these little boxes in the home screen. And every one of those boxes represents like a multi-billion dollar industry, right? Like there's booking travel online. And, you know, and then they have one box like called the internet. You can go to the internet. And so what happened was people didn't just automatically one day decide to switch off of AOL and switch on to the web. It was much more of a gradual change. And on the web, what you saw, I remember when San Jose Mercury News came online.

41:00Fantastic newspaper, really digital forward, and they had a fantastic web experience. It was way better than anything you could get on AOL. So more and more and more publications came to the web. And that started to get the ball rolling. So, you know, if you remember when Jim Clark started Netscape with Marc Andreessen, they also announced, I think it was five major publishers that were coming along to the web that were going to be actually backing Netscape. So that's one of the things that has to happen as well. The case that I heard from a couple of people in reporting this that I thought was really interesting was that one way to get to that critical mass is kind of the sum of a lot of smaller parts, right?

41:43And I think this is where something like Flipboard comes in for you, Mike. Flipboard is not the size of Facebook, but if you add Flipboard and Medium and Tumblr and this other sort of growing mass of things like the Metcalfe's law thing, right, where the value of the network increases exponentially by the number of people on the network, that seems to be the bet, right? And that you don't have to have one 3 billion person platform. You can have 10, 300 million people platforms or 103 million people. That's bad math. Whatever. You know what I mean? You can win this game sort of a piece at a time rather than having to beat Facebook with Facebook, right?

42:18That's kind of that's a big part of the whole activity pitch. Absolutely. And, you know, if you are a creator, OK, one of the parts of your job is to adopt new social media platforms as they happen, right? we've seen this movie. Everyone's on TikTok now. Snap was the number one thing. And before that, it was Facebook and so on. So what I'll tell you is that a creator wants to build an audience and wants to have that audience be an audience that they can continually reach without interference from someone else. And when Facebook changes their algorithm or Elon changes the For You algorithm or takes away your verification checkmark.

42:59And all of that time and energy you put into building that audience in a walled garden starts to go to waste. That's terrible. Plus, as a creator, you know, when I talk to when I talk to creators, they tell me all the time that like having to spend time on all these different social platforms is really hard, right? They've got all these fragmented audiences. You know, YouTube is now, you know, prioritizing vertical video, of course. So now you got to go make vertical video too, you know, in order to be in the recommendation algorithm. So this is a real challenge. What I think is going to happen is that creators are going to start to realize if I invest in the open social web and I start building an audience there, I don't have to leave all these other platforms, but I can start building an audience there.

43:42And over time, linking back to my content, maybe even starting to host some of that content in the open social web, in the Fediverse, over time, more and more people are going to go there because they know that that audience that they create, they'll be able to keep that audience for as long as they want to. And nobody can interfere with that. We're speaking Nealize language now. And that is my language. But what's actually about that is the reason the big platforms have succeeded is that the thing that they centralized most of all was monetization. So you are a YouTube creator. You go to YouTube.

44:15You hit whatever threshold to turn on YouTube, AdSense. You hit the button. Now YouTube is out there in the market selling ads and allowing people to buy ads on a platform. They're serving you against your content, and you're just getting a check. There's no analog for that in the Fediverse yet, right, where some other big platform has figured out monetization on the scale of a YouTube or a TikTok or whatever and is providing it to creators. Do you think that is, you know, you say moderation might be one of those functions that an ecosystem of companies arises for. Is monetization going to be one of those functions, too?

44:48Or will one of these platforms figure it out? I think so, Eli. I think, well, let's take a look at Patreon. Patreon is actually a pretty effective way for creators to monetize. And right now, you kind of have to go to Patreon to see, like, the special posts from those creators. And Patreon's not really set up that way as a discovery vehicle or as a consumption experience, right? But you could imagine something like Patreon or maybe Patreon itself integrated with ActivityPub so that when you subscribe to a creator and that creator posts something interesting just for their patrons, you'll see it.

45:24You'll see it in whatever experience you're using, whether that's the ivory client on Mastodon, whether it's Flipboard, you'll see it. And that is, I think, an example of a kind of centralized monetization applied in a decentralized way, if you will. This sounds like kind of like a super RSS, right? In many ways, you have a bunch of feeds and you got a feed reader and those things aren't connected. And then you open your feed reader and here's all the stuff from all your people. and it occurs to me that Flipboard is a kind of super feed reader. So I understand why you are in particular interested in this.

45:59The problem for us with RSS historically is that our business model doesn't go with it, right? So for The Verge, we give it away for free. We put ads on the page. That's why it's free. The ads make us enough money to pay the staff. When we were giving out full text RSS or when we were posting all of our stories on Twitter, which is something that we did for some reason for a decade, are monetization. We were just giving the stuff away for free. Do you see a world in which the advertising or the other kinds of business models travel with the content in ActivityPub? This is something that I think is very different than how monetization works today on the internet.

46:36Advertising is very primitive when you think about it. We have digital advertising now. Advertising tracking you and all of the privacy violations and the surveillance economy, you know, that happens because of advertising today online is terrible. In a lot of ways, Mastodon is a reaction to that, right? They don't want any algorithms at all in Mastodon because of that. Algorithms, there's nothing wrong with algorithms. Algorithms can be very helpful for content discovery and personalization and all sorts of things, right? But when they're used to monetize in ways that are not transparent, that violate users' privacy, obviously you're going to lose trust.

47:16And so that's what's happened. So now I do believe that there will be an opportunity for brands who want to promote themselves, who want to be recognized, who want to be discovered, to participate in a much more genuine, transparent way that's much more respectful of users. When we started Flipboard, it was about, we were inspired by print advertising, right? You would never buy Mountain Biking Magazine and rip out all the ads, right? The ads are part of the experience, right? It's actually something I like to have, right? That world can exist. I think there's a lot of thinking, a lot of collaboration that has to happen across the Fediverse.

47:52I think what you'll find most, though, aside from advertising, will be this more Patreon. Think of it as like a decentralized Patreon type of model, where people are paying for content or paying for access to communities or paying to be able to interact with a creator. And I think those payments can take the form of micropayments. They can be subscriptions. They can it might even be tokenized. There is a lot of opportunity here to rethink the business model in a way that's much healthier. Does that exist in Activity Hub now? I subscribe to you on whatever Fediverse Patreon and then I have access to feeds I can pump into any Fediverse product.

48:30Is that in the standard yet or is that to be built? No, it's not in the standard per se in terms of monetization. But the subscription, the RSS thing you mentioned earlier is dead on. I think of ActivityPub as two-way RSS, right? It's a dual RSS. And yes, you can subscribe to multiple feeds, right? And those could be from multiple services. And some of those might be behind a paywall of sorts. This is my favorite thing about ActivityPub, by the way. And the thing I think is the most interesting tension of it is like, boil it all the way down and ActivityPub doesn't do very much. Like what you just described, Mike, that two-way RSS thing, That is the entirety of ActivityPub.

49:09That's all it does. It has no thoughts about how we think about identity. It has no ideas about algorithms. It has no ideas about monetization. It's just like it's a push and pull of content in a relatively structured way such that you can say, here is how I understand content, and you can say, here is how I send content. And those two things can talk to each other. That's it. and that's what brings up i think to me this big challenge and i just keep coming back to this idea that there is sort of a chicken and egg problem which is that like the patreon example to me is a really interesting one that it would require everybody to decide to support federated patreon right that like if you want this big ecosystem to exist you can they kind of everybody has to play along all the readers would have to support it all the creators would have to play into it and then you have this like big giant centralized platform that controls all the monetization of the creator economy.

49:57And I'm not sure that's good either. Or the flip side is you have a hundred different ones that everybody has to support. And that I'm not sure just works from a UI perspective. So I feel like I just have a hard time breaking down the like big platforms actually have some real user experience wins that we've never really seen this like huge decentralized things pull off in such a way that actually makes sense. I don't know, like, is there a middle ground there that works, do you think? What does that look like? Yeah, I can tell you guys have been spending a lot of time talking about ActivityPub.

50:26This is all we talk about. It's all we talk about. Yeah, man, this is awesome. Because I, you know, by the way, I was out at South by Southwest, and I felt like I was like that weird guy on the street, like the end of Wald Gardens is near, you know, holding up the sign. Everyone's like, what are you talking about? It's a dream. But look, I think that, you know, the point around ActivityPub being this very simple protocol that all it does, it's, you know, two-way RSS is a good way to think about it, right? And it's the connection points that create the social graph. RSS wasn't really sort of thought about as like, oh, this is something where you have a person who's actually publishing RSS, right?

51:11It was more publisher to individual, right? What ActivityPub does is it's like, well, it's an individual to another individual, or it could be an organization. And that very simple protocol, basically, when you look at the effect of it, it creates a graph, it creates a social graph that is open. And that's huge. So the byproduct of ActivityPub gets you that, right? Now, when you come to monetization, you have to ask yourself, what's the kind of core protocol level thing you need to produce the friction for monetization? not to say like and try not to bake into that protocol some predefined way that it's going to work right with a centralized company or whatever right but really create it in a way that's flexible so that it could be used in all sorts of different models so i think probably one of the most important protocol things would be some kind of tokenization some sort of point system think of it like miles for the Fediverse, right?

52:12Some way where it was kind of built in and then it could be monetized. It could not be, it might be monetized in a subscription model or maybe on a micropayments model. But that's the kind of thinking that I think you need to do now. So it is a middle ground. And I do think that there's this incredible opportunity to collaborate with people right now who are building this Fediverse to do something like that and create something that's fundamentally healthier leads to a healthier business models. The reason I keep asking about money, which is kind of like the most boring part of this all, is because that's how you're going to get creators to start to use this stuff, right?

52:46You offer them a better deal than the big platforms. My joke about YouTube is that the life cycle of every YouTuber is marked by the video that they make about how mad they are at YouTube. And if you just are a YouTuber long enough, you end up making that video. And that changes your relationship to YouTube permanently once you've made that video. How do you go capture those people? And then how do you prevent them from being as frustrated with the decentralized platform and then have the worst problem of there being no one to yell at? Yep. Right. At least YouTube, like you can go yell at people at YouTube and then decentralized platform.

53:21You're just yelling at sort of a loose conglomerate of incentive structures. Yeah, that's a great point. Well, you know, I think that it's a gradual process. So one of the things I think would be good to adjust in terms of how people are thinking about ActivityPub and the Fediverse is that you have to leave one platform to join Fediverse. And that's just not the case. So, you know, I think it's important to be pragmatic. Initially, if you build an account on the Fediverse, right, as a creator, your main point there is to start to collect more audience and start to build an audience that ultimately you will have control over.

54:00and use that as a way to post a link to your YouTube video, post a link to your newsletter. That is a gradual way to start getting the ball rolling. And also, by the way, when you're on every YouTube video you make, say, hey, follow me on Macedon, right? Like follow me in the Fediverse. You know, I have this account here. And if you follow me, you'll see other things that I'm posting that you can't see here on YouTube. And what you'll have is over time, more and more people will start to follow that creator in the Fediverse. And then as these monetization capabilities start to come online in the Fediverse, you know, say there's a Patreon type of model, or maybe they even just use Patreon and Patreon adopts ActivityPub, right?

54:42Which would be a great idea. Then over time, more and more of their monetization will come from the Fediverse. So I think that's probably what you're gonna see. And the cool thing here is like, it's a no brainer. It doesn't take that much work to create an account on Mastodon today. It's a totally new social platform. There's fantastic people on there now. You get very high engagement. I see 10x or 100x the engagement on Mastodon than I do on Twitter. And you don't have to just leave Twitter. You can still, you know, tell your Twitter audience to like start following you on Mastodon. And over time, you'll have a critical mass of creators there.

55:23Okay, we need to take a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about how this all actually appears in the apps that people use every day. We'll be right back.

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57:51All right, we're back. with Neelai and Flipboard CEO Mike McHugh. We should talk about Flipboard because I think, to Neelai's point, this is still so much just like a word you say in rooms and no one knows what you're talking about. But you're in the process of trying to actually make this real for people. And I think the stuff that you're doing in Flipboard mirrors a lot of what I'm seeing other companies start to do in the Fediverse. And so my first question is, it seems like rather than reinvent the wheel and try to make Flipboard a gigantic on-its-own activity pub thing from the very beginning, your first move is really centered on Mastodon.

58:25That seems to be what's happening everywhere. Everybody is saying like, this is a big, long road, but the first kind of killer app for all of this seems to be Mastodon. Is that right? Do you see it that way? Like why, why bet there before sort of building out your own thing? Well, yes, you're right. Mastodon is by far the number one implementation on ActivityPub. And it looks and feels kind of like Twitter. And there's a need for a Twitter alternative now, which didn't really exist a year ago, but now there is. And so I think that that's a good place to start. Now that said, there is going to be other experiences that embrace ActivityPub, right?

59:02WordPress, Tumblr, and Flipboard. And so really when I zoom out here, I guess the thing I'm trying to make sure we do at Flipboard is not create just another Twitter clone, you know, just another thing that looks like Mastodon, but like it does things a little differently, right? I think it's really important to think about how these pieces fit together. What would you use something like Mastodon for? And what would you use something like Flipboard for? What are the different kinds of audiences that will use one or the other to the extent that they're going to make a choice? Flipboard is very much focused on the kind of mainstream audience.

59:36So my mom and my 16-year-old daughter, those are the two people. If I can get them to use the Fediverse, I know we're making progress. And that is what we're focusing Flipboard on, is to win people like that over. And is the idea that all the publishers you work with are going to sort of back into adopting ActivityPub because they're going to publish to Flipboard and then Flipboard will support it? Well, yeah. So I think that this is a conversation we're talking about with publishers now. And we can help be a helpful on-ramp for publishers to the extent that they need that. I think other publishers are able to, you know, stand up an instance and, you know, actually get going here.

1:00:16And I hope that they do. Again, same argument we were just talking about for creators applies to publishers, right? Why wouldn't you do this? It's like, this is your audience. It's like building a website right now, right? This is like a no brainer. So I think that like, you know, I'm not, when I say stand up an instance, I don't mean, hey, you know, now the Verge is a social network and everybody can join it, you know, unless you want to do that. I'd super want to do that. That's where my head is at completely. Exactly. Welcome to hell. But, you know, the FT, they opened it up so anybody could join, right?

1:00:51And they were like, ah, you know, this is hell. So we're out, right? But you don't have to open it up, right? You can say, okay, well, this is an instance where our journalists are going to have an account. They're going to be able to communicate with users. People can follow them here. They know this is the actual author or writer, you know, or journalist. So I think that yes, the publishers increasingly will come. And again, it's like a no brainer. Why wouldn't you? Right? I mean, this is it's just it's more audience, it's more of an opportunity to get in early, you know, people in the Fediverse are extremely welcoming to new entrants right now.

1:01:26And you can build a really fantastic following now. So I think that's going to be happening more and more. Well, and I think even just in the like, structure of Flipboard. This didn't click to me the first time we talked, but it just made sense to me now. Like what you're describing is the original pitch you made for Flipboard about web articles, right? You just said like, look, worst case, what we are is a new way to see and sort through stuff that lives on the web. If you want to like make a deal with us and ingest your content and have it look beautiful and we can do all this stuff, we can sell your ads for you.

1:01:57Terrific. Or we will just essentially set up a rich link to your page and people can flip through it and sort through it in new ways. And that's essentially the same structure you're describing, right? Like if you want to just use this distributed, this new system for sending rich links, terrific. Or if you want to drill like six or seven levels down deeper, there's even cooler stuff you can do. But the pitch is not that different, right? You're still just kind of doing flipboard things to the internet. So exactly. And, you know, this reminds me, by the way, of back when I joined Netscape, I used to be the guy that would go out and convince publishers to build a website.

1:02:35So it's like, hey, the web is a really cool thing and you should build on it. And one of the things that I tried to do back then was help publishers not just take what they're doing in print and just pick it up and drop it down on the web. It's a different world. The same thing is true here. So you don't want to just take an RSS feed and drop it onto the Fediverse. really what this is about is the journalists who work at a publisher to actually start to curate and post content by the way not just from that publisher but content that they're reading content that's inspiring them that's informing them to audiences and the publisher instance becomes a collection of those thoughtful journalists who are building audiences on their own and that is a very different approach to how most publishers, you know, that have a bot and RSS feed and put it out on Twitter, that doesn't build community, right?

1:03:33You need a genuine way for people to interact with other people, have conversations. So that's a different modality. And I think there's an opportunity to actually do that here. We're having this conversation in a really interesting, larger context. Twitter is whatever has happened. It's hard to even describe what is happening in Twitter. It's imploding. It's exploding. Something has forever changed with Twitter. At the same time, BuzzFeed just shut down BuzzFeed News. That has prompted a wave of articles and lamentations about the end of what you might call the social platform era, where Facebook would send lots of traffic to something like BuzzFeed News, or Twitter would send lots of traffic to something like BuzzFeed News.

1:04:18That's over, right? These platforms are not sending lots of traffic to pages on the web anymore. They're trying to keep it all for themselves in vertical video. Do you see this as a response to that, as we've got to build a new way to send traffic around the open web? Or do you see this as something different and new? A bit of both. And I'll add to the challenges that the web is facing. The whole realization that advertising is violating people's privacy, that's an extinction level event. What we're seeing now are profoundly damaged monetization streams for publishers that are making it so that they cannot support their journalists and building out on the web.

1:05:00And if you go to a web page, it's a disaster, right? There's pop-ups, there's ads everywhere. You can barely even find the content, right? And you've got belly fat ads and Outbrain and Topoola, and it just is a disgusting, horrible place and a lot of what used to be great content. So as GDPR and CCPA and other kind of well-meaning privacy things come online, it's only serving to make it even harder to sustain quality journalism, right? So with advertising. So the whole ad model is changing and will have to change drastically because it just doesn't work anymore. So this is another thing to add into that.

1:05:39So I think what you're seeing with the Fediverse, and this is coming back to why I see this as one of the most interesting and most powerful opportunities since I really started building companies, is that this gets at everything that we know about online, about the internet, right? Not just content discovery and connecting to people, but it also gets that content presentation. It gets that monetization. It gets that moderation. It gets that the impact on our societies, the impact on our own mental health. This is a big moment. David's going to kill me because this is my other obsession, and I'm going to work it into the activity pub conversation.

1:06:13If you start talking about copyright law, I'm kicking you out. I'm not going to talk about copyright law, although I could. Okay, good. No, I want to talk about search. The last thing that distributes traffic to web pages is Google search. We see what is happening with AI. We see a company that needs to change how search works to just answer the question and maybe have a robot somewhat accurately answer the question for you instead of sending you to some SEO-optimized web page. When you talk about how bad web pages are, yep, it's pop-ups. Yep, it's the sign-up for our newsletter interstitial that shows up.

1:06:44But it's also how structured every web page is to serve the Google robot instead of a human being. And that's changing, too. Does that play into this for you? that Google is about to break on top of everything else and like a generation of internet consumers might create new habits. Yeah, that is a great point. And, you know, the whole generative AI revolution is setting it up so that, you know, browsing the web from Google isn't gonna be increasingly a thing. You know, you'll just stay on Google or on Bing. You know, why would you go click over to a link? So yeah, that's a big part of this. And what I think is gonna require, where what's going to start to happen here is the very nature of what a website is, what content is, and how journalists are adding value to the conversation is going to have to evolve.

1:07:36So, you know, anybody can write an article about Mastodon, right? There's a whole bunch of them out there. And they tend to say the same things, right? You guys have been spending time actually digging down into the depths of the technical protocol that powers it and all of the different implications of that. So you're adding real value to this conversation, right? And that value can be captured by directly interacting with your audiences, right? Which you've had to do through third parties. You've had to do that through a publisher, which then had to do that through Google, you know, interfered with a business model around advertising.

1:08:13So that came back to like what content you would even, you know, be asked to write or would be able to write. Right. So what's happening now is like true value, true thoughtful content is prized. You know, this generic stuff that you can get from chat GPT, like, okay, yeah, I can, I can type in what is activity pub and I'll get a good answer. But this conversation here, for example, you know, this is the kind of stuff people are really looking for. Yeah, what makes this exciting is that you know there's one or two huge lies buried in the context of this. That's how I'm going to start competing with ChatGPT is we're just going to insert some definite falsehoods along the way and you just have to suss them out.

1:08:53It's a good strategy. Excellent. Before we let you go here, Mike, the two things I want to talk about are kind of the rest of this space a little bit, because I think we conflate like there's Activity Pub and there's the Fetaverse and there's Mastodon and everybody talks about these all as the same thing. But also there's like Blue Sky is out here with the AT protocol and NOSTER is a thing that Jack Dorsey talks a lot about. Where do you think this lands? Are we going to end up like everybody quotes that XKCD comic where it's like, you know, there are too many standards. Let's have one that governs everything.

1:09:20And then it's like, oh, no, now we have too many plus one standards. Does this land there? Are we going to end up in this really awful place where everybody is trying to do their own flavor of decentralized and things just get worse? Like, what do you see when you look around the rest of the space? I think you're going to see that Blue Sky ultimately will become part of the Fediverse. Blue Sky is very good. It is a hardcore, just exact Twitter clone. Yeah, it really is. And they've advanced the state of the thinking on some things like moderation and portability and things like that. That said, ActivityPub is a very simple, straightforward protocol.

1:09:57It reminds me of like HTTP, right? It's very straightforward, simple, does one thing, does it really well. That doesn't mean that there won't be other protocols that will come in will specialize on things like portability or identity moderation. So I think that you're going to see ultimately there will be bridges built between things like Blue Sky and things like, you know, Mastodon or ActivityPub. Think of it this way. Remember how when we had email clients, initially they were POP3 based, right? Because that was like most people weren't online all the time. So you downloaded all your email to your laptop.

1:10:30That was how POP3 worked. And then IMAP came online and IMAP was a different protocol, different way of doing email, had some extra functionality. Most email clients support both POP3 and IMAP, right? Maybe even to this day, I don't really know. I haven't been keeping on top of it. But what you would do is be able to use one email client and it would talk in POP3 or talk in IMAP, you know, whatever your server was. So I can see a scenario where there'll be bridges between these protocols, where clients will integrate both protocols. I believe that Blue Sky work in particular will just become part of the Fediverse.

1:11:05Yeah, Blue Sky seems to have gotten a lot of things around like user experience. Well, because they just copied Twitter. They had a decade of Twitter's work to build on. For sure. But it works, right? And it's like the thing for me is just like the usernames make more sense. Like Mastodon's things where you have two at symbols and it's an email address, but it's not an email address. It's just, it's too much. And Blue Sky is like, it seems to be well ahead on some of that stuff. So I kind of hope you're right that everybody learns from each other and we eventually find somewhere that actually makes sense.

1:11:33But then to that point, we're very much in this like rising tide lifts all boats thing in the Fediverse, right? Everybody's welcoming to everybody because there's no real competition because the competition is still Facebook. But like play this out a few years and this stuff gets really huge. And, you know, Flipboard is a big player in the Fediverse and everybody's on the Fediverse. And then I don't know, like Smart News shows up and is like smartnews.social, We're in the Fediverse now. Like, can this work without eventually getting competitive? Like, are you going to have to try to ruthlessly destroy other Fediverse companies 10 years from now in order to stay successful?

1:12:06Like, how long does this goodwill last? It lasts as long as you're providing genuine value to users, to people, right? I want to stop calling them users, in fact, because they're just people that are communicating with each other and they're looking for genuine value from others. And that might be an individual, might be a creator, that might be a company. If you stop doing that, then yeah, you're going to get swamped by somebody else. Because lock-in basically is gone, right? Like the price of being bad goes way up because it's going to get so much easier to leave. Exactly. That idea of decentralizing the innovation is so powerful.

1:12:44Let's look at another example. You could imagine where somebody could just do nothing but make amazing filters for video, like awesome augmented reality, virtual reality, cool AI filters. That's all they do day in, day out. That doesn't have to be part of a social media platform, right? And I guarantee you that like somebody just totally focused on that, they're going to build, you know, really something really cool. And now they can. Now people can actually say, hey, you know what? I'm using this social experience and I want to integrate these filters in. So there's going to be a lot of innovation that's going to happen.

1:13:23Similar to like the AOL to web transition, right? With AOL, there was only a certain number of things you could do to like book airline tickets. Like you could book an airline ticket, yes, but it was like going through the Sabre system and all of that. Now you have like this incredible ability to like find the lowest ticket and the right timeframe with all these other connections to hotels and other travel kinds of experiences. That didn't exist before, right? So I think what you're going to see, rather than everybody just trying to be the same thing, you know, which is what's happening now. Instagram looks like YouTube, looks like TikTok, looks like Snap.

1:13:59It's like they're all just becoming more and more the same thing. That's going to end. And you're going to have this blossoming of innovation that, yeah, they'll still be competitors, but it'll be much more on a level playing field where the best ideas will win and the most genuine experiences will be adopted. How do you think the big platform companies are going to play into this? Well, there's a report that Meta is working on an activity pub Twitter clone. At some point, if this goes the way that you're saying, YouTube will have to do something. How do you think the big platforms handle this?

1:14:32Do they do embrace, extend, extinguish, and start, and then somehow centralize it again? Or do they play nicely? Well, you know, hard to say. But, you know, if we look at past history, again, come back to AOL, you know, they had that little internet box. And that was what they did. And they're just like, yeah, now we do internet, right? So it depends on how Facebook really approaches this. Is this just like a rogue team inside of Facebook? And like, okay, now we do ActivityPub. Cool. We're open. But mostly they haven't changed anything. Or do they go all in? I remember when Bill Gates decided one day, it was December 7th in 1995, I think, where he was like, you know what?

1:15:14We are all in on the internet. Like everything we do will now be internet. Every single thing. That was a big moment, right? So is Facebook going to react that way? Or will they react more like AOL? I don't know. I have this vision of Mark Zucker being like, that whole metaverse thing, pause. activity pub yeah metaverse to fediverse yeah that's pretty good that is pretty good um all right we need to go here in a minute but um before we do nilai why aren't you on the fediverse i cannot tell you the number of people who are like is this fake nilai bot on the fediverse which a is a perfect elucidation of all the problems on the fediverse but nilai what the hell yeah so i have an account amassed on social which people have found and are replying to you try to get me to use, then there is a Verge reader or a Vergecast listener who made a bot called the Verge.space that reposts our quick posts into the Fediverse.

1:16:07You can just follow that account and you get all my quick posts in the Fediverse. I think that's super cool. But the real reason that I haven't engaged this is I'm just letting my mind heal. I've spent a full decade on Twitter. I've had too many emotional experiences with Twitter, good and bad. I've just I've run my brain in 240 characters for too long and I think it's healthy for me to not think about the rhythms of my day that way for a little bit I think like fundamentally I am a true believer in what activity pub will do I want there to be a more decentralized internet I really think that everybody who makes media for a living who is a creator should think about their relationship to their audience in a more direct way.

1:16:53And that's what Twitter did for people. It was just the default answer for every question for so long. And before I dive head first and do it again, I would just like to take myself out of that way of thinking for a little bit and come at it with just like a fresher perspective, a healthier state of mind. I don't know if it's working. My daughter turned five and we had a birthday party and I said a Twitter joke to a group of five-year-olds. Like, that's what I mean. Like, my brain is broken and I had no idea what I was saying. I just want to just release that tension for a little bit longer before I dive back into posting things that look like tweets all day.

1:17:33I mean, that's an annoyingly good response. That's a great response. It won't work. And I expect you to be back very quickly. Oh, yeah. No, I'm poisoned. And I'm just like, it's like, can I get the how much of the toxin can I get out of my system? It's not going to be all of it. But I think this is the next turn. My inclination is to come to that next turn with as fresh of a slate as possible. Not all of the old habits. Fair enough. Okay. So Mike, to go back to the, just as we go here to go back to the, one of the first things you talked about, Nick Negroponte got up and said, by next year, everyone will have heard of this and be using this.

1:18:07Put us on a timeline here, like not for it takes over the world. And this is the only thing we do, but like, how long is it going to take before? like this idea and these concepts get full, honest to God, like your mom and your daughter mainstream? Well, this year is incredibly meaningful. This will be the year where you have the experiences actually happen, where the mainstream audiences can come. I think you're also going to see this year a lot of important creators and interesting people join. And then probably next year is where it really goes fully mainstream. That's fast. I think so. I really do.

1:18:43You know, that doesn't mean all the modernization and, you know, moderate everything will be completely fixed or, you know, thought through. Those things will all be evolving as we go. But I do think that like, well, I mean, I'll tell you this. I think I'm working to get my mom to use this this year, 100 % this year. Right. She doesn't use Twitter. Good for her. And just, you know, have it be something where she's like, OK, this is this is I get this. This makes sense to me for my daughter. I think that'll be more next year thing. And the reason for that is that you just need more creators of that TikTok era to come to the Fediverse.

1:19:20And it's going to take longer for that, I think, just pragmatically to happen. Fair enough. I like it. All right. Well, we need to go. Thank you so much. This was really fun. And I suspect the three of us are going to have to do this a bunch more times over the next two years because this isn't going away. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Thank you guys for having me. All right, that's enough ActivityPub. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks so much to Dan, Neelai, and Mike for joining the show. There's lots more, as always, on all the stuff that we talked about at TheVerge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also just hit the homepage.

1:19:51It's a good time. I also wrote a big feature about ActivityPub. If you want to get even deeper in the weeds on the future of social, there's lots in there for you. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or your own weather setup that you want to tell us about, You can always email us at vergecastatheverge.com or keep calling the hotline. Like I say every week, it is my favorite thing that we do on this show. 866-VERGE-11. Send us all of your tech thoughts and questions and ideas and feelings. And we're going to do a hotline episode again soon. Please keep everything coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.

1:20:24Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We just want a Webby. Thank you again so much for all of your votes. It means so much to me and the whole team here. Neel, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about the chaos at Twitter, Apple headsets, whatever that humane demo was last week, and all the biggest news in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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