When you’re building an open source community you’re a part of a collective effort with a common goal. In the fediverse, there are early adopters doing a lot of the heavy lifting now. They’re the voices you want to follow to make sense of the place.

One such person is Chris Trottier. Chris describes himself as a “fediverse enthusiast” (he’s also passionate about video games). He’s a sage presence who makes smart observations and has a 10,000-foot view of all the innovation happening on the open social web — not to mention a few ideas of his own.

Highlights of this conversation:

Why he’s rallied around ActivityPub
The promise of social and the promise of the fediverse
Self-hosting an instance
Interesting apps and products built on top of ActivityPub
Adopting a survivability mindset (as VCs, developers)

Services mentioned in this episode include:

Friendica - https://friendi.ca/ - a decentralized social network

Misskey - https://misskey-hub.net/en/ - a microblogging platform

Akkoma - https://akkoma.social/ - “sorta like the child of Twitter and email”

Macstodon - https://github.com/smallsco/macstodon - a Mastodon client for Classic Mac OS
DOStodon - https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon - a Mastodon client for MS-DOS

Amidon - https://github.com/BlitterStudio/amidon - a Mastodon client for Amiga computers

Sora - https://mszpro.com/sorasns - a futuristic iOS app for Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey; uses local machine learning to rank posts and feature contents to you

Bluesky Firehose - https://firesky.tv/ - republishes every new post/reply from the Bluesky firehose in real-time

Castling Club - https://castling.club/ - chess game built on top of ActivityPub

🔎 You can find Chris in the fediverse at @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @mike@flipboard.com

💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

Leaving the City of Big Social, with Fediverse Enthusiast Chris Trottier