Werd I/O

This weekend I realized that I’m kind of burned out: agitated, stressed about nothing in particular, and peculiarly sleepless. It took a little introspection to figure out what was really going on.

Here’s what I finally decided: I really need to pull back from using social media in particular as much as I do.

A few things brought me here:

1. The sheer volume of social media sites is intense
2. Our relationship with social media has been redefined
3. I want to re-focus on my actual goals

I’d like to talk about them in turn. Some of you might be feeling something similar.

The sheer volume of social media sites is intense

It used to be that I posted and read on Twitter. That’s where my community was; that’s where I kept up to date with what was happening.

Well, we all know what happened there.

In its place, I find myself spending more time on:

1. Mastodon
2. Threads
3. Bluesky
4. LinkedIn (really!)
5. Facebook (I know)
6. Instagram

The backchannel that Twitter offered has become rather more diffuse. Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky offer pretty much the same thing as each other, with a different set of people. LinkedIn is more professional; I’m unlikely to post anything political there, and I’m a bit more mindful of polluting the feed. My Facebook community is mostly people I miss hanging out with, so I’ll usually post sillier or less professionally relevant stuff there. And Instagram, until recently, was mostly photos of our toddler.

I haven’t been spending a ton of time interacting on any of them; it’s common for almost a full day to go between posts. Regardless, there’s something about moving from app to app to app that feels exhausting. I realized I was experiencing a kind of FOMO — am I missing something important?! — that became an addiction.

Each dopamine hit, each context switch, each draw on my attention pushes me further to the right on the stress curve. Everyone’s different, but this kind of intense data-flood — of the information equivalent of empty calories, no less — makes me feel awful.

Ugh. First step: remove every app from my phone. Second step: drastically restrict how I can access them on the web.

Our relationship with social media has been redefined

At this point we’re all familiar with the adage that if you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold.

It never quite captured the true dynamic, but it was a pithy way to emphasize that we were being profiled in order to optimize ad sales in our direction. Of course, there was never anything to say that we weren’t being profiled or that our data wasn’t being traded even if we were the ostensible customer, but it seemed obvious that data mining for ad sales was more likely to happen on an ad-supported site.

With the advent of generative AI, or more precisely the generative AI bubble, this dynamic can be drawn more starkly. Everything we post can be ingested by a social media platform as training data for its AI engines. Prediction engines are trained on our words, our actions, our images, our audio, and then re-sold. We really are the product now.

I can accept that for posts where I share links to other resources, or a rapid-fire, off-the-cuff remark. Where I absolutely draw the line is allowing an engine to be trained on my child. Just as I’m not inclined to allow him to be fingerprinted or added to a DNA database, I’m not interested in having him be tracked or modeled. I know that this is likely an inevitability, but if it happens, it will happen despite me. I will not be the person who willingly uploads him as training data.

So, when I’m uploading images, you might see a picture of a snowy day, or a funny sign somewhere. You won’t see anything important, or anything representative of what life actually looks like. It’s time to establish an arms-length distance.

There’s something else here, too: while the platforms are certainly profiling and learning from us, they’re still giving us more of what we pause and spend our attention on. In an election year, with two major, ongoing wars, I’m finding that to be particularly stressful.

It’s not that I don’t want to know what’s going on. I read the news; I follow in-depth journalism; I read blogs and opinion pieces on these subjects. Those things aren’t harmful. What is harmful is the endless push for us to align into propaganda broadcasters ourselves, and to accept broad strokes over nuanced discussion and real reflection. This was a problem with Twitter, and it’s a problem with all of today’s platforms.

The short form of microblogging encourages us to be reductive about impossibly important topics that real people are losing their lives over right now. It’s like sports fans yelling about who their preferred team is. In contrast, long-form content — blogging, newsletters, platforms like Medium — leaves space to explore and truly debate. Whereas short-form is too low-resolution to capture the fidelity of the truth, long-form at least has the potential to be more representative of reality.

It’s great for jokes. Less so for war.

I want to re-focus on my actual goals

What do I actually want to achieve?

Well, I’ve got a family that I would like to support and show up for well.

I’ve got a demanding job doing something really important, that I want to make sure I show up well for.

I’ve also got a first draft of a majority of a novel printed out and sitting on my coffee table with pen edits all over it. I’d really like to finish it. It’s taken far longer than I intended or hoped for.

And I want to spend time organizing my thoughts for both my job and my creative work, which also means writing in this space and getting feedback from all of you.

Social media has the weird effect of making you feel like you’ve achieved something — made a post, perhaps received some feedback — without actually having done anything at all. It sits somewhere between marketing and procrastination: a way to lose time into a black hole without anything to really show for it.

So I want to move my center of gravity all the way back to writing for myself. I’ll write here; I’ll continue to write my longer work on paper; I’ll share it when it’s appropriate.

Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend; we only have one face to maintain ownership of. Independence is the most productive, least invasive way forward.

IndieNews

Over on Threads, Amanda Zamora asks:

I'm plotting away on Agencia Media and some personal writing/reporting this weekend (over a glass of 🍷 and many open tabs). One of the things I love most about building something new is the chance to design for intended outcomes — how to structure time and energy? What helps quiet chaos? Bring focus and creativity? Inspired by Ben Werdmuller’s recent callout about new Mac setups, I want to know about the ways you've built (or rebuilt) your way of working! Apps, workflows, rituals, name 'em 👇

A thing I’ve had to re-learn about building and creating is the importance of boredom in the way I think. I know that some people thrive when moving from thing to thing to thing at high speed, but I need time to reflect and toss ideas around in my head without an imposing deadline: the freedom to be creative without consequence.

The best way I’ve found to do that is to walk.

The work I’m proudest of was done in a context where I could walk for hours on end. When I was building Elgg, I would set off around Oxford, sometimes literally walking from one end of the city to the other and back again. When I was building Known and working for Matter, I roamed the east bay, sometimes walking from Berkeley to the tip of Oakland, or up through Tilden Park. I generally didn’t listen to music or audiobooks; I was alone with my thoughts and the sounds of the city. It helped me to figure out my priorities and consider what I was going to do next. When I came up with something new, it was more often than not in the midst of one of those walks.

When you’re deep into building something that’s your own, and that’s the entirety of what you’re doing (i.e., you don’t have another day job), you have the ability to structure your time however you’d like. Aside from the possible guilt of not working a traditional office day, there’s no reason to do that. Particularly at the beginning stages, I found that using the morning as unstructured reflective time led to better, more creative decision-making.

Again, this is me: everyone is different, and your mileage may vary. I do best when I have a lot of unstructured time; for some people, more structure is necessary. I think the key is to figure out what makes you happy and less stressed, and to get out from behind a screen. But also, walking really does boost creativity, so there’s that.

I recognize there’s a certain privilege inherent here: not everyone lives somewhere walkable, and not everyone feels safe when they’re walking out in the world. The (somewhat) good news is that indoor walking works just as well, if you can afford a low-end treadmill.

So what happens when you get back from a walk with a head full of ideas?

It’s probably no surprise that my other creativity hack is to journal: I want to get those unstructured thoughts, particularly the “what ifs” and “I wishes”, out on the page, together with the most important question, which is “why”. Writing long-form in this way puts me into a more contemplative state, much the same way that writing a blog post like this one helps me refine how I think about a topic. Putting a narrative arc to the thought gives it context and helps me refine what’s actually useful.

The through line here is an embrace of structurelessness; in part that’s just part of my personality, but in part it’s an avoidance of adhering to someone else’s template. If I’m writing items on a to-do list straight away, I’m subject to the design decisions of the to-do list software’s author. If I’m filling in a business model canvas, I’m thinking about the world in the way the canvas authors want me to. I can, and should, do all those things, but I always want to start with a blank page first. A template is someone else’s; a blank page is mine.

Nobody gets to see those thoughts until I’ve gone over them again and turned them into a written prototype. In the same way that authors should never show someone else their first draft, letting someone into an idea too early can deflate it with early criticism. That isn’t to say that understanding your hypotheses and doing research to validate them isn’t important — but I’ve found that I need to keep up the emotional momentum behind an idea if I’m going to see it through, and to do that, I need to keep the illusion that it’s a really good idea just long enough to give it shape.

Of course, when it has shape, I try to get all the expert feedback I can. Everyone needs an editor, and asking the right questions early and learning fast is an obvious accelerant.

So I guess my creative process boils down to:

• Embrace boredom and unstructured, open space to think creatively
• Capture those creative thoughts in an untemplated way, through narrative writing
• Identify my hypotheses and figure out what needs to be researched to back up the idea
• Ask experts and do that research as needed in order to create a second, more validated draft
• Get holistic feedback from trusted collaborators on that second draft
• Iterate 1-2 times
• Build the smallest, fastest thing I can based on the idea

There are no particular apps involved and no special frameworks. Really, it’s just about giving myself some space to be creative. And maybe that’s the only advice I can give to anyone building something new: give yourself space.

This post is part of February’s IndieWeb Carnival, in which Manuel Moreale prompts us to think about the various facets of digital relationships.

Our relationship to digital technology has been through a few different phases.

One: the census

In the first, computers were the realm of government and big business: vast databases that might be about us, but that we could never own or interrogate ourselves. Companies like IBM manufactured room-sized (and then cabinet-sized) machines that took a team of specialized technicians to operate. They were rare and a symbol of top-down power.

Punch cards were invented in the 1880s, and were machine-sortable even then, although not by anything we would recognize as a computer today. In the 1930s, a company called Dehomag, which was a 90%-owned subsidiary of IBM, used its punch card census technology to help the German Nazi party ethnically identify and sort the population. (Thomas Watson, IBM’s CEO at the time, even came to Germany to oversee the operation.)

The first general-purpose digital computer, ENIAC, was first put to use to determine the feasibility of the H bomb. Other mainframe computers were used by the US Navy for codebreaking, and by the US census bureau. By the sixties and seventies, though, they were commonplace in larger corporate offices and in universities for non-military, non-governmental applications.

Two: the desk

Personal computers decentralized computing power and put it in everybody’s hands. There was no overarching, always-on communications network for them to connect to, so every computer had its own copy of software that ran locally on it. There was no phoning home; no surveillance of our data; there were no ad-supported models. If you were lucky enough to have the not-insignificant sum of money needed to buy a computer, you could have one in your home. If you were lucky enough to have money left over for software, you could even do things with it.

The government and large institutions didn’t have a monopoly on computing power; theoretically, anyone could have it. Anyone could write a program, too, and (if you had yet more money to buy a modem) distribute it on bulletin board systems and online services. Your hardware was yours; your software was yours; once you’d paid your money, your relationship with the vendor was over.

For a while, you had a few options to connect with other people:

• Prodigy, an online service operated as a joint venture between CBS, IBM, and Sears
• CompuServe, which was owned and run by H&R Block
• America Online, which was originally a way for Atari 2600 owners to download new games and store high scores
• Independent bulletin boards, which were usually a single computer connected to a handful of direct phone lines for modems to connect to, run by an enthusiast

(My first after-school job was as a BBS system operator for Daily Information, a local information and classifieds sheet in my hometown.)

In 1992, in addition to bulletin board systems and online services, the internet was made commercially available. Whereas BBSes, AOL, etc were distinct walled gardens, any service that was connected to the internet could reach any other service. It changed everything. (In 1995, my BBS job expanded to running what became one of the first classifieds websites.)

But for a while, the decentralized, private nature of personal computing remained. For most private individuals, connecting to the internet was like visiting a PO box: you’d dial in, would upload and download any email you had pending, browse any websites you needed to, and then log off again. There was no way to constantly monitor people because internet users spent 23 hours of the day disconnected from the network.

Three: the cloud

Broadband, the iPhone, and wifi changed everything. Before the advent of broadband, most people needed to dial in to go online using their phone line. Before the iPhone, cell connections weren’t metered for data, and there was very little bandwidth to go around. Before wifi, a computer needed to physically be connected with a cable to go online.

With broadband and wifi, computers could be connected to the internet 24/7. With the iPhone, everyone had a computer in their pocket, that was permanently connected and could be constantly sending data back to online services — including your location and who was in your address book.

It was incredibly convenient and changed the world in hundreds of ways. The web in particular is a modern marvel; the iPhone is a feat of design and engineering. But what we lost was the decentralized self-ownership of our digital worlds. More than that, we lost an ability to be private that we’d had since the beginning of human civilization. It used to be that nobody needed to know where you were or what you were thinking about; that fundamental truth has gone the way of the dinosaur.

Almost immediately, our relationship to software changed in a few key ways:

• We could access all of our data from anywhere, on any device.
• Instead of buying a software package once, we were asked to subscribe to it.
• Instead of downloading or installing software, the main bulk of it could be run in a server farm somewhere.
• Every facet of our data was stored in one of these server farms.
• More data was produced about us as we used our devices — or even as we walked through our cities, shopped at stores, and met with other people — than we created intentionally ourselves.

While computing became infinitely easier to use and the internet became a force that changed global society in ways that I still believe are a net positive, surveilling us also became infinitely easier. Companies wanted to know exactly what we were likely to buy; politicians wanted to know how we might vote; law enforcement wanted to know if we were dangerous. All paid online services to build profiles about us that could be used to sell advertising, could be mined by the right buyer, and could even be used to influence elections.

Four: the farm

Our relationship is now changing again.

Whereas in the cloud era we were surveilled in order to profile us, our data is now being gathered for another set of reasons. We’re used to online services ingesting our words and actions in order to predict our behaviors and influence us in certain directions. We’re used to Target, for example, wanting to know if we’re pregnant so they can be the first to sell us baby gear. We’re not used to those services ingesting our words and actions in order to learn how to be us.

In our new relationship, software isn’t just set up to surveil us to report on us; it’s also set up to be able to do our work. GitHub Copilot learns from software we write so that it can write software automatically. Midjourney builds stunning illustrations and near-photorealistic images. Facebook is learning from the text and photos we upload so it can create its own text and realistic imagery (unlike many models, from data it actually has the license to). Far more than us being profiled, our modes of human expression are now being farmed for the benefit of people who hope to no longer have to hire us for our unique skills.

In the first era, technology was here to catalogue us.

In the second, it was here to empower us.

In the third, it was here to observe us.

In the fourth, it is here to replace us.

We had a very brief window, somewhere between the inception of the homebrew computer club and the introduction of the iPhone, where digital technology heralded distributed empowerment. Even then, empowerment was hardly evenly distributed, and any return to decentralization must be far more equitable than it ever was. But we find ourselves in a world where our true relationship is with power.

Of course, it’s a matter of degrees, and everything is a spectrum: there are plenty of services that don’tuse your data to train generative AI models, and there are plenty that don’t surveil you at all. There are also lots of applications and organizations that are actively designed to protect us from being watched and subjugated. New regulations are being proposed all the time that would guarantee our right to privacy and our right to not be included in training data.

Those might seem like technical decisions, but they’re really about preserving our ownership and autonomy, and returning those things to us when they’ve already been lost. They’re human, democratic decisions that seek to enforce a relationship where we’re in charge. They’re becoming more and more important every day.

Tantek Çelik has posted a lovely encapsulation of the indieweb:

The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of people, a network of networks of people, connected peer-to-peer in human-scale groups, communities of locality and affinity.

This complements the more technical description on the indieweb homepage:

The IndieWeb is a community of independent and personal websites connected by open standards, based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

I first came across the indieweb movement when I’d just moved to California. Tantek, Kevin Marks, Aaron Parecki, Amber Case, and a band of independent developers and designers were actively working to helping people own their own websites again, at a time when a lot of people were questioning why you wouldn’t just post on Twitter and Facebook. They gathered at IndieWebCamps in Portland, and at Homebrew Website Camp in San Francisco.

One could look at the movement as kind of a throwback to the very early web, which was a tapestry of wildly different sites and ideas, at a time when everybody’s online communications were templated through web services owned by a handful of billion dollar corporations. I’d prefer to think of it as a manifesto for diversity of communications, the freedom to share your knowledge and lived experiences on your own terms, and maintaining the independence of freedom of expression from business interests.

A decade and change later and the web landscape looks very different. It’s now clear to just about everyone that it’s harmful for all of our information to be filtered through a handful of services. From the Cambridge Analytica scandal through Facebook’s culpability in the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, it’s clear that allowing private businesses to own and control most of the ways we learn about the world around us is dangerous. And the examples keep piling up, story after story after story.

While these events have highlighted the dangers, the indieweb community has been highlighting the possibilities. The movement itself has grown from strength to strength: IndieWebCamps and Homebrew Website Clubs are now held all over the world. I’ve never made it to one of the European events – to my shame, it’s been years since I’ve even been able to make it to a US event – but the community is thriving and the outcomes have been productive.

Even before the advent of the fediverse, the indieweb community had built tools to allow websites to connect to each other as a kind of independent, decentralized social web. Webmention, in conjunction with lightweight microformats that extended HTML to provide semantic hints about the purpose of content on a website, allowed anyone to reply to any website article using a post on their own site – not just that, but they could RSVP to events, send a “like”, reshare it, or use verbs that don’t have analogies in the traditional social networks. The community also created micropub, a simple API that makes it easy to build tools to help people publish to their websites, and a handful of other technologies that are becoming more and more commonplace.

In the wake of the decline of Twitter, Google’s turn towards an AI-driven erosion of the web, and a splintering of social media, many publishers have realized that they need to build stronger, more direct relationships with their communities, and that they can’t trust social media companies to be the center of gravity of their brands and networks. For them, owning their own website has regained its importance, together with building unique experiences that help differentiate them, and allow them to publish stories on their own terms. These are truly indieweb principles, and serve as validation (if validation were needed) of the indieweb movement’s foundational assumptions.

But ultimately it’s not about business, or technology, or any one technique or facet of website-building. As Tantek says, it’s about building a social internet of people: a human network of gloriously diverse lived experiences, creative modes of expression, community affinities, and personalities. The internet has always been made of people, but it has not always been people-first. The indieweb reminds us that humanity is the most important thing, and that nobody should own our ability to connect, form relationships, express ourselves, be creative, learn from each other, and embrace our differences and similarities.

I’m deeply glad it exists.

Also posted on IndieNews

Given all the talk lately of Threads, Mastodon, and ways that people can publish on their own sites, I thought it might be worth revisiting what the fediverse actually is — and why an organization might want to integrate with it.

My focus is on media organizations, but remember that just about every company is, in some sense, a media organization: newsrooms, for sure, but also marketing organizations, engineering teams hoping to hire great talent, non-profits that need to spread their message and make an impact, creatives who want to promote their work, and so on.

Here’s the summary: the fediverse allows media organizations to directly own their relationships with their audiences in a way that they’ve previously only been able to approximate with email newsletters. It gives them full, deep analytics about what their audiences care about in a way that can’t be achieved with newsletters or news aggregators, allows publishers to reach them directly, and will grow to a potential audience of at least 172 million people by the end of the year.

How did I come to those conclusions? I’ll break it down.

Really simple syndication

It all started with syndication feeds. The word “syndication” here is actually misleading: they’re a way to subscribe to the content put out by a publisher, such that if you subscribe to a publisher’s feed in your feed reader, you will receive every article they publish in your reader.

You already know about RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which is one open format for feeds, used by readers like Feedly and Reeder. RSS is also what powers podcasts behind the scenes.

RSS isn’t the only kind of syndication feed, however. For example, if you’re on a Mac or an iPhone, you might use Apple News, which is a feed reader that’s been optimized for a curated set of news publishers. Its underlying technology is not a million miles away from an RSS reader.

Each reader application performs the following steps:

1. Load the feeds for all the publishers a user has subscribed to, directly from the publishers’ websites
2. Check for any new articles in each of the feeds that the user hasn’t seen before
3. Place these articles in an inbox for the user to read

A feed reader is a one-directional broadcast relationship. Once you subscribe to a feed, you will receive newly-published articles from that publisher. What you can’t do is reply to those articles, and there’s also no standard way to re-share them. Syndication feeds are for reading only: you receive articles from the publisher but have no way of sending anything back to them.

It’s worth adding that I’m using “articles” here as a shorthand: feeds can contain any kind of content. A podcast is just a syndication feed that happens to contain audio; a podcast player is a feed reader optimized to play audio. It’s also perfectly possible for a feed to contain video or even interactive applications. It just so happens that most feeds are text and audio, but they don’t have to be that way.

While curated apps like Apple News do let publishers know how many people are reading their content (which is often multiples of the number of people who read the publisher’s website directly), this is almost impossible to achieve with RSS. In most cases, if a publisher is producing a feed, they have no idea how many people are subscribed to it — let alone who they are, what else they’re interested in, and who else they’re subscribed to.

Email newsletters

Publishers don’t know who is subscribing to their RSS feeds, or how effective those feeds are. Meanwhile, while they try and reach their audiences via social media, companies like Meta have long since been intermediating between publishers and their followers, often charging publishers to be seen by more of the people who already opted in to following them.

Increasingly, the response has been to establish email newsletters:

• Publishers can be reasonably sure that emails will be received by readers
• They can change email providers without losing email subscriptions
• Email open rates can usually be measured
• Email subscribers are more likely to donate or become paid subscribers

It’s considered to be a direct relationship because email providers don’t intermediate. The publisher receives the subscriber’s email details, and the reader knows they’ll receive all of a publisher’s emails.

However, publishers really only know three things about email subscribers:

1. Their email address
2. Whether they open their mail
3. Whether they click on anything in their mail

In particular, they don’t know who those people are, what they’re interested in, and who else they’re subscribed to. Often they’ll run an annual survey to get a stronger sense of that information — primarily so they can figure out how to serve that audience with content tailored for them, but also so they can figure out if they’re reaching a diverse enough audience, and so on. However, publishers are not likely to get any other information about them, save for an occasional email reply from around 2% of the most-engaged subscribers.

What’s different on the fediverse

The fediverse is a decentralized social layer for the whole web. One way to think of it is if the entire web was a social network, with profiles, content, and actions on that content.

It’s the best of the worlds I’ve discussed in the following ways:

• Publishers know who is subscribing to their content
• Everyone has a profile, where their other subscriptions can be traversed, so publishers can understand what their readers are interested in
• It’s incredibly easy for a reader to respond to, or interact with, content, making their opinions and preferences known
• All of the above happens in a direct, non-intermediated way: content is published on the publisher’s website, and it is subscribed to directly and received by the reader on publication (at least, most of the time; more on this in a moment)

Like pure syndication, the fediverse is essentially based on feeds. Here, rather than just publishers having a feed, everyone gets one.

Not everyone wants to publish articles of their own, but you possibly might want to “like” or re-share something that someone else published. When feeds contain actions as well as content, we call them activity streams. “Ben Werdmuller liked Evan Prodromou’s article” is an example of an activity.

In the above example, it’s not particularly useful for me to like Evan’s article if he doesn’t get to know about it. So in the fediverse, each reader can receive other peoples’ actions to its inbox, even if the user hasn’t subscribed to them. Evan might not subscribe to me, but if I click to “like” one of his articles, my reader will send that activity to his inbox, and he’ll be notified.

There is, of course, much more to it technically behind the scenes. But at its core, the fediverse really is just feeds of content and activities, with a little bit of magic to let people know when people are talking about them. (You might have heard of ActivityPub: this is the protocol used to enable this magic, as well as to help readers find a publisher’s feed to begin with.)

Remember that syndication feeds have a uni-directional relationship: the publisher creates content and the user subscribes and reads. In contrast, fediverse feeds have a bi-directional relationship: the publisher creates content and the user can subscribe, read, like, re-share, quote, and more.

Every fediverse application is just a feed reader that lets you respond to content, perform activities like “liking” and “re-sharing” it, and publish your own.

This means that, yes, Mastodon is, at its core, a feed reader. Threads will also be a feed reader once it fully supports ActivityPub. It just so happens that most of these feeds tend to contain short Twitter-style content right now, but they don’t have to. They can contain articles, audio, video, interactive content — all the same content possibilities as syndication feeds, as well as a range of activities on that content.

Importantly for media companies, whereas a publisher doesn’t really know who might be subscribing to their syndication feeds, a publisher knows exactly who is subscribing to their fediverse feeds. Subscriptions are just another activity that they’re notified about — which allows them to measure growth over time, and even reach out to their individual subscribers directly if they want. Each subscriber has a profile that lists who else they’re following, allowing their interests to be measured in aggregate.

Okay, but who’s going to use it?

The fediverse does not provide identity portability. That is to say, if you have an account on Threads and you want to move to Mastodon, there’s no standard way to move from one to the other. While any application on the fediverse allows users to interact with content produced by any other application on the fediverse, there’s nothing to prevent users from being locked in to any one of these applications. If I build a following on Threads, I can’t move that following to Mastodon.

While that might seem like a bug, it’s a characteristic that can help platforms like Threads feel comfortable supporting the fediverse. It allows their users to read and interact with an expanding world of content, but it’s not an offramp for those users to more easily leave the platform. Finally, although content can be consumed using any fediverse reader, a lot of it will look better on the platform it originated from, so platforms may gain users who discover them through reshared fediverse content.

So the benefits for platforms are:

• Platforms have a world of content and users they can plug into from day one, so they solve the cold start problem where a platform seems empty before lots of people have joined
• Users are incentivized to stay on a platform once they’ve joined it
• Users can discover new platforms through content that’s been shared on the fediverse

The result should be that more platforms support the fediverse over time. Currently the biggest platforms are Mastodon, at 12 million users across many installations across the web. Over the next year it will be joined by Threads, who has over 160 million users. Unlike many of the decentralized social web efforts in the past, the fediverse will have hundreds of millions of users as a baseline.

Publishers who are there and ready when Threads fully plugs in its fediverse connectivity will be at a distinct advantage.

About those direct connections

I mentioned that the fediverse wasn’t intermediated: a publisher can be reasonably sure that a reader will receive its content.

While a publisher’s website can be plugged into the fediverse so that a reader can subscribe directly, whether that reader actually gets to see the content does depend on the platform they’re is using. In particular, it’s reasonable to assume that Threads, which is owned by Meta, is more likely to create intermediation between the publisher and the reader. Meta has form for this: Facebook Page owners famously need to pay to promote posts if they want to be sure their communities can see them. It’s not clear how Threads will monetize, but it’s possible that this sort of content promotion will be part of its strategy.

The good news is that the underlying protocols are open and anybody can build something new on top of them. While Mastodon and Threads are both optimized for short-form content, other platforms already exist: Pixelfed is optimized for photographs, for example, and Lemmy for Reddit-style conversations. It’s highly likely that we’ll see fediverse software that works more closely to Apple News or a traditional feed reader, optimized for longer-form web content. Meta isn’t the only game in town and can’t dictate how the wider fediverse network functions.

How hard is it for a publisher to plug in?

The effort required to connect a website to the fediverse is very low. Publishers that use WordPress as their underlying CMS can add an existing ActivityPub plugin that is also available to hosted WordPress clients. Ghost has indicated that it’s exploring integrating with ActivityPub. Bridgy Fed also helps connects websites to the fediverse. (Known, which my website is built on, has contracted to build ActivityPub support in the first few months of this year.)

This support will only increase over the next year, particularly as Threads gets closer to releasing its full fediverse compatibility. It’ll only become easier and easier to plug in.

So should I, as a publisher, experiment with it?

Yes.

Don’t throw all your eggs into this basket, but the barrier to experimentation is so low, and the potential upside is so high, that it’s absolutely worth your time to experiment.

So should I, as a software developer, experiment with it?

Also yes. As you’ve read, there are lots of opportunities for use cases on the fediverse that haven’t quite been seen to fruition yet. There is a lot of potential here for both new and existing teams to create tools that provide a lot of value to an already-established and growing audience.

More libraries and APIs are becoming available every day to help you build fediverse compatibility. The barrier to entry is only getting lower — so the time to get established is now.