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Hard Fork
Can We Build a Better Social Network?
00:40:48
A “Hard Fork” and “Search Engine” collaboration.
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- [00:00]
A
I don't know about you, but when I'm using AI for my business, I don't need it to tell me what to do. I know what I want. I just need help making it happen. With wix, I finally have an AI tool that gets things done the way I want. I just have to describe the type of website I need and it's ready. I can even ask it to manage my inventory, plan my next marking campaign, or help out my customers. Wix gives me AI wherever I need it. Try it out@wix.com.
- [00:30]
B
Well, Casey, we've got something different for Hard Fork listeners today. We are dropping in a special Tuesday episode, and this is an episode that we've been working on for a very long time. We're very excited to bring it to our listeners.
- [00:42]
C
It might be, Kevin, the first episode in the history of Hard Fork that took more than one week to make.
- [00:50]
B
In fact, it took more than one year to make. So more than a year ago, we started chatting with friends, friend of the pod, PJ Vogt, the host of the great Search Engine podcast, which both of us have been on. PJ's been on hard Fork as well. And we started talking about this experiment that we wanted to run together, the three of us. And so today's episode describes the results of that experiment and it involves the Fediverse.
- [01:16]
C
That's right, Kevin. And honestly, it kind of started as a joke. You'll hear it in the episode. But based on the response that they got over there, it kicked off more than a year of and getting together in person, clowning around, and we're just so pleased to be able to present to you today the adventure that we've been on.
- [01:35]
B
Yes. And we should say Search Engine did most of the work to string this all together so nicely. They produced this episode. We are sharing it in our feed because we think you'll all be interested. But this is really the results of one of the most fun experiments that I personally have done in the past year or so.
- [01:54]
D
Yeah.
- [01:54]
C
And it truly is just a great way, if you have not yet heard Search Engine, to listen to what they do. They are master craftspeople of the podcasting forum, and if you haven't checked them out yet, I think you're really going to enjoy what they do.
- [02:09]
B
Yes, many people are saying that Search Engine is America's second best technology podcast, and I should say I agree.
- [02:16]
C
All right, well, to kick the story off, Kevin, let's kick things over to our good friend pj. Vote.
- [02:47]
D
Hello and welcome to a new year search engines, 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. 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. 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 any anything hopeful around the corner, anything that made him feel optimistic.
- [04:10]
C
I have the best, worst, dorkiest answer to that question, pj, which is that we have to finish building the fetiverse. Really?
- [04:24]
B
Yeah.
- [04:25]
D
You mean like, so, okay, the Fediverse.
- [04:28]
C
You're already so upset that I'm making you talk about this. And that's fine.
- [04:31]
B
You should be.
- [04:32]
C
We should all be upset that we have to talk about the Fediverse.
- [04:34]
D
Talk about the Fediverse, but in a way that my mom can understand it.
- [04:38]
B
Yeah.
- [04:39]
C
So 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.
- [05:10]
D
Kasey 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 Microsoft, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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.
- [09:30]
B
Oh, thank God. This is the ideal setting for a podcast. Don't change a thing.
- [09:37]
C
Can you hear me now?
- [09:37]
B
Yes. There we go.
- [09:39]
C
Hi.
- [09:39]
B
We did it, fam.
- [09:41]
D
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? And Kevin had had an idea about how to find out.
- [10:04]
B
I think we should start a social media platform on the Fediverse. In the Fediverse. Is it on or in?
- [10:10]
E
Anyway, we'll find out along the way.
- [10:11]
C
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?
- [10:30]
E
I can tell you some. Then what?
- [10:31]
B
Yeah, then PJ can tell us. Then what?
- [10:33]
E
For me, if right now, you know, very early into our. I don't even wanna 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 gonna make you think in bumper stickers. Instagram's gonna make you realize that everyone you know is, like, thinner and on vacation. 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 very often. And so what I find interesting as a testable game and not just like sort of like a stunt that we.
- [11:24]
D
Could do because we're journalists, is.
- [11:26]
E
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.
- [11:58]
C
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 form here.
- [12:24]
B
But that is so fundamentally pessimistic. Kasey, I have to call you out 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.
- [13:06]
C
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.
- [13:44]
D
Their own servers and are sort of.
- [13:45]
C
Publishing directly to this feed. And maybe there are some other interactions there. To me, this is how we actually move away from the Internet that we're on. It is not like, can we get a hundred nice people in a room together? I'm sure we could do that. It is, after we get the hundred 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.
- [14:16]
D
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 too. Three people who had 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 microserver, 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, 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. 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.
- [15:31]
B
What's our go to market plan? As they say, like, how do we actually get this thing out and get our first users? Yeah. Well, I asked Claude, 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 doing stuff like setting up a server and a hosting provider and DNS records and all of that.
- [16:11]
C
You know, it's times like this that I'm grateful that I chose a boyfriend who was a software engineer. I feel like he's going to be huge for this.
- [16:18]
E
Oh, that's great.
- [16:19]
B
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. Wow.
- [16:32]
C
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 and that's where we come in. Yes, we're the Slayers. Now, I don't know if that's going to work.
- [16:47]
B
This is why we pay Kasey the big bucks.
- [16:49]
E
You got to swing hard or not swing at all.
- [16:52]
D
There's 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. Kasey had a pitch.
- [17:02]
C
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 Forkaverse.
- [17:14]
B
I mean, I tried to do a blended name and came up with Searchfork or Hard Engine Hardengine.
- [17:21]
E
Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different Internet.
- [17:25]
B
That's of Casey's Incognito tab.
- [17:30]
E
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 the Internet.
- [17:38]
C
Exactly.
- [17:45]
D
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.
- [18:29]
F
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- [19:31]
G
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- [20:13]
D
Hello?
- [20:14]
C
Hello? Can you still hear me?
- [20:15]
D
P.J. i can still hear you.
- [20:17]
C
Dreams are coming true.
- [20:18]
B
Can you still hear me?
- [20:19]
D
Yes. This was a few months later. Kevin Roose, 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.
- [20:34]
C
I came down to the studio.
- [20:36]
D
Where's the studio?
- [20:37]
B
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?
- [20:52]
D
Kevin, what do you have for us?
- [20:54]
B
So since our last meeting, we have built a Mastodon server.
- [21:00]
C
Really?
- [21:01]
B
And by we? 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 really, I was a little bit daunted by this project. And so I'VE been testing this operator thing. Have you heard about this?
- [21:24]
D
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.
- [21:39]
E
The AI can actually, like, do stuff.
- [21:42]
D
For you, but it doesn't usually do it very well. You can take over your mouse and it can type stuff in, but, like, it's not so good yet. Is my understanding. Is that understanding wrong?
- [21:52]
B
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 about our project and I said, go out, buy me a domain name, set up a whole Mastodon server, and configure all the settings.
- [22:07]
D
Yet you gave the AI your credit card.
- [22:09]
B
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 theforkaverse.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 Mastod Host.
- [22:40]
E
Okay.
- [22:41]
B
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.
- [22:59]
D
I should hope so.
- [23:00]
B
And it gives us the following things. Very high federation capacity.
- [23:05]
E
Okay.
- [23:06]
B
50 processing threads.
- [23:08]
E
Okay.
- [23:09]
B
40 gigabyte database.
- [23:10]
E
Okay.
- [23:11]
B
400 gigabyte media storage.
- [23:14]
D
We only have 400 gigabytes of media storage for our entire social network.
- [23:19]
C
Let's just say that uploading images is discouraged on the fork of our server.
- [23:23]
B
They just have to be small.
- [23:25]
D
No. 4K. No 4K.
- [23:26]
B
No, no 4K. And it can hold an estimated 2,000 users. Okay. 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.
- [23:43]
D
So the Galaxy plan gives us a social media network that in size kind of resembles like a late 90s message board. Yes, but it can connect to all the other social media networks. That's the high federation capacity or whatever.
- [23:57]
B
Exactly.
- [23:59]
D
One clarification here is that of course we can connect only to other Open federated platforms. So a fork reverse 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 forkoverse 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.
- [24:28]
C
That's the dream. That's the hope. That's what we're trying to do.
- [24:31]
D
Go backwards.
- [24:32]
C
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.
- [24:45]
B
So I would like to invite you both to open a new tab in your browser.
- [24:50]
D
Okay.
- [24:50]
B
And go to theforkiverse.com.
- [24:54]
D
Okay. I'm at the Forkiverse.
- [24:55]
C
Oh, so you want me to just go to the forkiverse.com? yeah, I see. I just got a warning saying that my connection is not private and that attackers might be trying to steal my information.
- [25:07]
B
Okay, Kevin, I can help you with that. Nope, we just got to ask Operator about that. I also got an error message that said that my.
- [25:16]
C
I think the New York Times.
- [25:17]
B
We're blocked. The New York Times firewall is blocking us from going to the Forkaverse.
- [25:23]
D
So out here in independent media, where there's no rules and you could do whatever you want. I'm on the Forkaverse. Do you want me to tell you what I'm seeing?
- [25:30]
B
Yes, please.
- [25:32]
D
Okay, so first of all, there's a nice little graphic. I don't know if that's a Mastodon graphic or a Forkaverse graphic, but there's like. It's sort of anime and there's like a bunch of elephants. It says theforgoverse.com is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the Fediverse. And then the thing that I realized 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.
- [26:13]
B
Yeah. And how does looking at that feel?
- [26:16]
D
Not yet stressful. It's just interesting. This is what, like, it's weird to think there was a day where, like, they turned on Twitter and nobody had posted yet. Like, it's kind of cool to see an unfilled universe.
- [26:27]
C
It's so beautiful to just see it, you know, without any misinformation, any sort of toxic hate speech or bullying.
- [26:35]
B
Yeah. Many people are saying this is the ideal social network, right?
- [26:38]
C
It really is.
- [26:39]
D
It's very zed. There's zero active users.
- [26:41]
C
I don't feel addicted to it. Yeah. I don't feel compelled to check it, really. Ever.
- [26:48]
D
The pristine emptiness of our site. Obviously, every social media platform has begun unsullied. But my real hope, with the fork verse, if anyone did show up to use it, then 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.
- [27:23]
B
Pj, I think you should try to create an account.
- [27:25]
D
Okay. Create account.
- [27:27]
C
I could look at it from my. On my phone.
- [27:29]
B
Let's do that. Let's use our phone while you guys.
- [27:31]
D
Get on your phones. I'm on.
- [27:32]
B
We're hacking the mainframe username.
- [27:34]
D
I'm gonna try to see if PJ's taken.
- [27:37]
B
All right.
- [27:38]
D
Put my email. Same password I use for everything that everybody knows. That won't go wrong. I've read and agreed the privacy policy. I'm not gonna read the privacy policy. Okay? It says now I have a confirmation link in my inbox. Bop, bop, bop. My application is pending review by the staff. This may take some time.
- [27:59]
C
Did you hire us a staff operator?
- [28:01]
B
Might have hired us a staff. I'm not sure.
- [28:03]
D
Oh, wow. Are there a bunch of AIs deciding.
- [28:06]
B
If I want to use it? Makes us do a little to help us. Process your registration, write a bit about yourself and why you want an account on theforkiverse.com?
- [28:15]
D
Who'S deciding?
- [28:16]
B
It's making us audition for our own social network. I'm just saying I want to test it.
- [28:21]
C
I'm saying this is my goddamn server, okay?
- [28:24]
B
Oh, no. It's saying pending review by our staff. Okay, well, who's the staff, Casey? Are you the staff?
- [28:32]
C
I'm not the staff.
- [28:34]
D
So we don't know who's in charge of the social network you built, Gavin.
- [28:38]
B
Well, I have to be clear. I did not build this. This was autonomously built.
- [28:47]
D
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 platforms. We decided to use our time to figure out our roles on the news 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. And Kevin went away to iron out the remaining wrinkles. It was now time to open the doors of the Fediverse that. But after a short break.
- [29:27]
H
We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.
- [29:36]
B
Do you think this one's still good? Free milk?
- [29:38]
H
Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.
- [29:41]
F
Dang it.
- [29:42]
H
Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.
- [29:50]
B
Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.
- [29:53]
H
Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.
- [29:55]
B
It feels good to save big.
- [29:56]
C
It feels good to Geico.
- [29:58]
I
I'm Natalie Kitroeff, and as the Mexico City bureau chief for the New York Times, I started looking into the Sinaloa cartel and fentanyl production. I was trying to understand why this drug was killing so many Americans. And to do that, I knew that we had to get inside of this criminal organization. It took us months and months of work and multiple trips to Sinaloa to actually get into this fentanyl lab. There were a lot of risks involved in the reporting, but people got to have a real inside view into the organization that is making this drug. And they saw the process with photos and videos and interviews. This is the kind of work that we're able to do because of our subscribers. If you'd like to subscribe, go to nytimes.com subscribe.
- [31:00]
D
Welcome back to the show, Kevin. Casey and I met three months later, this time in person at the San Francisco New York Times office.
- [31:09]
B
Gentlemen, hello.
- [31:11]
C
Welcome.
- [31:11]
D
Thank you.
- [31:12]
B
To the first ever convening of the Forkiverse board of directors.
- [31:16]
D
Good to be here.
- [31:17]
C
Good to be here.
- [31:17]
B
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 now go to theforcoverse.com from our offices here.
- [31:34]
D
Wait, do you guys have to get individual permission to go to every new website?
- [31:39]
B
New website, yes.
- [31:40]
C
And it's a three month process.
- [31:41]
D
Process to make that happen?
- [31:42]
B
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. Yeah. It's like, whoa, whoa, buddy, like we got to check you out first.
- [31:53]
D
Okay. But this has been New York Times approved.
- [31:55]
B
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.
- [32:09]
D
Do you feel things?
- [32:11]
B
Yeah, so I, 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.
- [32:27]
D
Wait, and who are you following on our.
- [32:29]
I
Oh.
- [32:29]
E
Cause it's federated.
- [32:30]
B
Yes. So this is the thing is, because this is a federated social network, no one has to have an account on the Forkaverse for us to put their stuff in our feeds.
- [32:42]
D
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 Pixel Fed, which is like Instagram. He could even follow some accounts on Threads, Meta's, Twitter clone. Here, on the Forkaverse's very first day, its first user already had a full feed.
- [33:36]
B
So when I go onto theforkaverse.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. Nic Techmeme I see.
- [33:56]
C
Which is a sort of popular news aggregator about tech news.
- [33:59]
B
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.
- [34:12]
C
What are you following to get a lot of misinformation and AI slop?
- [34:18]
B
I haven't followed that many accounts yet. I think I'm at 6. But I would invite invite us all to log into our Forkiverse. And that URL again is of course theforcoverse.com.
- [34:30]
C
I'm in. Okay, Heather, Kevin, I'm following you back.
- [34:37]
B
Oh, thanks. Oh, I just got the notification. Had a little noise.
- [34:45]
D
We'd reached the Forkaverse. The logo had a 90s pixel aesthetic, rainbow colors, a soaring fork flying over an under construction sign.
- [34:54]
E
Other than that, it really did have.
- [34:56]
D
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.
- [35:08]
B
Some of the other most popular Mastodon accounts include Stephen Fry, the British actor. British actor. God.
- [35:19]
E
God.
- [35:19]
D
Oh, like the old Twitter account God.
- [35:21]
E
Or different person cosplaying.
- [35:23]
B
I have no idea whose who counter it is, but it has 144,000 followers. The Auschwitz Memorial. Not going to make a joke about that one. There was a pause where someone could have wandered in and risked some career points. Go for it, Casey.
- [35:42]
C
Those people are used to dealing with dire experiences. Then they said, why don't we set up on the Fediverse?
- [35:48]
B
How bad could it be? You went for it. And that's what I love about you.
- [35:54]
D
The Nazis aren't going to come to Auschwitz.
- [35:56]
B
Auschwitz has to come to the Nazis.
- [35:58]
D
Go to social media.
- [35:59]
C
Exactly.
- [36:00]
B
NASA has a very popular Mastodon account.
- [36:02]
C
Wait till Doge finds out about that.
- [36:05]
B
And Elon Musk's jet is also on here because it got kicked off of.
- [36:09]
D
X. Oh, these are people who want.
- [36:10]
B
To track Elon Musk, the tracker account that tracks the movements of Elon Musk's private jet.
- [36:15]
D
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 suite of accounts describes a kind of normie millennial Internet user. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's interesting.
- [36:34]
B
Yeah.
- [36:35]
C
Yeah.
- [36:36]
B
It does feel like the age band is like 35 and up on Mastodon.
- [36:41]
D
Yes.
- [36:42]
B
The thing that I have noticed, because I've been spending a little bit of time with Mastodon in general, trying to figure out who to follow, is that so much of it is just people trying to recapture the magic of old Twitter. A lot of it just does feel very backward looking. And if we could all just get together on a new place and post like we used to, it could be like summer camp again this way where I'm like, I think, like, we need a new thing, y'.
- [37:08]
C
All.
- [37:08]
B
Like, I think whatever comes next has to feel different than what came before. Does that make sense?
- [37:13]
C
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 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 intentioned. 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.
- [37:47]
D
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
- [37:49]
E
Like, I. I'll say this like 80.
- [37:51]
D
More times in 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 I remember what it used to be like to have Twitter and to, 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 grieving lunatics. There's Threads, which is like the most boring social media network in the world. There's Twitter, which is filled with stark raving lunatics. And then that's it as far as witty sentences goes. And so I think the appeal of the fork reverse is okay. If you don't like the social media that exists, build your own.
- [38:30]
E
You don't have to fill it with.
- [38:32]
D
People because you can connect to existing little planets people have built for themselves. Right?
- [38:36]
E
That's it.
- [38:37]
D
Right.
- [38:37]
B
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.
- [38:58]
C
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.
- [39:26]
F
Okay.
- [39:26]
C
I had no recourse. And then couple years so later, I left Substack because it had also made a bunch of policy 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, 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 can actually do it in a way that doesn't destroy your life.
- [40:10]
D
Okay, first of all, I think you should promise you'll never leave the fork reverse.
- [40:13]
C
Oh, I can't make you any promises. Of any of us here, I'm the most likely to leave. Just statistically.
- [40:26]
D
So those were the Fediverse's promises. Make your own algorithms leave when you want to build an Internet where even Casey Newton might one day be happy. This was the beginning. From here, we'd see who showed up, what happened, whether the for would die at ghost town, succumb to the normal dynamics of social media, or maybe, maybe possibly surprise Casey and point the way towards something else.
- [40:52]
B
Are we ready to open this thing?
- [40:54]
D
Let's open it.
- [40:54]
C
Let's open it.
- [40:56]
B
All right, it's open.
- [40:59]
D
Okay. So are we launched?
- [41:01]
B
We're launched.
- [41:28]
F
All right.
- [41:28]
B
Well, Casey, that was a very fun experiment and a very fun collaboration with PJ and Search Engine. As we mentioned in the episode, there are only about 2,000 spots on our Mastodon server, and they are going quickly. But if it fills up, which it looks like it may, by the time this episode comes out, you can start your own Fediverse server or join an existing one and federate with us, share updates on what you're doing, listen to our updates, and participate in this grand civic experiment with us.
- [42:00]
C
You remember when Dua Lipa said, I'm levitating? Well, we're federating. And that's what's happening here on the Hard fork show in 2026. And if you're wondering what do I post in the fork reverse, PJ had the great idea you could post a photo of where you're listening to the podcast at. I throw another one out there. It's always fun to post your full Social Security number.
- [42:17]
D
Yeah.
- [42:17]
B
And I would love for people to post updates on troop movements in Ukraine.
- [42:24]
C
Search Engine is going to be doing occasional updates on what's happening or not happening in the Fork reverse. And, you know, we kind of are interested in talking about it, too. So this is going to be a little bit of a sandbox for us to play in this year, and we encourage you to get in there and help, you know, maybe bring some toys to the sandbox.
- [42:40]
B
Yes. And when we inevitably have our first major sort of content moderation crisis meltdown scandal, we will also, of course, talk about that on our show as well.
- [42:52]
C
Huge thanks to the Search Engine team for all their hard work on this episode. Thank you, PJVote. Thank you, Saruthi Pinaminini. And now here's PJ again to read those credits.
- [43:01]
B
We'll be back with our regularly scheduled episode on Friday.
- [43:10]
D
Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinamani. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. This episode was fact checked by Natsumi Ajasaka. Our executive producer is Leah Rees. Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schmidt. Off. 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 Search Engine show. Thank you for listening. We'll see you soon. Choose to lean into it.
- [44:18]
I
Every Mazda is engineered to give you effortless control.
- [44:25]
D
Awake up.