The Fediverse Experiment

Summary

Search Engine – "The Fediverse Experiment" (Jan 9, 2026)

Host: PJ Vogt

Guests: Casey Newton (Platformer/Hard Fork), Kevin Roose (New York Times/Hard Fork)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the “Fediverse”—an alternative vision for social media and the internet—by exploring what would happen if the hosts created their own social platform within it. Vogt, Newton, and Roose set out to both explain the idea and test the underlying promise: Could the internet be rebuilt, not as a handful of monopolistic, algorithm-driven social platforms, but as a more open, flexible, user-centered web? Through candid reflection, hands-on experiments, and plenty of banter, the trio examine the hopes, realities, and obstacles of the Fediverse in 2026.

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Main Themes & Discussion Points

1. What’s Broken About the Internet—and Why Try Again?

• Opening Framing: Vogt candidly acknowledges the fatigue around talking about how bad today's internet feels—dominated by a few social media giants that harvest attention and promote unhealthy engagement cycles.
  • Memorable phrase: "Gooner’s 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." (02:13)
• Audience Demand: Despite skepticism, a flood of listener emails reveals real interest in hearing about alternatives, showing a hunger for hope.

2. What Is the Fediverse?

• Casey Newton defines:
  • "The Fediverse is a way for people to take back the Internet for themselves... 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." (03:49)
• Comparison to the “Old Internet”:
  • Emphasizes the shift from the “infinite websites, infinite message boards” of the '90s/early 2000s, to siloed, audience-captive social platforms.
  • Social media introduced dependence on proprietary platforms, locking in users through follower counts and handing over control to platform “moguls.”
• The Fediverse Vision:
  • Reclaims user agency, moves toward open protocols, and enables migration or aggregation across platforms.
  • “These were people trying to build a Millennium Falcon in their garage out of old car parts.” (06:07)

3. Hands-on Experiment: Building a Fediverse Platform

The Idea

• Roose’s Proposal: "I think we should start a social media platform on the Fediverse. In the Fediverse. Is it on or in?" (09:15)
• Clarifying the Goal: They’re not inventing a new social network, but configuring their own “instance”—a federated server others can join, built on Mastodon and linked to the wider Fediverse.

Why Bother?

• Vogt explains: “What would it be like to try to make a clubhouse that has rules that actually feel healthier?... 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.” (10:12)

Pessimism vs. Optimism

• Newton (skeptical): “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...” (11:09)
• Roose (hopeful): Cites Wikipedia’s surprise success: “If you cultivate the vibe of this space, it can actually be good.” (11:35)
• Newton (tech angle): The Fediverse’s promise is less about “nice people,” more about what content and connections become possible through federation—mixing feeds, connecting with publications and platforms, remixing the network.

4. Building “The Forkiverse”

Naming & Setup

• The trio brainstorm names, joke about “Searchfork” and “Hard Engine” before settling on the “Forkiverse,” evoking both their podcasts and the act of “forking” off the main internet.
  • “Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different Internet.” (16:32 – Vogt)

Technical Implementation

• Kevin Roose uses OpenAI’s operator:
  • Delegates most technical work (buying the domain, configuring the Mastodon hosting) to AI — “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.” (21:21)
• Specs: 2,000 user slots, 400GB storage, “very high federation capacity.”
  • “So the Galaxy plan gives us a social media network that in size kind of resembles like a late 90s message board.” (22:55 – Vogt)

First Impressions: The Blank Slate

• On the initial login, the Forkiverse is “pristine… like in the morning when it snows… nothing is trending right now.” (24:44 – Vogt)
  • Newton: “It’s so beautiful to just see it, you know, without any misinformation, any sort of toxic hate speech or bullying.” (25:39)
  • Roose: “Many people are saying this is the ideal social network.” (25:47)

Registration Oddities

• The hosts find out even they have to apply and be “approved” to join (by unspecified “staff”), revealing quirks in default Mastodon configuration—highlighting how these new systems can be opaque, even to builders.
  • Vogt: “We don’t know who’s in charge of the social network you built, Kevin.” (27:46)

5. Filling the Feed: Federation in Practice

• Now able to connect, the hosts describe the experience:
  • Roose: “...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.” (29:58)
  • Explains how users can cross-follow accounts from other federated platforms (e.g., Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, some Threads accounts).
• Roose: “When I go onto theforkaverse.com, I see something that looks basically like the old Twitter...” (31:04)
• Memorable moment: A list of popular accounts (Stephen Fry, “God”, the Auschwitz Memorial, NASA, Elon Musk’s jet tracker) shows who’s “wandered in” to this new part of the internet (32:36–33:37).

6. Is It All Just Nostalgia?

• Roose notes much of Mastodon/the Fediverse is preoccupied with “recapturing the magic of old Twitter”—a “backward-looking” vibe (34:09).
• Newton agrees: “It does feel like it is rooted more in nostalgia and… the way millennials thought of their first experiences of the Internet...” He warns that for the Fediverse to “take off,” it’ll need to “feel new and obviously better than what came before in some very obvious way.” (34:41)

7. What’s the Fediverse Actually Good For?

• Vogt and Roose argue that, aside from vibe, the Fediverse’s practical value is easy exit and portability:
  • Roose: “If you're 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.” (36:05)
• Casey Newton’s personal example:
  • Leaving X meant sacrificing 200k followers (and income)—no easy way out.
  • Leaving Substack, he exported 200k email subscribers and continued seamlessly: “...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.” (36:54)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On nostalgia and ambition:
  • “These were people trying to build a Millennium Falcon in their garage out of old car parts.” (06:07 – Vogt)
• On social network birth:
  • "It’s like in the morning when it snows. The social network right now." (25:25 – Vogt)
• On leaving platforms:
  • Newton: “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.” (37:34)
• On user migration:
  • Roose: “You can take your stuff with you when you leave.” (36:16)
• Deadpan banter:
  • Newton: “Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different Internet.” (16:32)
  • Roose: “We’re the Slayers now. I don’t know if that’s going to work.” (15:55)
• Ironically accurate summary:
  • “It really is. It’s very Zen. There’s zero active users.” (25:50 – Kevin Roose and PJ Vogt)

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Key Timestamps

• 02:00–04:20: Problems with the current internet & intro to the Fediverse
• 09:15: The trio decides to build a Fediverse server
• 16:14: Brainstorming the name (“The Forkiverse”)
• 20:04–22:55: Kevin instructs AI to build the Mastodon server & reveals tech specs
• 24:06–25:50: First login—blank, pristine feed; initial reactions
• 29:37–33:37: Filling the feed, federation explained, who’s on Mastodon
• 34:09–36:26: The nostalgia problem, and what’s actually new about the Fediverse
• 36:54: Casey Newton’s story of leaving platforms, user data portability
• 38:20–38:34: The Forkiverse launches and is open to public signups

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Tone & Style

The episode maintains a wry, earnest, and playful tone. The hosts are self-deprecating, joking about their own tech skills and the structural quirks of the Fediverse. They remain critical but hopeful, modeling curiosity and transparency about both the technical hurdles and the sociological stakes.

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Final Thoughts & Next Steps

The Forkiverse is now open—an experiment in what a user-created, federated social network might look like in practice. The hosts pledge to share updates and further stories, using their hands-on experience to probe whether a less addictive, less monopolistic, and more portable internet is truly possible.

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If You Want to Join

• Visit: theforkiverse.com
• Act fast: Only 2,000 user slots, and they want you to post low-res photos of where you’re listening!

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“The appeal of the fork reverse is OK. 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 to existing little planets people have built for themselves. Right? That's it.” —PJ Vogt (35:15)

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For more stories and updates on the Forkiverse and the Fediverse, keep listening to Search Engine and check out their sibling show, Hard Fork.

Transcript

[PJ Vogt]

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[PJ Vogt]

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 gooner's 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.

[Casey Newton]

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

[PJ Vogt]

Really?

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

You mean like, so, okay, the Fediverse.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

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

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. 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.

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Kevin Roose]

Oh, thank God. This is the ideal setting for a podcast. Don't change a thing.

[Casey Newton]

Can you hear me now?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. There we go.

[Casey Newton]

Hi.

[Kevin Roose]

We did it, fam.

[PJ 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? And Kevin had had an idea about how to find out.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[PJ Vogt]

Anyway, we'll find out along the way.

[Casey Newton]

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?

[PJ Vogt]

I can tell you some. Then what?

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, then PJ can tell us then what?

[PJ 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 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.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[Kevin Roose]

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.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

Their own servers and are sort of.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[PJ 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 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 Roose 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.

[Kevin Roose]

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, like, doing stuff like setting up a server and a hosting provider and DNS records and all of that.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, that's great.

[Kevin Roose]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

Wow.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Newton]

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

[Kevin Roose]

This is why we pay KC the big bucks.

[PJ Vogt]

You got to swing hard or not swing at all. 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. Kasey had a pitch.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[Casey Newton]

Hard Engine.

[PJ Vogt]

Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different Internet.

[Kevin Roose]

That's of Casey's Incognito tab.

[PJ 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 the Internet.

[Casey Newton]

Exactly.

[PJ 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. Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter?

[Sponsor Announcer]

Right.

[PJ Vogt]

And the best part? They accept Discover.

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Except Discover in a little place like this. I don't think so, Jennifer.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, yeah. Huh? Discovers accepted where I like to shop. Come on, baby, get with the times. Right. So we shouldn't get the parachute pants. These are making a comeback, I think. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. Based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.

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[Jill Schlesinger]

Hi, this is Jill Schlesinger, CBS News business analyst, certified financial planner and the host of the Jill on Money podcast. With the new year upon us, there's no better time to take control of your financial life, and the Jill on Money Podcast is here to help. It's your questions that make it possible for me to provide unconventional and, I hope, entertaining insights on your money and, more importantly, on your life. Follow and listen to Jill on Money wherever you get your podcasts.

[Casey Newton]

Hello?

[Kevin Roose]

Hello?

[Casey Newton]

Can you still hear me?

[PJ Vogt]

Pj, I can still hear you.

[Casey Newton]

That's dreams are coming true.

[Kevin Roose]

Can you still hear me?

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Casey Newton]

I came down to the studio.

[PJ Vogt]

Where's the studio?

[Kevin Roose]

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?

[PJ Vogt]

Kevin, what do you have for us?

[Kevin Roose]

So, since our last meeting, we have built a Mastodon server.

[PJ Vogt]

Really?

[Kevin Roose]

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?

[PJ 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. Is my understanding. Is that understanding wrong?

[Kevin Roose]

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. Yeah.

[PJ Vogt]

You gave the AI your credit card.

[Kevin Roose]

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, 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.

[PJ Vogt]

I should hope so.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Kevin Roose]

50 processing threads.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Kevin Roose]

40 gigabyte database.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Kevin Roose]

400 gigabyte media storage.

[PJ Vogt]

We only have 400 gigabytes of media storage for our entire social network.

[Casey Newton]

Let's just say that uploading images is discouraged on the fork of our server.

[Kevin Roose]

They just have to be small.

[PJ Vogt]

No. 4K. No 4K.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[PJ Vogt]

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

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, yes.

[PJ Vogt]

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

[Kevin Roose]

Exactly.

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Casey Newton]

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

[PJ Vogt]

Go backwards.

[Casey Newton]

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.

[Kevin Roose]

So I would like to invite you both to open a new tab in your browser.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Kevin Roose]

And go to the forkaverse.com.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay, I'm at the forkiverse.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, you want me to just go to the forkoverse.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.

[Kevin Roose]

Okay, Kevin, anything to help you with that? Nope, we just got to ask operator about that. I also got an error message that said that my.

[Casey Newton]

I think the New York Times. We're blocked.

[Kevin Roose]

The New York Times firewall is blocking us from going to the Forkaverse.

[PJ Vogt]

So out here in independent media, where there's no rules and you can do whatever you want. I'm on the Forkaverse. Do you want me to tell you what I'm seeing?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, please.

[PJ Vogt]

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 I never, 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. Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

And how does looking at that feel?

[PJ Vogt]

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.

[Casey Newton]

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

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. Many people are saying this is the ideal social network.

[Casey Newton]

Right?

[Kevin Roose]

It really is.

[PJ Vogt]

It's very Zen. There's zero active users.

[Casey Newton]

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

[PJ Vogt]

The pristine emptiness of our site. Obviously, every social media platform has begun unsullied. But my real hope with the fork reverse, 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.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[PJ Vogt]

Okay. Create account.

[Casey Newton]

I could look at it from my. On my phone.

[Kevin Roose]

Let's do that. Let's use our phone while you guys.

[PJ Vogt]

Go on your phones. I'm on.

[Kevin Roose]

We're hacking the mainframe username.

[PJ Vogt]

I'm gonna try to see if PJ's taken. All right. 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.

[Casey Newton]

Did you hire us a staff operator? Might have hired us a staff.

[Kevin Roose]

I'm not sure.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, wow. Are there a bunch of AIs deciding.

[Kevin Roose]

If I want to.

[PJ Vogt]

Oh, wow.

[Kevin Roose]

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?

[PJ Vogt]

Who'S deciding?

[Kevin Roose]

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

[Casey Newton]

I'm saying this is my goddamn server.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[Casey Newton]

I'm not the staff.

[PJ Vogt]

So we don't know who's in charge of the social network you built, Gavin.

[Casey Newton]

Well, this is a metaphor.

[Kevin Roose]

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

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

[Kevin Roose]

Gentlemen, Hello. Welcome.

[PJ Vogt]

Thank you.

[Kevin Roose]

To the first ever convening of the Forkiverse board of directors.

[PJ Vogt]

Good to be here.

[Casey Newton]

Good to be here.

[Kevin Roose]

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 TheForKiverse.com from our offices here.

[PJ Vogt]

Wait, do you guys have to get individual permission to go to every new website?

[Kevin Roose]

New website, yes.

[Casey Newton]

And it's a three month process to make that happen.

[Kevin Roose]

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, it's like, whoa, whoa, buddy, like we gotta check you out first.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay. But this has been New York Times approved.

[Kevin Roose]

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 are on our way to having our own full fledged social network.

[PJ Vogt]

Do you feel things?

[Kevin Roose]

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.

[PJ Vogt]

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

[Kevin Roose]

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.

[PJ 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 Forkaverse, 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. 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.

[Kevin Roose]

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.

[Casey Newton]

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

[Kevin Roose]

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.

[Casey Newton]

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

[Kevin Roose]

I haven't followed that many accounts yet. I think I'm at 6. But I would invite us all to log into our Forkiverse.

[Casey Newton]

And that URL again is of course theforkiverse.com I'm in. Okay, Heather, Kevin, I'm following you back.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[PJ Vogt]

We'd reached the forkaverse. The logo had a 90s pixel aesthetic, Rainbow colors, a soaring fork flying over an 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.

[Kevin Roose]

Some of the other most popular Mastodon accounts include Stephen Fry, the British actor. British actor. God.

[PJ Vogt]

God. Oh, like the old Twitter account God or different person cosplaying.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[PJ Vogt]

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

[Kevin Roose]

Go for it, Casey.

[Casey Newton]

Those people are used to dealing with dire experiences. Then they said, why don't we set up on the Fediverse? How bad could it be? You went for it.

[Kevin Roose]

And that's what I love about you.

[PJ Vogt]

The Nazis aren't going to come to Auschwitz.

[Kevin Roose]

Auschwitz has to come to the Nazis.

[PJ Vogt]

Go to social media.

[Casey Newton]

Exactly.

[Kevin Roose]

NASA has a very popular Mastodon account.

[Casey Newton]

Wait till Doge finds out about that.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[PJ Vogt]

X. Oh, these are people who want.

[Kevin Roose]

To track Elon Musk, the tracker account that tracks the movements of Elon Musk's private jet.

[PJ 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 suite of accounts describes a kind of normie millennial Internet user. Do you know what I mean? It's interesting.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, yeah. It does feel like the age band is like 35 and up on Mastodon.

[PJ Vogt]

Yes.

[Kevin Roose]

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, like, recapture the magic of old Twitter. Like, a lot of it just does feel like, very backward looking. And like, if we could all just get together on a new place and post like we used to, it could be like summer camp again in this way where I'm like, I think, like, we need a new thing, y'.

[Casey Newton]

All.

[Kevin Roose]

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

[Casey Newton]

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 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.

[PJ Vogt]

Yeah, that makes sense to me. Like, I. I'll say this like 80 more times. 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 graving 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. You don't have to fill it with people because you can connect to existing little planets people have built for themselves. Right? That's it. Right.

[Kevin Roose]

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.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And can I just say, I have lived this experience 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.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay.

[Casey Newton]

I had no recourse. I 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.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay, first of all, I think you should promise you'll never leave the fork reverse.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, I can't make you any promises. Of any of us here, I'm the most likely to leave, just statistically.

[PJ Vogt]

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 fork reverse 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.

[Kevin Roose]

Are we ready to open this thing?

[PJ Vogt]

Let's open it.

[Casey Newton]

Let's open it.

[Kevin Roose]

All right, it's open.

[PJ Vogt]

Okay. So are we launched?

[Kevin Roose]

We're launched.

[PJ Vogt]

The Forkiverse is now online. Please join us [e-mail]. you just go to T H E F O r K I V e r s e.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 Fork Reverse. 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. We're going to do periodic updates on what's happening or not happening on the Fork Reverse and we plan to share some of the stories of the people trying to build the actual Fediverse. 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. Sam. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinamani. Garrett Graham is our Senior producer. Emily Malta 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 Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. 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.