Protocol Wars - The Fediverse Explained!

26:52And now if Facebook ruins part of their UI, some small amount of people will find it ruined and will go to this new social network, but they won't have the users and they'll come back to Facebook because it's still good enough that it's better than not having the users. Right. So there's, so you're kind of stuck now and we have created the giants and we're living with these giants now. Yeah. And there's, that's not like too big to fail, but it's like pretty close. Kind of, yeah. There was this moment where everyone was like, Elon took over Twitter, he's firing everyone, they're getting kicked out of their HQ, like, it's happening.

27:31One of the giants is disappearing. Yeah. And so everyone hopped on, Mastodon, T2, we're finally going to take one of these giants down. Right. But none of them could combo all of these things. Right. and eventually people went okay never mind T2 is not actually okay Mastodon it's cool it's got some ideas but alright and then threads is the interesting one because they kind of hacked the user's part and so it's just everyone who's already on a different giant clicked a button and also now I'm on threads and I'm following everyone and so it felt like it was a new thing but it's not new that's where I'm at we're kind of stuck with the pillars that we have.

28:12With all of this, though, it does this. And it puts the users... It crosses... It takes users out of one of the things that you need to be in the social graph. And now when you switch, you have the exact same users because they're all part of the same thing. Yeah. So it makes switching more free. You can actually make those changes. There's lots of people who wanted to get off Twitter but are still on it. Me, one of them, because of the users and a lot of other things there. I don't go on Twitter every day and I'm like, oh man, this is so great. Everything's just like it used to be. If I could go somewhere else that had all the other users that had a better feed and features, I would love that.

28:51That'd be great. And the question is, can we get enough people to start engaging in this new thing to actually have a new pillar, like a new UI? That is definitely the question. That is exactly where we find ourselves now. But the cool thing about it is that you have all these small asteroids and these small islands of people that are on these new platforms that are all federating the cool thing about them federating is they're all talking to each other yeah so you have like this mass of all of these objects together that are all interconnected so it feels like you've got exactly you've got the users hopefully yes there's enough users that a new platform isn't totally empty it's got all the users already yeah it just needs to nail the other two.

29:36Yeah. And then if that platform ruins the experience, you move somewhere else, but there is account portability that they're working on and you should be able to take your social graph with you. These are the foundations of the social web. And I think it's really important to understand that context to understand what happens next. We're going to take a quick break, but after the break, we're going to talk about Mastodon.

30:33We'll see you next time. Do that with the all-new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. The Florida Michelin Guide has recently added five new Greater Fort Lauderdale restaurants to its list, bringing even more culinary magic to the destination. The culinary scene is a melting pot of global flavors, all rooted in the destination's vibrant community spirit. From international cuisine to locally inspired dishes, It's the perfect time to celebrate the rich flavors, innovation, and passion driving Greater Fort Lauderdale's evolving food scene. And their dining scene is taken to the next level with spots that you can access by boat, combining delicious meals with the laid-back coastal vibe that defines the destination.

31:17These waterfront restaurants offer the perfect mix of great food and a one-of-a-kind dining experience, where the stunning waterways are as much a part of the ambiance as the culinary delights. Go to visit lauderdale.com slash restaurants.

31:57specific needs. For example, need working capital, a line of credit, an SBA loan, equipment financing. SoFi's marketplace can help you find all of the above, and it's already helped thousands of small businesses like yours find the funding they need. And if you like where this is going, SoFi also offers business owners curated tools, vetted business bank accounts, business credit card recommendations, and a ton of resources to help you scale your business like a boss. SoFi, now helping you get your business right. Visit SoFi.com slash BoxPod and see your options in minutes. Okay, so while ActivityPub was being written, this guy in Europe named Eugene Rochko was having some pretty valid concerns about Twitter.

32:43Like, as important as Twitter had become, it wasn't exactly profitable. Twitter was growing really fast, but it never really figured out a way to actually make money. Like they made enough, some, but reports saying that they might close down any day were pretty much non-stop, which led Mark Zuckerberg to say that Twitter was basically a clown car that crashed into a gold mine. So around 2016, Eugene decided to do something about it. Eugene had known about all of these open social protocols, but at the time they were kind of used for super niche technical communities and they weren't really centered around user friendliness.

33:19So he started working on something called Mastodon. I'm Eugene Rochko. I am the founder and CEO of Mastodon. And the reason that I started working on it was because I felt like Twitter was not doing well. And I've been using Twitter since 2008. So I was quite a heavy power user. And I felt like it was something very important for the world because it was like an instant global communications platform but at the same time it was in the hands of a single company that was seemingly on the verge of some kind of disaster from day to day. I mean at that point they were not doing well financially and there were talks that they were going to get bought out by either Disney or Peter feel or something like that.

34:11And it didn't feel right that that was how it worked. And I wanted to see if there was something else. And Mastodon was not like an innovation in itself, because the idea wasn't new. And I didn't invent the protocol that it was on or anything like that. But it was just my take on the concept that already existed of decentralized social media. There were different platforms that worked with similar protocols, but they lacked a certain mainstream appeal. And I place a lot of importance on design and user-franiness, and I just wanted to try to do a better execution of a social media platform. So Mastodon is kind of similar to Identica in that and it's this open source social media network that anyone can like spin up an instance of.

35:09You might've seen mastodon.social, but there's also things like disabled.social or mass.town or mastodon.xyz. There's all these instances of mastodon that can intercommunicate with each other, but they have their own set of moderation and rules. So Eugene went and posted mastodon on Hacker News and it got its first batch of users. And for a couple of years, there were these major events that made people realize is that maybe centralized social media was not what they wanted to be using. Like Eugene specifically called out that Gamergate was a pretty big wake up call for people in terms of the harassment they wanted to deal with on social media.

35:45And there was this huge delete Facebook movement with the Cambridge Analytica scandal where this outside firm was using Facebook user data without their consent and was using that data to advance political motives. So originally Mastodon was using Ostatus, which was this decentralized protocol that was actually also written by Evan. But around 2017, when they were finishing up the ActivityPub standardization, the W3C and Evan reached out to Eugene to see if he'd be interested in testing it. What we did was we implemented two protocols at the same time during that time. So Mastodon was speaking both OSTATUS and ActivityPub for probably a year until basically most of the network switched over, and then we could just drop the old code and stick with ActivityPub.

36:30And over the last few years, more and more of these small services have been popping up, adopting ActivityPub, and federating. Like, now there's Peertube, which is this federated YouTube alternative that launched in October 2018. There's PixelFed, which is a federated Instagram alternative which launched in December 2018. And slowly but surely, the Fediverse has been populating with all sorts of decentralized versions of these popular services. But of course, if you're gonna unseat an incumbent, you kind of need to reach a critical mass, which at the time seemed like a pretty distant future. And then Elon Musk bought Twitter.

37:07The big breaking news this afternoon, Elon Musk's Twitter takeover is a go. Elon Musk has agreed to buy Twitter for$54.20 a share. We are following breaking news. The deal is done. Twitter has been sold to Elon Musk. Twitter's board accepted an offer from the billionaire to buy the social media company and take it private. And ever since Elon bought Twitter, these calls to move to a more decentralized version of the social web have kind of amplified tenfold. There was immediately a huge influx of new Mastodon accounts after that happened. And Eugene said that it got so hard to keep up with that they actually had to pause Mastodon signups for a short period of time.

37:41But luckily it's not just Mastodon that's the answer to this problem. Other bigger platforms are taking notice of this too. This seems like the perfect opportunity to move to a new way of thinking about the web, not just socially, but in general. Hi, I'm Mike McHugh. I'm the CEO of Flipboard. When Elon took over Twitter, I left Twitter. I joined Mastodon and I started looking at what was happening there with ActivityPub and the Fediverse. And it dawned on me that this was the beginnings of the open social web and that it would have profound implications for Flipboard, for all of our users, for how Flipboard works, and give us the opportunity to tear down the walls around Flipboard, open it all up, and actually make Flipboard a part of the open social web.

38:29Like since the acquisition, products like Flipboard, WordPress, Tumblr, Ghost, and a bunch of others have actually committed to using ActivityPub to try to unify around an alternative idea, not just an alternative platform. There's been some movement, maybe not enough to change things immediately, but probably in the future. And then in July, 2023, Instagram launched threads. So at first threads just kind of looked like the thing everyone was expecting. Like Instagram was already working on this notes feature, which already supported text and video. But the weirdest thing about threads is that when it launched in July, 2023, they committed to supporting ActivityPub.

39:10Meta had committed to supporting the open social web. Now, this is so weird, right? I mean, this is Meta. This is the company that either buys you or outbuilds you. So supporting an open social protocol that actually gives you the ability to leave for a different platform, I mean, that's a really weird concept. So why would they support this? I have some ideas. I don't know if you guys remember this, but in around April, 2021, Apple pushed out this update that forces apps to manually ask users if their data can be tracked. Meta launched this whole advertising campaign pleading with users to please keep letting apps track your data because that was kind of the main thing making them money.

39:53So maybe it's that, but it's probably more complicated. So I decided to ask around. My name's Jon O 'Norlin. I'm the founder and CEO of Ghost.org. To compete with Twitter, for sure. That's my take. I'm sure they'll say something different because that's not a PR-friendly answer, right? Just, we want to beat Elon as not inspiring enough, so I'm sure they'll have some extended waffle. It's interesting, right? Like, Facebook has done so many of these clones where they just rip off someone else's app and launch it, and they have a track record of falling flat, like, 100 % of the time. This is the first one where, like, that hasn't happened.

40:34So I would be surprised if it hasn't vastly exceeded their expectations for it, potentially even to an extent where, could it have worked without the ActivityPub integration? I'm not sure. I think the ActivityPub Fediverse side of things was a big enough draw to get that initial audience interested. I think that in order to compete with Twitter, you have to get creators like you and others excited about being on this platform, on this totally new platform. Now, if it's yet another walled garden controlled by yet another billionaire, and who knows how it's going to shape up, are you excited about doing that?

41:10I don't know, right? I mean, it's really hard to attract savvy creators who are kind of done and tired with like building out yet someone else's proprietary walled garden with their own content. And not being in control of the algorithm and the discovery and even their own social graph, right? You don't own your audience, you rent your audience as a participant in these walled gardens, right? Right. So so the thing I think that's really savvy for meta is that they were like, OK, we need to do something different than Twitter. Different. And this I think as they talk to creators, this theme was evolving.

41:48You know, I think largely because Mastodon was, you know, very was very, very popular very early on, you know, when after Elon bought Twitter. And so I think a lot of savvy creators were like, I'm not I'm not going to do that movie again. But if you're going to offer me something different, like this concept of the Fediverse, now I'm interested. So I think that helped. And I think that's a big reason why they've embraced it. The final thing I'll say is that, you know, they have a lot of different social networks today. And none of them really work well with each other, right? And so like, are you going to build yet another one that's totally its own little island?

42:24And now you have 12 social networks, or however many they have? Like, when are these things going to be interoperable? How do we experiment with interoperability? And how is that then sort of stack up against the regulatory scenarios that are playing out in the EU and in the United States? You know, so I just think that like Meta is actually pretty savvy about this. They're like, look, you know, this is kind of where things are going. This is what creators want. And let's figure out a way to embrace this rather than have it disrupt us. What do you think is Meta's motivation for having ActivityPub when they already have a platform that's growing so fast?

42:58Yeah, what a good question, right? I think so. One place that this federated model, right, can be really successful is when you're trying to unseat an established, you know, incumbent. Right. And in particular for the microblogging world, there's an established incumbent in Twitter and running at Twitter as a single network is hard to do. But if you can establish a federation of different companies, and it's not just your 100 million at Threads, but it's another 50 million Mozilla social users and people at Flipboard and people at Medium and then the long tail of Mastodon sites, Tumblr, you start to get close to the size of that incumbent.

43:59and it's a good way to, you know, possibly unseat that incumbent, right? So if the intention is, I think for Facebook, or excuse me, Meta, their goal is not necessarily to take over microblogging. Their goal is to like, mess things up for Twitter, right? Like take Twitter out of the equation. So like, partnering up with lots of other companies to make a federated network is a good strategy for them. And that's speculation on my part. I've had a chance to talk with Threads folks quite a bit. They are the typical answer that they give, which I think is at least on the part of people in the Threads organization is they're like, this is the right thing to do.

44:48I'm like, okay, yes, but you're also running the team, right? But I think they see it, they also see it as strategically really valuable to be able to like partner with a lot of other organizations. And those are all pretty sensible answers, right? Like I think it makes sense to need to try to grow as fast as possible to compete by Twitter. And it gives you access to all these Mastodon users and the other companies that are in the Fediverse. Now there's Flipboard and there's Ghost and there's Tumblr and there's WordPress and Threads is gonna be able to connect to all of these and have a lot more potential connections.

45:21And the more of these platforms that federate over ActivityPub, the more Threads value grows over time, which it can use as an advantage against Twitter. But I really wanted to know Meta's stance on this, so I reached out to Adam Asiri, who is the CEO of Instagram and the guy that's currently in charge of threads. It was a question that was, I think, a good one before we launched, and I think it's an even better one now. I think a couple different reasons. There are some longer-term ones where I do feel like the web is going to move to a more open and decentralized place over time, exactly what that looks like.

45:56time will tell but it's i think good to lean into these long-term trends as a large incumbent just because i think the biggest risk to any company the size of ours is both not only competition but what you do becomes irrelevant and then you slowly become irrelevant but honestly with threads specifically the bigger motivation was to try and really set up a really strong set of incentives. I think it's a healthier set of incentives to be in a place where creators can feasibly leave your platform and go to another platform with their followership. And that is a challenge. There's risk to that. But it's also, I think, creates value because it forces us to really try and differentiate and create the most dynamic and compelling experience and not just to lean on our size.

46:55So Adam is basically saying that they're trying to adapt to where the web is going early instead of just ignoring change like AOL did, for example. Like in a way, it's kind of the exact same story. HTTP decentralized the web from AOL and there's this real chance that the movement to the next version of the social web wipes out all the current incumbents or at least makes them a lot smaller. So maybe this is just a long-term play. As far as that second part about giving users the option to leave the platform, maybe. Like, I guess if the Fetaverse took off and people still didn't like Meta, they'd have the option to leave.

47:31But now they do have the option to leave. Meta's kind of betting that they're going to have the best experience in the Fetaverse and people might actually stay. That's kind of a risk Meta's willing to take. Now, Threads isn't just flipping a switch and making all 200 million accounts on Threads federated over ActivityPub. Right now, it's opt-in. And that's, I don't know, it's kind of a bummer. It'd be really nice if you had access to the whole Threads network from Mastodon and other places. So I asked why that is, and this is what Adam had to say. I think it would be tough from a privacy and a regulatory perspective.

48:03I think there's a lot of misunderstanding. I mean, you get a bunch of questions. You can imagine the questions we get from regulators around the world who might be less technical. And I assume a lot of your audience is pretty technical. And there's a lot of concerns about your content going to places that you don't anticipate it going to. So from a privacy consent perspective and from a compliance perspective, it's pretty hard to imagine us getting all the way to opt out. But we want people to opt in. In fact, I actually think more people, if the community grows, I think more people will opt in over time because it will be a great way to just increase your reach.

48:40and most creators are interested in increasing their reach. I also think that if you look at text-based social networks like Twitter, like Threads, like Mastodon, they tend to be even more head-heavy than other social networks, which are also head-heavy. So a small number of accounts create a majority of the impressions or the content that drives a majority of the impressions. So you can get a lot of the value without getting everyone to opt in by getting the accounts that have the most reach to opt in. Because I think that's what threads can do that can really help other servers is get some bigger names with bigger appeal onto a more mass appeal app and then have their content flow out and create value on other servers.

49:26Now, one of the biggest things that I hear from a lot of people who say that they're sort of worried about the Fedverse is that there are different social cultures on different platforms, which is very true. For example, I don't post work-related things on my Instagram page. I just post extremely long images, right? Yes, this is true. Right. Yes. So I don't want all my work mumbo-jumbo intermixing in with my long images. Right. So theoretically, if Instagram were to be able to federate as well, you could follow on your social media reader of choice, you could follow my images stream or you could follow my thread stream or you could follow this.

50:13And so they are working, like there are people that are thinking about, oh, like maybe we could do like one singular Fediverse account that sort of links out to all your other Fediverse accounts. But currently the people that say like, oh, well, I don't want my Tumblr stuff like intermixing with other stuff, people just only follow your tumblr if they want to follow your tumblr like all these different social media sites are different versions of you and people sort of know what to expect from these different versions of you yeah so you only really have to follow the version of the person that you want to get yeah so instead of i follow david on instagram and david on twitter it's now i follow david's fetterized long images and i also decided to follow david's work text posts right and it's just two accounts.

51:01Yeah. And then theoretically, you could have a platform that only shows images. You could have a platform that only shows text post, or you could have a platform that shows both. It's an interesting concept, right? Because the idea that the technology leads to a particular culture and those barriers like protect the culture. But I think that our choices as individuals are what drive that culture, right? So if you're on Tumblr right now and you're just like, hey, I don't want to have people on threads showing up in my feed. It's like, don't follow people on threads then, right? Like that's a relatively easy thing for you to do.

51:41Or maybe there are people on threads who aren't on Tumblr that you really do want to follow that you don't know about yet. Right. And so it kind of I think that there is a lot of opportunity for for that kind of cross-cultural pollination to happen and a lot of opportunity to say, like, hey, that that's not for me. And for me in particular, I'm going to kind of make my choices in a different way. Right. I think this is a really interesting thing about the Fediverse. Right. There's definitely this tension around what data you want to be where. And right now, there are some people that have the opinion that we should just all post all of our content on one account and everyone should just have access to one singular version of us.

52:25But other people want to be a little more segmented. Right now, ActivityPub kind of does both. You still have to create an account on this federated platform and you still have to grow a follower base there. But now your potential followers are kind of everyone all over the Fediverse. So in the future, if I publish an article on Ghost, it'll show up as an account you can follow on Mastodon or Flipboard. And if you comment on that post in Mastodon or Flipboard, it will also show up in Ghost. That's pretty cool. So ultimately, if I could leave you with a succinct version of what the Fediverse is and how it works, Evan says that it's basically like email.

53:03You can have various accounts that are hosted across various different servers and they can all interoperate. But who you choose to host you kind of dictates your experience, right? So if I'm on Gmail, I'm gonna have a certain experience with certain features. Outlook is gonna have another. Superhuman's gonna have another. But they all have the same key features that let email be email. But you kind of choose them for the overall experience and the extra features they build on top. Eventually, you're gonna be able to migrate your account to somewhere else and take all those followers with you.

53:33This mechanism is still in its early stages and it only kind of works But eventually, you should be able to change what account's hosting you and where you're viewing the content pretty simply. So if you're interested in all that and you're already on threads, you can turn on Fediverse sharing so other people across federated platforms can interact with you. And if you're on Mastodon, Flipboard, or some other federated social service, it'll just do it by default. one thing that adam massiri said was being able to differentiate products based on features is going to lead to things like threads monetizing threats you know like they have to turn that on at some point but if people don't like that if they do it in a wrong way they would just leave and go somewhere else yeah you go to a platform that doesn't have that doesn't have ads so they he was saying that they need to really get the features up there where people really want to use it that they're willing to sit through ads because there's going to be other readers.

54:26You could just download another app just like Twitter with Phoenix and all that stuff. How easy will it be for the rest of this awesome switching that we think is a great idea? Because it can be there and it can be a great idea, but will people actually do it? Mike McHugh, the CEO of Flipboard, actually did this because he was on Macedon.social. And then when Flipboard decided to federate, he was like, I should probably be on Flipboard.social. You know, this is my company. I should do that and he said that switching was very technical and difficult right now but it also depends on the app developers which in his case is him and his team that they're going to put that feature in the app so if you use that there should just be like a switch that you can just export all and switch to another app hopefully it's easy to find it's at the top if i'm threads i'm not maybe i'm burying it too many levels deep just to make it a little harder because that stuff at scale makes a difference like you have 200 million users if it's the if it's a button on the home page everyone finds it if it's three menu layers deep way less people find it it will definitely be three layer menus deep because you don't want to accidentally do that either true but again most of this is just based on where you're hosted right like if i just don't want to be davidml.threads.net anymore and that's my main fediverse account i could be and i wanted to be on glorp social or something like i would only really move that if i was like i do not like meta and i want to be on something that's not owned by meta and i want that to host me then i go through the process otherwise you don't really have to think about it as long as people know that that's your account on that thing yeah like i can switch email apps but i don't need to migrate all of my emails off of google servers right it's it's technical right now and like the social web and especially activity pub is you know made by a standards group and it moves slowly because it's made by a standards group and because of that you know it's going to keep evolving over a period of time as working groups put things together but that's also one of the primary things that blue sky is trying to do with the at protocol damn what a good segue there's still blue sky yes so i guess we'll get to that after the break i guess we'll get to that after the break it's a break

56:54Adobe Acrobat Studio. So brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant. With key insights from an AI assistant. Pick a template with a click. Now your Prezo looks super slick. Close that deal? Yeah, you won. Do that, doing that, did that, done. Now you can do that, do that, with Acrobat. Now you can do that, do that, with the all-new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. When you're looking for a person to go on an adventure with, you want someone who can roll with the punches.

57:30You want someone who won't give up halfway through. And if you're given the option, you probably want someone who smells like coconut and pink jasmine. Dove Aluminum Free Deodorant is your partner in adventure with 72 hours of freshness and odor protection. It's also free of aluminum, baking soda, and parabens. so you can give your underarms the same level of care you give the rest of your lovely self, body, and mind. With scents like cucumber and green tea, dragon fruit and coconut cream, and yes, coconut and pink jasmine, Dove Aluminum Free Deodorant offers freshness that won't leave you stranded.

58:06So the next time you're setting out to explore the world, don't forget to invite Dove Aluminum Free Deodorant along for the ride, because you were made for adventure, and your deodorant should be too. The search is over. An aluminum-free deodorant that won't let you down. Find your one true Dove. Choose Dove aluminum-free deodorant for 72-hour freshness and odor protection. Buy online at dove.com or at a retailer near you. At Sierra, discover top workout gear at incredible prices, which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time. Awkward. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices.

58:48Sierra, let's get moving. Okay, so if you haven't heard, Blue Sky is this newish social network that looks a lot like Twitter. And that kind of makes sense because it was incubated at Twitter. Blue Sky is not actually as new as you might think. Well, it is, but it also kind of isn't. In late 2019, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter at the time, announced that Twitter was funding a small team of developers to build an open and decentralized standard for social media. At the time, Jack felt really regretful that Twitter had gotten more and more centralized. He said that centralized social media was struggling to meet global enforcement policies, and he was frustrated that the incentives trended towards outrage and argumentative content versus something more user-focused.

59:31So Jack was giving this new team two options. He was either going to, and I'm quoting here, either find an existing decentralized standard that they can help move forward, or, failing that, create one from scratch. This matrix chat room of interested people in the community got created to talk about potential implementations of this, but no one could really come to a consensus on the protocol itself, particularly around how much power these servers should have, how they should handle moderation, things like that. So they decided to take individual proposals instead. And Jay Graber, who had been in that chat room for Blue Sky and had separately created this decentralized platform called Happening, sent in a proposal to lead the project, and she got chosen for it.

1:00:11Then in late 2021, Blue Sky spun off from Twitter as a public benefit LLC to develop that project in the open with a$13 million grant from Twitter itself. But just like everything else in the story, Elon buying Twitter threw a wrench in things. Now that Blue Sky was totally separate from Twitter and Elon was trying to cut costs everywhere, it became pretty unlikely that Blue Sky was going to receive any more funding from them, which kind of kicked that project into overdrive. The Blue Sky team worked really quickly after this, especially considering they were now running on this fixed amount of funding with no additional income.

1:00:45They announced a waitlist for their own platform called Blue Sky, which would use their own protocol around October, 2022. And they announced an iOS app for an invite-only beta in February, 2023, with Android coming out in April. All this work was just enough to snag them a little additional funding in July, 2023 to kind of stay afloat. The protocol that's underlying Blue Sky is called the AT protocol or at, which, you know, I think kind of apps considering it's for social media. Even though the AT protocol and activity pub have pretty similar goals, they actually kind of work in a fundamentally different way.

1:01:20And which one you think is better, I think kind of just depends on your values. So the primary function of the AT protocol is to have total control over your social experience without any individual company deciding what you see and when you see it. Apps can pull information from all over the AT protocol network and have their own take on it, but it all kind of shares the same bigger network. I'm Jay Graber. I'm the CEO of Blue Sky Social. It's a company that's built Blue Sky, the social app and the app protocol, which is the open source decentralized protocol that it runs on. It's designed a lot for composability, meaning that you can take the blocks of it and put them together in different ways.

1:01:57So you could, for example, just use the identity and social graph piece to build a different kind of application, or you could just borrow one of the labelers to label photos in your application or something like that. And it's designed a lot around account portability. So you can take your data, your friends and move them from one app to another without much disruption at all. You could have a separate AT protocol app that uses the identity part of the protocol, but has its own way of doing moderation or has a certain way of orienting feeds. And no matter what social network you're on, personally, all that information is gonna spread all over the AT network.

1:02:32It's all accessible. Probably one of the most important functions of AT is account portability. Your account's untethered from the server you're on, and instead it's tied to this hidden unique user ID that spans the entire network. So your account can be used to log into any service using the AT protocol, and you'll still have all the same account details and followers. You're just gonna be posting from a different platform with different features. That gives people a really easy way to choose who's going to host their account, whether it be bluesky.social or like, I don't know, glorb.net. And if you want, you can even host your own account.

1:03:03So for example, I'm just at davidml.com on the AT protocol. So I can use any service using that protocol and my host is just me. So Blue Sky the company spun up Blue Sky the social app to basically showcase what's possible with that protocol so that other companies could see what you could do with it. Are there more, how many people are on the at protocol or is it only Blue Sky? Because I felt like it was partially easier to understand activity pub because I know of all the ghosts and the other ones I don't know. Currently, Blue Sky is one of the only ones building on the AT protocol. It is an open protocol, so anyone can build on top of it.

1:03:48But just like you need a critical mass to use a platform, you also kind of need a critical mass to have the incentive to build an application of people that could come to the platform. One of these other features is custom feeds, which lets you create and share your own feeds with your own filters. So where ActivityPub is kind of just this fire hose of information that you receive, the AT protocol kind of lets you pick and choose what kind of information you want to receive from all across the network. Yeah, I mean, the one I really like is the Moss feed. It's just pictures of moss, pretty much.

1:04:21And it's very calming because, you know, you have the Discover feed, which is one that we build that gives you kind of trending content across the network as well as some stuff that you know your likes indicate you might like and that kind of gives me a big picture of what's going on and then when I get tired of that I just there's like a lot of politics on there usually and then I just go over to the mossy just pictures of like just mossy rocks on hikes and like green nature scenes and it's very soothing it's just a moment of zen and like the social scroll. That sort of makes AT like a mega social protocol that can encompass a lot of different types of social media.

1:04:53Like if I want to only look at nature photos, I could use that feed for a while and then hop over to my regular social feed. Somebody in a blog post described the app protocol as a toolbox for building social applications. And that sounds pretty apt because it is like I mentioned this toolbox of different sets of pieces. Like here's like the way that we structure the data. Here's the way that we structure your identity. And like the way that we have decided to structure your data is something that we've tried to make really portable. Which is cool, right? You can also do things like choose your own moderation, which you can stack with other moderation to kind of create your own filters that you can then share.

1:05:28You can create a custom algorithm to rank your content that pretty much anyone can build. Now, currently, Blue Sky is open for anyone to join. And just like Mastodon, they have a bunch of little spurts of new users popping up here and there. But they're building on it really, really fast. Like just recently, they've added direct messaging, stackable moderation, and these starter packs, which helped onboard users a lot faster. Again, Blue Sky is still a company which generally builds a lot faster than a standards organization. The AT protocol has a lot of really great ideas and a lot of people are really stoked about its potential, but it is a very fundamentally different way of thinking about the web versus, say, ActivityPub.

1:06:05But again, they both have really good ideas and some people like both of them so much that they're actually building bridges between the protocols to make the protocols interoperable. Yeah, I'm Ryan Barrett. I am a stereotypical Silicon Valley engineer. But what we're talking about here is mostly the stuff I've done kind of on the side, which is working with decentralized social and building bridges between social networks. Ryan is building something called BridgyFed, which is basically exactly what it sounds like. The idea of BridgyFed is to bridge different federated protocols and make them interoperable.

1:06:41Meta, I know. Again, these are all open protocols. it's like HTTP or any part of the internet. And so Bridget Fett is this middleman, this server that sits in the middle that knows how to speak all the protocols and translates from one to the other. Whenever there's an individual action, like you post, you reply, you like, you follow or unfollow. Like it understands all those actions on each protocol and it just knows how to translate into the other protocol and deliver it to wherever it should go and vice versa. Double federated. kind of kind of kind of i mean again federated we are like in the really early days of the decentralized social web so it's like we don't really know what's gonna like win out yet so everyone's just kind of trying a lot of different things sounds like one is winning if i'm being honest yes i mean for a while activity pub was not really being used by anyone but basically mastodon and some very small projects like pixel fed which was trying to be the decentralized instagram but now that threads join there's like tons of momentum and you know some people will say like oh now we have access to the 200 million threads followers you don't really because you have to manually turn it on yeah there's something called metcalf's law it's named after bob metcalf who was an executive at 3com and he was talking about land networks but it also applies in social networks.

1:08:09And the idea is that the value of the network is not necessarily in the number of people, it's in the number of potential connections, right? So how many people can get connected? And that so you know, the value goes up by the square of the number of people. So if you have a really big network, it's got a huge amount of value. And it's got a lot more value than a network even half the size so all of those people that could be turned on as a as a connection in the fediverse that sort of like amplifies the value of the fediverse exponentially i mean those people are closer to joining the fediverse than people without a threads account who don't really know what's going on yeah because it's one click away and it's right there and it's yeah yeah yeah and it was embraced by like a major platform does blue sky still have invites no right now no now it's public but that was one of the things too that david and i kept like coming back to was that the more we learned about these different protocols we're like at kind of sounds really good yeah but activity pub seems like the one that's gonna win because of threats yeah right they're fairly different like like activity pub is just a different way of looking at the internet altogether where all the content that you make is now social media you know if i make a youtube video it is now social media if i make a blog post it is now social media whereas at protocol is more just like i want to tailor my social media experience exactly how i want it to be and i can take in the streams of data from everyone else that's making social content as well could there not be a platform on activity pub where the user experience is better tailoring to your own needs.

1:09:57That is true. Ultimately, doesn't that make, if it's already winning, something like that would make sense? Probably. I think what a lot of people will say is that ActivityPub is just way simpler of an idea. A lot of people even say that the AT protocol is over-engineered because they have thought through everything. A lot of the things that they have thought through, like the simplicity of account portability and different algorithms or choosing different feeds is a very good idea, but it's almost too complex for some people. Some people think the platform should be really simple, and the creativity of the apps that get built up on top of the platform can then be a lot more complex.

1:10:43Both of these protocols have pretty similar goals to decentralize social media and separate power from individual companies, but they're handling it in pretty different ways. The idea of ActivityPub is to allow sources of media from all over the internet to connect to a single fire hose and let users follow and interact with that media wherever they are. The AT protocol works as more of a piecemeal framework for building decentralized social networks, which gives you this single source of identity that can be easily moved wherever you want and can be structured however the user or platform wants.

1:11:14Ultimately, these are just really different ideologies on how open social should work. They both want the same thing, which is to remove consolidated power and give users more control over their social experience. And I think that's a good thing for everyone. We'll see how the future plays out. So if you want to be part of the new web movement, federate your threads account, just like we bullied Marques. Can you show me how to do it? Yeah. It's just one box. Are you about to federize live? I'm going to federate and I'm just going to live on the podcast. What's tweeting called on threads? Are you about to join the federation?

1:11:50That was blue sky. I'm just going to say you're welcome after I do it. Wait, turn it on. I want to see your face as you turn on sharing. Wow. You are now sharing to the Fediverse. Nothing has changed. That's crazy. I want to say one more thing. Now watch your notifications. Now watch me not open threads. You should not have notifications on any social media platform. It's healthier that way. Especially likes. Push notifications. I only get notifications from people that I mutually follow. I only get DM notifications. I professionally post on social media. Yeah. That's all I do. But you need to see every interaction?

1:12:30Not everything. No, no, no. But I still get some notifications for some important things that happen to my posts. What if there was like an app that was specifically made for creators that dealt with notifications and only give you useful ones? Oh, look. That'd be nice. Opportunity. An opportunity arises. opportunity yeah no I agree that sounds great I would love that I'm gonna say one more thing before we get out close it out okay okay I asked Adam a seat i was just so i wish you said that was amazing beautiful okay um i'm keeping all this by the way i asked adam asseria if there was a potential for them to make federation opt out right because a lot of people talk about like oh the fediverse now has like this huge opportunity because threads has 200 million people in it and that's 200 million people in the fediverse it's 200 million people potentially in the fediverse that federate and i asked adam assiri do you ever see a world where you turn it on as an opt out instead of an opt in and i guess he didn't say or said no he said he said probably not yeah and the biggest reason that he said is that it's actually really funny.

1:13:55He said, most senators and legal people don't understand anything that we do. And the questions that we're going to have to field if people's data start going places that we don't control is going to be awful for me. On the legal side, a lot of laws only kick in once you get above a particular scale that we are above and the vast majority of the other players are not. So we just have to do things that other people don't have to do um we're also scrutinized much more than probably anybody else um and that also means that the tolerance for mistakes uh is also much lower which is kind of fair um yeah and so there is that there is that point like when you if you sign up for threads and you're not federated if it's not a core part of the platform it's not a core part of the way that the internet works that you assume that the internet is going to work and then all of a sudden all of your data can be accessible in other places that you don't assume that is something that maybe people would be annoyed at but but if we're scraping your data opt out baby that's right that's right um but i think that there will be a world eventually in in which it's just kind of assumed that all of your everything you post is accessible from everywhere because it's not necessarily that it goes everywhere it's just that other people are being able to see your fire hose from other platforms if you sign up right now is there an option right off the bat to that would be a good sign up button i feel like that's just quickly explains it it obviously didn't happen for us because it wasn't federated when we all signed up for threads yeah but i think currently you can still only sign up for threads through instagram but i don't know if they have i doubt they've added that they have done a couple of like Q &A sessions around about the Fediverse but I do think they need to get a do a better job of kind of talking to people about it that said just like you said they don't currently have full integration with Federation so currently on threads at least a time of recording all you can do is see comments and like comments but you can't reply to them which is a problem because a lot of people from Mastodon keep asking me questions on threads that I can't reply to he's not ignoring you I'm not ignoring you David's banging the glass as loud as he can I see you but there are some leaks that by the end of the year they'll have potentially finished that process of federation federation I'll believe it when I see it I would like to see it though for the sake of my notifications please thank you alright well and if you don't know now you know you've heard the song before yeah I know for sure okay yeah for sure yeah I don't really you don't know what I don't think I know that song oh my goodness is it Biggie never heard hippie biggie biggie I think you're joking oh no I do know that song that's not the song oh okay well you've heard the line you've heard the I feel like I've heard the line being said I just don't know what the song is David take us out Come on, Biggie, don't you wait.

1:17:10Never mind, Marquez, take a shot. I bet you can't wait to federate. And if you don't know, now you know. That's the Fediverse. This has been a bonus episode. Thank you for joining us on this winding road. You now know more about it than you ever thought you would. Me too. It's great. Hopefully we're all federated. Federated. Federiverse together. Federiverse. Catch you guys in the next episode on a regularly scheduled programming. Peace.

1:17:53these are these guys are now fed a verse adobe acrobat studio so brand new show me all the things pdfs can do do your work with ease and speed pdf spaces is all you need do hours of research in an instant with key insights from an AI assistant. Pick a template with a click. Now your Prezo looks super slick. Close that deal. Yeah, you won. Do that, doing that, did that, done. Now you can do that, do that with Acrobat. Now you can do that, do that with the all-new Acrobat. It's time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. Lemo Game. And Doug, here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.

1:18:39Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.