The Fediverse Experiment

Our present version of the internet is arguably the worst it’s ever been. Which means – any shot at changing things, even an unlikely one – is worth trying out. Three podcasters who’ve spent years critiquing social media companies try to build their own small alternative social media. A collaboration with Hard Fork https://www.nytimes.com/column/hard-fork’s Kevin Roose and Casey Newton: join ⁠The Forkiverse⁠ https://theforkiverse.com/ here.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01PJ Vogt?

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• 1:03PJ Vogt?

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• 2:32PJ Vogt?

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

• 3:03PJ Vogt?

  We've all experienced the kind of gooners remorse after we've spent more time than we meant to, mindlessly thumbing a feed that makes us feel worse about ourselves, our friends, the world. So it's cliche to complain about this problem that's only gotten worse for the last decade. But this week, this year, we're talking about it because we are curious about solutions, even possibly quixotic ones.

• 3:29PJ Vogt?

  And in that spirit, I actually want to revisit a moment that an earlier, maybe more cynical version of me tried to brush past on our show. It first came up on air way back in May of 2024. I was interviewing Casey Newton, co-host of the Hard Fork Podcast, the writer behind Platformer. We were having a depressingly familiar conversation about the internet. And I asked Casey whether there was anything hopeful around the corner, anything that made him feel optimistic.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  I have the best, worst, dorkiest answer to that question, PJ, which is that we have to finish building the Fediverse.

• 4:09PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:10PJ Vogt?

  You mean like, so, okay, the Fediverse.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  You're already so upset that I'm making you talk about this, and that's fine. You should be. We should all be upset that we have to talk about the Fediverse.

• 4:19PJ Vogt?

  Talk about the Fediverse. But in a way that my mom can understand it.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  The Fediverse is a way for people to take back the internet for themselves. It's a way to have an identity and connect to other things that are important to you online and just not worry about having to fight through a Google algorithm or a Facebook algorithm. In fact, you could bring your own algorithm if you want to. I'm already doing such a bad job of explaining what the Fediverse is.

• 4:55PJ Vogt?

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

• 5:37PJ Vogt?

  all we had to do was finish building it. That was something people were very curious about. So that year, I started talking to some of the people trying to build the Fediverse.

• 5:49PJ Vogt?

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

• 6:32PJ Vogt?

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

• 7:16PJ Vogt?

  The vision they held was that they could take control of social media out of the hands of the Musks and Zuckerbergs and reroute it back towards a more open internet, where no mogul would ever have the same kind of power they do now. That was their wild dream, and they were working on nights and weekends for no money, just building out the digital infrastructure that a Fediverse would require. Establishing shared protocols, building an open standard, coding the first federated social media platforms. All of this was audacious. The scale of their dream combined with their meager resources, these were people trying to build a Millennium Falcon in their garage out of old car parts. And as of today, that Fediverse, it exists.

• 8:01PJ Vogt?

  You can visit it. And if you do, you'll see that it functions differently from the internet you're used to. On our normal internet, if you want to follow a friend to read their tweets, you have to sign up for an account on X.com, Elon Musk's platform. You have to follow his rules, you have to trust him with your direct messages. By default, you're offered posts in the order his algorithm chooses. On the federated internet, if you have a friend microblogging on a federated platform like Mastodon, you can follow their account from anywhere in the Fediverse. You don't ever have to join Mastodon itself. And if your home platform does get bought by some temperamental tech mogul, you can leave.

• 8:42PJ Vogt?

  And, given a little technical expertise, when you pop up at your new federated internet home, you'll have all of the followers you did before. It is exciting. It is also still incredibly hard to understand and harder to explain. If I wanted to really get the potential of this and the pitfalls of it, I would need to experience the Fediverse for myself. So I went back into the studio, this time with Casey and Kevin Roos, his co-host on the podcast Hard Fork, to discuss an experiment. Oh, Casey, yeah, you're muted somehow.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Oh, thank God. This is the ideal setting for a podcast.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Don't change a thing.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Can you hear me now?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Hi. We did it, fam.

• 9:27PJ Vogt?

  The three of us were all millennials, old enough to use words like fam, but also old enough to have grown up on a more fun version of the internet, to have seen it change. And we believed it could still change again. But if the promise of the Fediverse was utopia tomorrow, what we wanted to know was, what about today?

• 9:46PJ Vogt?

  And Kevin had had an idea about how to find out.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  I think we should start a social media platform on the Fediverse, in the Fediverse? Is it on or in? Anyway.

• 9:55PJ Vogt?

  We'll find out along the way.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  But wait, why, why do you want to, what will be the point? And by the way, I don't really think you're talking about starting a new social network. You're talking about like creating a server on the Fediverse, right? Like a place where other people, you know, whether it's listeners to Hard Fork or listeners to Search Engine, whoever, they can come and they can create accounts there. But like, then what?

• 10:15PJ Vogt?

  I can tell you some then what.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, then PJ can tell us then what.

• 10:18PJ Vogt?

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

• 11:03PJ Vogt?

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

• 11:43Speaker 01

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

• 12:09Speaker 02

  But that is so fundamentally pessimistic, Casey. I have to call you on that because that is the way that our platforms today are designed. That is the behavior that they sort of encourage, either explicitly or tacitly. But like, look at Wikipedia. Like, Wikipedia is a collective internet experiment that shouldn't have worked. If you just like, put that idea on a whiteboard in like, you know, 1993, people would have been like, an encyclopedia that everyone can edit, that's going to be a total disaster. And yet, today is like, a monument and like, a thing that people hold up as an example of what the internet can be. So, I maintain some optimism about this. If you just put the right guardrails and boundaries and guidelines in place, if you cultivate the vibe of this space, it can actually be good.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  To me, what is interesting about this is less about who will show up and what will they say on the network, but what can we connect our server to, right? To me, this is the promise of the Fediverse. It's not like, could we set up an internet forum where people were nicer to each other and only said like, pro-social things about the future of democracy? It's, what happens if you're able to link it to some publications that publish news that you think is interesting? And link it up to maybe another social network, like Threads, and see content From people who are posting there, but nowhere else. And then some next generation things like they're actually like publications that set up their own servers and are sort of publishing directly to this feed. And maybe there are some other interactions there.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  To me, this is how we actually move away from the internet that we're on. It is not like, can we get 100 nice people in a room together? I'm sure we could do that. It is after we get the 100 nice people in the room. What else can we show them? And can it be more interesting than random Instagram reels that were picked for you by an AI? Because like that is the present and the future. If nobody else comes up with something better.

• 14:01PJ Vogt?

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

• 14:46PJ Vogt?

  Because I assumed Kevin Roos would do most of the work. Kevin, something you should know about him. He loves to experiment with new technology. He does this constantly at his job, covering tech at the New York Times. For instance, not so long ago, he spent a month only communicating with AI chatbots to see if they could replace his human friends. There are tech journalists today who are unsure if they even want to try new technology like AI. They think it'll get a moral stain on them. Kevin's a tinkerer. He thinks by doing.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  What's our go-to-market plan, as they say? Like, how do we actually get this thing out and get our first users?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Well, I asked Claude.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  And it said that the first steps include choosing a memorable name and securing a domain for our server. We have to establish community guidelines and decide if our server will have a specific theme or topic, decide who will handle server administration and content moderation. And then we have to actually start, like, doing stuff like setting up a server and a hosting provider and DNS records and all of that.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  You know, it's times like this that I'm grateful that I chose a boyfriend who is a software engineer. I feel like he's going to be huge for this.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great. Now, I should actually disclose that I have some relevant history here, which is that when I was in middle school, I was the webmaster of the third-largest Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan site on GeoCities.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Wow. And now, fast forward to today, and there's another vampire sucking the life force out of the world. And it's called meta.com.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  And that's where we come in.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  We're the Slayers now. I don't know if that's going to work.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  This is why we pay Casey the big bucks. You gotta swing hard or not swing at all.

• 16:38PJ Vogt?

  There was one more decision to make before we could get up and running. Our fledgling platform, our little slice of the Fediverse, it needed a name. Casey had a pitch.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  So I have one idea that I would say is sort of very particular to one podcast as opposed to being really particular to both podcasts. But we could call it the Forkiverse.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I tried to do a blended name and came up with Search Fork or Hard Engine.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Hard Engine.

• 17:06PJ Vogt?

  Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different internet.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  That's a Casey's incognito tab.

• 17:15PJ Vogt?

  I could live with Forkiverse. It also feels like, it feels like it's not just a reference to hard fork, but like, you're forking off.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:22PJ Vogt?

  The internet.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:30PJ Vogt?

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

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Hello?

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Can you still hear me, PJ?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  I can still hear you.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Dreams are coming true.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Can you still hear me?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:36PJ Vogt?

  This was a few months later. Kevin Roos, as I'd hoped, had become our chief technology officer. And he was here to report on the work he'd been doing. I was in the studio in Brooklyn. Kevin and Casey were connecting from the New York Times San Francisco office.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  I came down to the studio. Where's the studio? It's in a closet in the New York Times San Francisco bureau that was built for Ezra Klein that he never once used. And I once asked him about it and he was like, wait, they built a studio?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Kevin, what do you have for us? So since our last meeting, we have built a Mastodon server. Really? And by we...

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Well, and by built, I mean ordered from like a managed hosting service. I did not personally build anything here. And by we, I mostly mean AI because

• 19:31PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  I was a little bit daunted by this project. And so I've been testing this operator thing. Have you heard about this?

• 19:40PJ Vogt?

  We were talking, I should say, last January, which in the pace of AI development feels like approximately two centuries ago. But anyway, that long ago week, OpenAI's operator was new. Yeah, operator is OpenAI's new thing where the AI can actually like do stuff for you, but it doesn't usually do it very well. It can take over your mouse and it can type stuff in, but like it's not so good yet. This is my understanding. Is that understanding wrong?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  I think that's no, I think that's a mostly correct understanding, although in this case it did do this extremely well. So I, I told it about our project and I said, go out, buy me a domain name, set up a whole Mastodon server and configure all the settings. Yeah.

• 20:23PJ Vogt?

  You gave the AI your credit card?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  PJ, we're living in the future out here. We, we, we trust AIs more than other humans. So I gave it this task and then I came back like 20 minutes later and it had done most of what I asked it for. I still needed to like, you know, input some stuff, but we now own the domain name, theforkiverse.com. That was available for $1 for the first year. Then I assume it goes up to like $7,000 or something. And we also have an account on something called masto/host.

• 20:56PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Which is a fully managed Mastodon hosting service. So it's basically, you know, it's like Squarespace, but for social media sites. And so I bought us a plan, $89 a month. I will be expensing that to the search engine accounting department.

• 21:14PJ Vogt?

  I should hope so.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  And it gives us the following things. Very high federation capacity.

• 21:21PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  50 processing threads.

• 21:23PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  40 gigabyte database.

• 21:26PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  400 gigabyte media storage.

• 21:29PJ Vogt?

  We only have 400 gigabytes of media storage for our entire social network. Let's just say that uploading images is discouraged on the fork of a server.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  They just have to be very small.

• 21:40PJ Vogt?

  No 4K, no 4K.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  No, no 4K. And it can hold an estimated 2,000 users.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  So that was the largest plan. I could have gone with the moon, planet, star, or constellation plans, but I went with the galaxy plan. So that's what we got.

• 21:58PJ Vogt?

  So the galaxy plan gives us a social media network that in size kind of resembles like a late 90s message board.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:06PJ Vogt?

  But it can connect to all the other social media networks. That's the high federation capacity or whatever.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:14PJ Vogt?

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

• 22:43Speaker 01

  That's the dream. That's the hope. That's what we're trying to do.

• 22:46PJ Vogt?

  Go backwards.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Also, I just want to say, I tried to use Operator to do cool things too. And when I tried to order groceries, it tried to send them to the grocery store that I was ordering from. So that's how far I got with the AI.

• 23:01PJ Vogt?

  So I would like to invite you both to open a new tab in your browser. Okay. And go to theforkiverse.com. Okay, I'm at the Forkiverse.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Oh, so you want me to just go to theforkiverse.com?

• 23:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  I see.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  I just got a warning saying that my connection is not private and that attackers might be trying to steal my information.

• 23:22PJ Vogt?

  Okay, well, I can't help you with that. Nope. We just got to ask Operator about that. I also got an error message that said that my...

• 23:31Speaker 01

  I think the New York Times...

• 23:32PJ Vogt?

  We're blocked. The New York Times firewall is blocking us from going to the Forkiverse. So out here in independent media where there's no rules and you can do whatever you want, I'm on the Forkiverse. Do you want me to tell you what I'm seeing? Yes, please.

• 23:48PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so first of all, there's a nice little graphic. I don't know if that's a Mastodon graphic or a Forkiverse graphic, but it's anime and there's a bunch of elephants. It says the forkiverse.com is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the Fediverse. And then the thing that I realized I'd never seen before is that it's like, there's the feed that you would see on any of the 20 Twitter clones or whatever, but there's nothing on it yet. It's pristine. It's like, posts. These are posts from across the social web that are getting traction today. No posts. Hashtags. These are hashtags that are getting traction. No hashtags. News. These are the news stories. Nothing is trending right now. It's like in the morning when it snows, the social network right now.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and how does looking at that feel?

• 24:31PJ Vogt?

  Not yet stressful. It's just interesting. It's weird to think there was a day where they turned on Twitter and nobody had posted yet. It's kind of cool to see an unfilled universe.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  It's so beautiful to just see it without any misinformation, any sort of toxic hate speech or bullying.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, many people are saying this is the ideal social network.

• 24:53PJ Vogt?

  It really is. It's very zen. There's zero active users.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  I don't feel addicted to it. I don't feel compelled to check it, really, ever.

• 25:03PJ Vogt?

  The pristine emptiness of our site. Obviously, every social media platform has begun unsullied. But my real hope with the Forkiverse, if anyone did show up to use it, and who knew? But if they did, what might stop it from becoming what every other platform had become was that it wasn't particularly algorithmic. There was no AI-powered machine mind underneath it, constantly trying to suggest addictive content to users. We had a social media that was not designed to make everyone miserably addicted to it. I don't want to say I was hopeful, but I was at least curious.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  PJ, I think you should try to create an account.

• 25:41PJ Vogt?

  Okay, create account.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  I could look at it from my, on my phone. Let's do that.

• 25:46PJ Vogt?

  Let's use our phones. While you guys go on your phones, I'm on- We're hacking the mainframe. Username. I'm gonna try to see if PJ's taken. All right. Da-da-da, put my email, same password I use for everything and everybody knows. That won't go wrong. I have read and agree to the privacy policy. I'm not gonna read the privacy policy. Okay, it says, now I have a confirmation link in my inbox. Bup, bup, bup.

• 26:10PJ Vogt?

  My application is pending review by the staff. This may take some time.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Ooh, the staff.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Can you hire us a staff?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Operator might have hired us a staff, I'm not sure.

• 26:19PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow. Are there a bunch of AIs deciding if I'm allowed to post?

• 26:22Speaker 02

  It makes us do a little, to help us process your registration, write a bit about yourself and why you want an account on the forkaverse.com.

• 26:31PJ Vogt?

  Who's deciding?

• 26:32Speaker 02

  It's making us audition for our own social network. I'm just saying, I want to test it.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I'm saying, this is my goddamn server.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Okay. Oh, no, it's saying pending review by our staff. Okay, well, who's the staff? Casey, are you the staff?

• 26:47PJ Vogt?

  I'm not the staff. So we don't know who's in charge of the social network you built, Kevin?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Well, to be clear, I did not build this. This was autonomously built.

• 27:03PJ Vogt?

  It was so early and things were already going so wrong. The machines had risen. Kevin agreed offline to figure out who his vibe coding had put in charge of our federated platform. We decided to use our time to figure out our roles on the new site. Casey had to be the moderator, since his website platformer is all about the feckless decisions by social media moderators. Kevin was CTO. I was the growth officer. We put together a moderation policy, which we cribbed from Casey's platformer newsletter.

• 27:35PJ Vogt?

  And three months later, we met again, this time in person at the San Francisco New York Times office.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Gentlemen.

• 27:42PJ Vogt?

  Hello.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Welcome.

• 27:43PJ Vogt?

  Thank you.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  To the first ever convening of the Forkiverse Board.

• 27:47PJ Vogt?

  Good to be here. Good to be here.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Now, I know that we ran into some technical hiccups last time. But I've made some tweaks and changes that are going to get us through this rough patch. We have been whitelisted by the New York Times Firewall system. So you can go to theforkiverse.com from our offices here.

• 28:06PJ Vogt?

  Do you guys have to get individual permission to go to every new website?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  New website, yes.

• 28:11PJ Vogt?

  Yes, and it's a three-month process to get that happen.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  No, it was very quick. Some very nice people on the IT team helped me get that whitelisted. But basically, it's like if it's never seen the URL before.

• 28:20PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  It's like, whoa, whoa, buddy.

• 28:22PJ Vogt?

  Wow.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  We gotta check you out first.

• 28:24PJ Vogt?

  Okay, but this has been New York Times approved.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Yes. So we are in the system and I have programmed our rules into the thing that you get when you sign up for an account. And I have started setting up my feed and we're on our way to having our own full-fledged social network.

• 28:40PJ Vogt?

  Do you feel things?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, um, I felt that sort of like blank slate feeling that you talked about last time where it's like, this is, this is pure snow. And then I started filling up my feed with things. And now I don't feel that anymore. Now I feel like, oh, here we go again.

• 28:59PJ Vogt?

  Wait, and who are you following on our, oh, because it's federated.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Yes. So this is the thing is because this is a federated social network, no one has to have an account on the Forkiverse for us to put their stuff in our feeds.

• 29:13PJ Vogt?

  Just to step in here to fully explain this, because it's confusing and it's important to understand. On normal social media, if Kevin had logged onto Instagram for the first time, he'd only have seen Instagram posts, nothing from Twitter, nothing from TikTok. Most social media works like that, and there's a good business reason why. Instagram wants a monopoly on Instagram content. So the site is closed. You have to sign up on the platform to follow the people there. But federated websites aren't designed that way. They're open. So Kevin, the very first member of the Forkiverse, could already follow anybody who signed up for an account on any other federated social media platform. He could follow people on Lemmy, which is like Reddit, people on Pixelfed, which is like Instagram.

• 29:57PJ Vogt?

  He could even follow some accounts on Threads, Meta's Twitter clone. Here on the Forkiverse's very first day, its first user already had a full feed.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  So when I go on to theforkiverse.com, I see something that looks basically like the old Twitter. I see a reverse chronological feed of posts from accounts that I follow, including the two of you, but also a bunch of other accounts. And I see Techmeme. I see-

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Which is a sort of popular news aggregator about tech news.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  I see The Verge, the tech news website. I see 404 Media, a couple of other folks that I've been following. But basically, if you have a Mastodon account on any compatible server, you can now add that stuff right to your feed.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Hmm. And what are you following to get a lot of misinformation and AI slop?

• 30:48Speaker 02

  I haven't followed that many accounts yet. I think I'm at six, but I would invite us all to log into our Forkiverse-

• 30:55Speaker 01

  And that URL again is, of course-

• 30:57Speaker 02

  theforkiverse.com.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  I'm in.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Uh, okay.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  There.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Kevin, I'm following you back.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Aw, thanks. Oh, I just got the notification. Had a little noise.

• 31:16PJ Vogt?

  We'd reached the Forkiverse. The logo had a 90s pixel aesthetic, rainbow colors, a soaring fork flying over and under construction sign. Other than that, it really did have the familiar look of any feed-based social media platform. Nobody had arrived yet, but as we joined, Mastodon's protocol was already suggesting accounts to follow on other parts of the Fediverse.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Some of the other most popular Mastodon accounts include Stephen Fry.

• 31:46PJ Vogt?

  The British actor.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  British actor, uh, God.

• 31:50PJ Vogt?

  God, oh, like the old Twitter account God? Or different person cosplaying as God?

• 31:54Speaker 02

  I have no idea who's, who counted it is, but it has 144,000 followers. The Auschwitz Memorial, not gonna make a joke about that one.

• 32:04PJ Vogt?

  There was a pause where someone could have wandered in and risked some career points.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Go for it, Casey.

• 32:14PJ Vogt?

  Those people are used to dealing with dire experiences. Then they said, why did we set up on the Fediverse? How bad could it be?

• 32:23PJ Vogt?

  You went for it and I, and that's what I love about you. The Nazis aren't gonna come to Auschwitz. Auschwitz has a government of Nazis. Yeah. Go to social media. Exactly.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Uh, NASA has a very popular Mastodon account.

• 32:34PJ Vogt?

  Uh, wait till Doge finds out about that.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  And Elon Musk's jet is also on here because it got kicked off of X.

• 32:40PJ Vogt?

  Oh, these are people who want to track Elon Musk.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  The tracker account, uh, that tracks the movements of Elon Musk's private jet.

• 32:46PJ Vogt?

  It's interesting. It does kind of give you a view onto who has wandered into this little part of the internet. It's like, as you said, it's sort of Twitter discontents. It's honestly, that, that suite of accounts describes a kind of normie millennial internet user. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's interesting.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it does feel like the, the age band is like 35 and up.

• 33:11PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  On Mastodon.

• 33:12PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  The, the thing that I have noticed, cause I've been spending a little bit of time with Mastodon in general, uh, trying to figure out who to follow, is that so much of it is just people trying to like recapture the magic of old Twitter.

• 33:26PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Like, a lot of it just does feel like very backward looking. And like, if we could all just get together on our new place and post like we used to, it could be like summer camp again.

• 33:35PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  And in this way where I'm like, mm, I think like we need a new thing.

• 33:39PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Like, I think whatever comes next has to feel different than what came before. Does that make sense?

• 33:44PJ Vogt?

  You, you're totally right about this. And I actually think this is maybe one of the biggest reasons why the Fediverse might not take off, is that it does feel like it is rooted more in nostalgia.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  And like the way that millennials thought of their first experiences of the internet than it does like an organic response to what the world needs right now. That said, I do think the world needs something like this right now. But I think those two ideas are somewhat intention. And I agree with you that for the Fediverse to take off, it is going to have to feel new and obviously better than what came before in some very obvious way.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:19PJ Vogt?

  That makes sense to me. Like I'll say this like 80 more times in this episode. I don't like social media very much. But sometimes I walk around during the day and a funny thought occurs to me. And remember what it used to be like to have Twitter? And like post the funny thought and see if other people thought it was funny. Now, when I have that, I just text it to a friend. Because if I open up my phone, there's Blue Sky, which is full of a bunch of Star Graving Loon and Ticks. There's Threads, which is like the most boring social media network in the world. There's Twitter, which is filled with Star Graving Loon and Ticks. And then like, that's it as far as like witty sentences goes. And so I think the appeal of the fork of this is, okay, if you don't like the social media that exists, build your own. You don't have to fill it with people because you can connect

• 35:04PJ Vogt?

  to existing little planets people have built for themselves.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Right. That's it.

• 35:08PJ Vogt?

  Right?

• 35:09Speaker 02

  So I think that's like the idealistic argument for the Fediverse. I think there's a practical argument for it too, which is that if you are part of a server that does make some kind of rule that you disagree with, you can pack up and move without losing all of your followers and all of your feeds. Like you can take your stuff with you when you leave.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And can I just say, I have lived this experience twice and had very different experiences. One was when I left X because I thought this is a horrible place. I cannot justify being here anymore. At the time, I had more than 200,000 followers. I had worked to build them up over a decade. It was a huge part of my business. This is how I would promote my actual work and find new subscribers. And I walked away from it because I was like, I truly cannot be here anymore. And there was a financial cost to me. It was one I could bear and was happy to bear, but it cost me money. Okay? I had no recourse. Then, a couple years or so later, I left Substack because it had also made a bunch of policy decisions. Decisions that I decided that I could not live with and I left it. Substack could not say, no, no, no, you can't take your email. I mean, I guess maybe they could have tried.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  But one of the premises of Substack was we're going to be a little bit more open in this regard. And if for whatever reason you decide you want to leave, you can. And so I did. And I took almost 200,000 email addresses to a brand new platform and I set up. And for my subscribers, it was as if nothing had ever happened. And I just kept on writing Platformer as normal. So that is the dream of a Fediverse is if you are a big drama queen like me and you're always leaving platforms at the drop of a hat, you could actually do it in a way that doesn't destroy your life.

• 36:42PJ Vogt?

  Hey, first of all, I think you should promise you'll never leave the Forkiverse.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I can't make you any promises.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Of any of us here, I'm the most likely to leave, just statistically.

• 36:57PJ Vogt?

  So those were the Fediverse's promises. Make your own algorithms, leave when you want to. Build an internet where even Casey might one day be happy. This was the beginning. From here, we see who showed up, what happened. Whether the Forkiverse would die at Ghost Town, succumb to the normal dynamics of social media, or maybe, possibly, surprise Casey and point the way towards something else.

• 37:24PJ Vogt?

  Are we ready to open this thing? Yeah, let's open it.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Let's open it.

• 37:27PJ Vogt?

  All right. It's open. Okay, so are we launched?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  We're launched.

• 37:38PJ Vogt?

  The Forkiverse is now online. Please join us there at www.theforkiverse.com. You just go to T H E F O R K I V E R S E dot com and click Create Account. You can become the fourth person on our platform and discuss whatever you want, as long as you follow the rules. If you're looking for something to post, I would love for people to post photos of where they are while they're listening to this. So maybe snap a photo right now and share it to the Forkiverse. Feels like a wholesome enough start. Also, please keep them as low res as possible, since our storage limits are hilariously small. And speaking of limits, we mentioned this in the episode. There's only 2,000 spots on our instance. But if it fills up, you can start your own and federate with us.

• 38:24PJ Vogt?

  We're going to do periodic updates on what's happening or not happening on the Forkiverse. And we plan to share some of the stories of the people trying to build the actual Fediverse.

• 38:35PJ Vogt?

  You'll hear those segments either here on Search Engine or over at Hard Fork, one of our very favorite podcasts, which we heartily recommend.

• 39:34PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Xero. Okay, you're a great small business owner, but math was never your thing. Totally get it. But if you run a small business, you know how important it is to run your numbers. Enter Xero. That's X E R O, as in X marks the spot for the perfect platform that puts accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics in one place. So you always have one clear picture of your business. Xero is more detailed than spreadsheets and just as powerful as other leading software, but it's simpler and easier to use. With visual dashboards, Xero makes it easy to understand your cash flow. You know exactly what's coming in and what's going out. So you make smarter decisions that can help grow your business without feeling overwhelmed by the numbers. Join 5 million customers worldwide who use Xero to manage their finances.

• 40:19PJ Vogt?

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• 40:26PJ Vogt?

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• 41:10PJ Vogt?

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• 41:25PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by the new book from Michael Lewis, Blockers. For 30 years, Michael Lewis has written about the people behind the stories in character-driven bestsellers like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Fifth Risk. Now, in his new book, Blockers, Michael Lewis tells the story of six civil servants who devoted their lives to public service that matters. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands; another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules; one figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods; another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. There was also a security guard. In the new Washington, these federal employees discovered that their high standards were their greatest liability.

• 42:08PJ Vogt?

  If these public servants can't survive in government today, what does that say about us? I am so excited that this new book is out. Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. I read everything he writes, and I'm very excited for this one. Blockers by Michael Lewis, available wherever books are sold. Learn more at blockersbook.com.

• 42:38PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Truthy Pennamani. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. This episode was fact-checked by Natsumi Ajisaka. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Maury Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schaaf. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes, please consider signing up for incognito mode at searchengine.show. Thank you for listening. We'll see you soon.

• 43:42PJ Vogt?

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• 44:26PJ Vogt?

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