Werd I/O

I care a lot about the future of social media. It’s how many of us learn about the world and connect to each other; putting something so important in the hands of a handful of centralized corporations has repeatedly proven itself to be harmful. That’s why I’m so excited about the growth of federated and decentralized social media in the wake of Elon Musk’s disastrous acquisition of X. These platforms give more control to communities and individuals, reducing the risks of a central corporation manipulating the global conversation through algorithms or other means.

Although a lot of my focus has been on Fediverse platforms like Mastodon, from time to time I’ve mentioned that I’m really impressed with what the Bluesky team has achieved. The Bluesky platform is growing very quickly and seems to be the go-to choice for less-technical users like journalists, politicians, and so on who want to leave X. Bluesky offers valuable insights for anyone interested in the future of social media and how to build a vibrant alternative platform.

• Easy to understand onboarding: You register at the Bluesky site. To get you started, you can access “starter packs” of users to follow around various topics, so your feed is never empty. Here’s a starter pack of ProPublica journalists, for example, or people in tech from underrepresented communities.
• It feels alive: The posts are both timely and engaging. This is in contrast to Mastodon, where they’re purely chronologically-ordered, or Threads, where I was still seeing hopeful posts from before the election a week later (because they piggybacked on the Instagram algorithm, which is optimized for a different kind of content). News can actually break here — and so can memes. Find an old-timer and ask them about ALF: an inside joke that I absolutely refuse to log an explanation for here.
• Search works universally: It simply doesn’t on Mastodon, and I can only describe the search engine on Threads as weird.
• It’s moderated and facilitated: The site has easy-to-understand moderation. More than that, the team seems to have invested in the culture of the community they’re creating. Particularly in the beginning, they did a lot of community facilitation work that set the tone of the place. The result — so far — is a palpable sense of fun in contrast to a seriousness that pervades both Threads and Mastodon.

At the same time, Bluesky benefits from an open mindset, an open-source codebase, and a permissionless protocol that allows anyone to build tools on top of it. Critics will note that it isn’t really decentralized yet: there’s one dominant personal data store that basically everyone is attached to. In contrast to Mastodon’s model of co-operative communities anchored by a non-profit, Bluesky is a venture funded startup that grew out of Twitter.

Other critics complain about the involvement of Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter and therefore a lot of the problems that we’re all trying to get away from. I don’t think that’s a valid complaint: he famously both established Bluesky because he felt that Twitter should have been a protocol rather than a company, and both left the board and closed his account after becoming dissatisfied with the way Bluesky was run as a moderated community. He has since described X as “freedom technology” and put a ton of his own money behind Nostr. I’ve personally found Nostr to be a particularly toxic decentralized network dominated by Bitcoin-loving libertarians. This may indicate where his priorities lie.

I’ll be honest: on paper, I like Mastodon’s model better. It’s a community-driven effort paid for transparently by donations, much like any non-profit. (Much like any non-profit, the bulk of the funding comes from larger entities, but these are advertised on the Mastodon website alongside smaller-dollar donors.) I also like the co-operative model where smaller communities can dictate their own norms but interoperate with the larger network, which means that, for example, communities for trans posters or journalists can provide more directed support.

But this model faces a much harder road. It means, firstly, that there is less money to go around (Bluesky has raised $36M so far; Mastodon raised €326K in 2022), and secondly, that it’s harder to understand for a new user who wants to join in. It’s also clear that CEO Jay Graber has established a cohesive team that by all accounts is a lot of fun to work in. That counts for a lot and has helped to establish a healthy community.

Even with its hurdles, Mastodon’s model embodies a rare, user-first ethos, and I believe it’s worth supporting. In the end, the future of social media may depend on which values we choose to uphold.

I suspect both will continue to exist side by side. If I had to guess, Bluesky might become a mainstream platform for people who want something very close to pre-acquisition Twitter (which it is rapidly becoming right now), and the Fediverse might become the default glue between any social platform. For example, I post my book reading activity on Bookwyrm, which I find more useful in its own right than Goodreads. Other people can follow and interact with my book reviews there, or they can follow from other Fediverse-compatible platforms like Mastodon. (Right now, my followers are about half and half). Mastodon itself will allow niche supportive communities to grow, and of course, the fact that Threads is building Fediverse support means that any of its hundreds of millions of users will be able to interact with anyone on any other Fediverse platform.

Bluesky may evolve into a streamlined alternative to Twitter, while the Fediverse could serve as a decentralized, cross-platform connector among diverse networks. This dynamic offers a promising future for users, with both worlds learning from one another in a productive tension that has the potential to strengthen the open social web. That’s good news for everyone who values an open, user-driven future for social media.

I’ve noticed a few mistaken assumptions circulating on social media lately, so I thought it was worth clarifying a few things around privacy and surveillance.

Much of this depends on the idea of a threat model: a term that refers to the potential risks you face based on who you think might try to access your information and why.

Making a social media profile private does not make it safe from surveillance.

While it may make you safe from harassment by preventing drive-by comments from outside attackers, its content is still accessible by the platform owner.

For centralized services like Threads and X, this is hopefully obvious: the platform owner can see your content. However, it’s also true on other platforms. For example, the owner of your Mastodon instance could theoretically view your non-public posts.

If your main concern is harassment, setting your account to private can be a helpful step. If your threat model is a state actor or other large entity accessing your information and using it to incriminate you in some way, it does not prevent that from happening if the social media platform co-operates. For example, if X was compelled (or chose to) provide information about users posting about receiving reproductive healthcare, it could do that regardless of an account’s privacy settings. Threads or a Mastodon instance could similarly be subpoenaed for the same information.

Remember, even with privacy settings in place, your data belongs to the platform owner, not you. This is a critical point to understand in any digital space, regardless of ownership or whether it is centralized or decentralized. Even if a platform is decentralized, privacy still depends on who runs your instance, their stance on co-operating with outside requests for information, and the legal demands of the region they reside in.

If a platform chooses to co-operate, a warrant is not necessarily required for this information, and you may never find out that it has happened.

Decentralized/federated social networks are not free from surveillance.

These platforms are based on permissionless protocols, which allow anyone to join the network and interact without needing special permissions from anyone. This is great for accessibility but can also make it easier for bad actors to watch public posts.

In some ways, that makes them easier to surveil than centralized services. For an actor to surveil X or Threads, they would need to work with the platform owner. For an actor to do the same thing with Mastodon or Bluesky, they simply need to implement the protocol and go looking.

This is where making your account private can help, as long as the platform owner is not directly co-operating. (As described above, if a platform owner does co-operate, all data stored with them is potentially accessible.) If your account is public, your information can be freely indexed with no limitations.

Social media is not suitable for sensitive conversations.

As we’ve seen, privacy settings are helpful but limited. Given the limitations of privacy settings on social media, for truly sensitive conversations, it’s wise to switch to encrypted channels. You should also be mindful of what you share on any social platform, even with privacy settings enabled.

I always recommend Signal for sensitive conversations, and suggest using it to replace DMs entirely. You’re much more likely to use it for a sensitive conversation if you’re already using it for everyconversation. Unlike the alternatives, it’s open source and auditable, not owned by a large corporation, end-to-end encrypted, works on every platform, and is very easy to use.

You should also consider using Block Party, which is the most user-friendly tool I’ve seen for locking down your social media privacy settings.

In the end, privacy settings can only go so far. Using a platform like Signal can make a meaningful difference in safeguarding your most sensitive information. It’s a free, simple choice. But even more than that, it’s worth remembering: the point of social media is that someone is always watching. Act accordingly.

In case you’re searching for things to take your mind off the immediate horrors of the real world for, you know, some reason, here are ten:

‌3D Workers Island is a horror story told in the form of late-nineties screenshots from forums, websites, and a mysterious screensaver.

‌Practical Betterments is a collection of very small one-off actions that improve your life continuously. Examples include putting a spoon in every container that needs a spoon or cutting your toothbrush in half. Gently unhinged.

‌Someone remixed a cover of Raffi’s Bananaphone with Ms. Rachel and it’s kind of a bop?

‌David Gilliver creates amazing light paintings — one of his latest was just shortlisted in the British Photography Awards. This article says he uses a lightsaber while dressed all in black; the pinnacle of Sith expression.

‌Witches on roller skates! Sure, Halloween’s over. But witches on roller skates!

‌That time Sir Terry Pratchett modded Oblivion is “the untold story of how Discworld author Terry Pratchett became an unexpected contributor to the world of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” even as his Alzheimer’s progressed. The video is based on this older article.

‌After having a stroke at 25, Eilish Briscoe created a typeface to show the process of learning to write again — and has created a series of typographic exhibitions centered around the idea that “expression is a luxury”.

‌Halfbakery is “a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users”. For example, the beardaclava, which is “a carefully woven balaclava that hangs as a thick and luxurious seamless extension to your existing beard, perfectly matching its colour and hair quality”.

‌Godchecker is here for you if you need to check a god. “Our legendary mythology encyclopedia now includes nearly four thousand weird and wonderful Gods, Supreme Beings, Demons, Spirits and Fabulous Beasts from all over the world.” Comprehensive.

‌Wigmaker is a game about making wigs. And it’s open source!

Mathew Ingram has posted some smart reflections inspired by Netscape’s thirtieth birthday:

I don’t think an ancient serf seeing an illustrated manuscript for the first time in the 11th century would have been any more gobsmacked than I was at Netscape. Yes, there were things like America Online and Compuserve before that, and I had tried most of them. But I felt that they were like a children’s playground with 10-foot-high walls — you couldn’t even see the real internet from there, let alone actually interact with it.

That’s how I felt too. I was an active CompuServe user and had connected to a bunch of the local Bulletin Board Systems by the time I touched the internet; they felt both easy to grasp and constrained.

The web and I grew up together. 

Our family was friends with John Rose, the proprietor of a local listings and classifieds broadsheet called Daily Information, who was a tech enthusiast on the side. He’d turned the Daily Info office (a creaky Victorian house in North Oxford that smelled of photocopiers) into a part-time computer café for the local students to use. My parents were both students at the University while I was growing up, and so I’d hung out at Daily Info since I was small. We didn’t have much money, but because of John, I grew up around daisy-wheel typewriters, which became dedicated word-processors, which became Macs and IBM PCs.

John had become excited about the idea of BBSes (possible because he’d seen that I was excited about BBSes), so hired me as a fifteen year old to start one from him. We had a single line: one person at a time could dial in and look at apartments to rent or get today’s movie times. I’d come in after school for £5 an hour and update the listings and make sure the BBS was working.

A BBS is a walled garden. You dial in, you’re presented with a menu (perhaps painstakingly built in ANSI characters by a teenager after school), and you can select a very small number of things to do. You might chat in a forum, upload or download a few files, or read some information. There’s no expansiveness: you’re logging into a limited information system that’s designed for a small number of people to interact with, likely run from a single computer under a desk.

The internet, of course, is something else entirely.

While I was building text-only interfaces on the BBS computer in Daily Information’s storage closet, the consumer internet was emerging. It wasn’t long before it entered my living room. My mother was a telecoms analyst for Kagan World Media, where she wrote a newsletter about the emerging internet, computer and cellphone industries. (Here she is quoted discussing CD-ROM penetration in Time Magazine in 1995, or in Communications International announcing the decline of the pager). She’d get to try out new tech from time to time, so we briefly got a very early version of commercial dial-up internet at home; I wowed myself with the Carnegie Mellon Coke machine and the Trojan Room coffee pot (the first IoT device and first webcam respectively). I found the internet much harder to use than BBSes, but it was clear that the possibilities were enormous. Family friends would come to our house to see it.

In that first year of running the BBS, John installed a 128kbps ISDN line at the Daily Info office. I’d already played with the internet a little bit at home; here I had more time and bandwidth to try web browsers. I’d been using NCSA Mosaic, an early web browser built at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by student programmers Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen. When they graduated and started Netscape with Jim Clark, I eagerly downloaded every version: the one when it was still called Mosaic, before the University Illinois complained about use of the name; the version of Netscape with the boxy blue N in the top right that had a prominent role in the first Mission Impossible film; the one with the classy night sky logo.

It was a window into something entirely new. It was magic: a way for anyone to tell stories in practically any way they wanted. There was something about the slow speed which emphasized how special it was; a photograph that took a minute to download, coming into progressive focus or cascading down the screen line by line, felt like it was being delivered from half a world away. That’s been lost now that the web is instantaneous; it’s inarguably better now, of course, but it’s also easier to take it for granted.

With each Netscape release, I was also glued to every new feature that the web allowed. The HTML 2.0 release the next year introduced some major new ideas: a head and body tag, forms, inline images, a few basic styles. By the time I graduated high school, CSS had been invented, and people were beginning to add semantic details to the markup — but HTML 2.0 was enough to get started with.

John bought us some web space, and we created a website for Daily Info. The BBS was still functional, but now any number of people with an internet connection could view the listings simultaneously. It was very basic — this was 1995 — but it was possible for someone to see the listings and pay to add their own to the site on the same day, albeit with a real human dealing with it. The PageMaker files for the paper version of the sheet were still the primary source of truth, so ads were added there first, and then extracted back into files that I could convert into HTML and upload to the server.

I realized years later that the Daily Info website was online before either Craigslist or eBay, which are usually credited as being the first web classifieds sites. It was certainly more basic (built, as it was, by a teenager in a closet), although we progressively built more interactivity through Perl scripts. That fact speaks one of the most powerful things about the web: anyone can do it. You don’t need permission to publish. You just need to have something to say.

My excitement about the internet at Daily Info led to us finally getting the internet at home, through Demon, an early dial-up ISP that literally connected you to the internet with a static IP whenever you dialed in. It was the first to give every customer free web space, which felt like freedom: even though I’d been building at my after-school job for a while, having web space of my own meant I could do anything I wanted with it. I began to experiment with my own homepages, and narrate my life through a kind of online diary (we have a different word for that now). All the while, I continued to update the Daily Info website, which is still running today, with a very different codebase.

I thought I was going to be a writer; experimenting with the web meant that I chose to take the computer science route and learn more about building software. It radically changed the course of my life. I’m still a writer at heart — my love of technology stems from my desire to tell stories with it — but I’ve also been a developer, a startup founder, an advisor, and a CTO. So much of what I’ve been able to do, the people I’ve met, the things I’ve experienced, the work I’ve been privileged to take on, has been because of the magic of those first Netscape releases. I’m grateful for all of these influences — Netscape, John Rose, my mother, the permissionless experimentation that the web itself made possible. That spirit of magic and possibility is still what I’m chasing, and, despite the exploitation of big tech and the corrosive nature of unequal funding and the politics and everything else, is still what I think is magical about the web.

As regular readers know, I care a lot about growing the open social web: the rapidly-growing decentralized network of interoperable social platforms that includes Mastodon, Threads, Ghost, Flipboard, and many other platforms, both emerging and established. This is for a few reasons, including but not limited to:

Support for strong communities

• Support for niche interests and diversity: Smaller, independent communities can flourish without the pressure to appeal to mass audiences, leading to richer, more diverse conversations and interactions. But these aren’t silos: any member from one community can easily follow someone from any other.
• Community-driven moderation: Instead of top-down moderation, communities set their own rules and guidelines, which can lead to healthier and more relevant interactions. Community health isn’t subject to a single corporation’s policies and motivations.

Better developer experience

• An easier way to build social apps: Shared libraries, tools and protocols let developers get started faster. And developers no longer have to worry about their social products feeling empty: every new product can plug into communities of millions of people.
• Developer stability: Developers don’t need to ask anyone for permission to build on open social web protocols. Nobody will suddenly turn off the open social web and charge developers to access it: just like the web itself, it’s open and permissionless, forever. The result is a less risky playing field for new entrants.

Respect for users

• Decentralized governance: Users have more control over their data, identity, and interactions, without reliance on a single corporation or platform.
• Freedom from corporate algorithms: No algorithm-driven feeds prioritize ads or engagement-maximizing content, allowing for more authentic and community-driven interaction (and significantly less election interference, for example).
• Data ownership and portability: Users have greater control over their data and are not at the mercy of corporate interests. The open social web has the potential to connect every social platform, allowing anyone to be in conversation. And users can move from provider to provider at any time without losing their communities.
• Reduced surveillance: Federated systems are often less focused on advertising and surveillance-based business models, reducing targeted ads and invasive data collection.
• A more ethical ecosystem: It’s far easier for developers to build ethical apps that don’t hold user data hostage.

I’d love to be more involved in helping it grow. Here are some ways I’ve thought about doing that. As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

Acting as an advocate between publishers and vendors.

Status: I’m already doing this informally.

Open social web vendors like Mastodon seem to want to understand the needs of news publishers; there are already lots of advantages for news publishers who join the open social web. There’s some need for a go-between to help both groups understand each other.

Publishers need to prove that there’s return on investment on getting involved in any social platform. Mastodon in particular has some analytics-hostile features, including preventing linked websites from knowing where traffic is coming from, and stripping the utm tags that audience teams use to analyze traffic. There’s also no great analytics dashboard and little integration with professional social media tools.

Meanwhile, the open social web already has a highly engaged, intelligent, action-oriented community of early adopters who care about the world around them and are willing to back news publishers they think are doing good work. I’ve done work to prove this, and have found that publishers can easily get more meaningful engagement (subscriptions, donations) on the open social web than on all closed social networks combined. That’s a huge advantage.

But both groups need to collaborate — and in the case of publishers, need to want to collaborate. There’s certainly work to do here.

Providing tertiary services.

Status: I built ShareOpenly, but there’s much more work to do.

There are a lot of ways a service provider could add value to the open social web.

Automattic, the commercial company behind WordPress, got its start by providing anti-spam services through a tool called Akismet. Automattic itself is unfortunately not a wonderful example to point to at this moment in time, but the model stands: take an open source product and make it more useful through add-ons.

There’s absolutely the need for anti-spam and moderation services on the open social web (which are already provided by Independent Federated Trust And Safety, which is a group that deserves to be better-funded).

My tiny contribution so far is ShareOpenly, a site that provides “share to …” buttons for websites that are inclusive of Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms. A few sites, like my own blog and Tedium, include ShareOpenly links on posts, and it’s been used to share to hundreds of Mastodon instances. (I don’t track links shared at all, so don’t have stats about that.) But, of course, it could be a lot bigger.

I think there’s potential in anti-spam services in particular: unlike trust and safety, they can largely be automated, and there’s a proven model with Akismet.

Rebuilding Known to support the Fediverse — or contributing to an existing Fediverse platform.

Status: I just need more time.

My publishing platform Known could be rewritten to have a new, faster, cleaner architecture that is Fediverse-first.

It’s not clear to me what the sustainability model is here: how can I make sure I continue to have the time and resources to work on it? But I do think there’s a lot of potential for it to be useful — particularly for individual bloggers and smaller publishers — once it was built.

And of course, there are many other open source Fediverse platforms (like Mastodon) that always need extra hands. The question remains: how can I find the time and resources to be able to make those contributions?

(I’ve already tried: funding as a startup, consultancy services, donations, and a paid hosting service. If you’ve got other ideas, I’d love to hear them!)

An API engine for the Fediverse

Status: idea only, but validated with both experts and potential customers. Would need to be funded.

ActivityPub, the underlying protocol underneath the Fediverse, can sometimes be hard to implement. Unlike many web apps, you often need to set up asynchronous queues and process data in potentially expensive ways when both publishing and reading data from other instances.

So why not abstract all of that away? Here smaller communities and experimental developers can rely on shared infrastructure that handles inboxes and queues automatically behind a simple RESTful API with SDKs in every modern language. Rather than have to build out all that infrastructure to begin with, developers can start with the Fediverse API, saving them a bunch of time and allowing them to focus on their unique idea.

It would start out with a free tier, allowing experimentation, and then scale up to affordable, use-based billing.

Add-on services could provide the aforementioned anti-spam, and there could be plugins from services like IFTAS in order to provide real human moderation for communities that need it.

Suddenly, developers can build a fully Fediverse-compatible app in an afternoon instead of in weeks or months, and know that they don’t need to be responsible for maintaining its underlying ActivityPub infrastructure.

A professional open social network (Fediverse VIP)

Status: idea only, but validated with domain experts.

A first-class social network with top-tier UX and UI design, particularly around onboarding and discovery, built explicitly to be part of the Fediverse. The aim is to be the destination for anyone who wants to join the Fediverse for professional purposes — or if they simply don’t know what other instance to join.

There is full active moderation and trust and safety for all users. Videos are supported out of the box. Images all receive automatic alt text generation by default (or you can specify your own). There is a first-class app across all mobile platforms, and live search for events, TV shows, sports, and so on. Posts can easily be embedded on third-party sites.

You can break out long-form posts from shorter posts, allowing you to read stories from Ghost and other platforms that publish long-form text to the Fediverse.

If publishers and brands join Fediverse VIP, profiles of their employees can be fully branded and be associated with their domains. A paid tier offers full analytics (in contrast in particular to Mastodon, which offers almost none) and scheduled posts, as well as advanced trust and safety features for journalists and other users from sensitive organizations. Publishers can opt to syndicate full-content feeds into the Fediverse. This becomes the best, safest, most feature-supported and brand-safe way for publishers to share with the hundreds of millions of Fediverse users.

Finally, an enterprise concierge tier allows Fediverse VIP to be deeply customized and integrated with any website or tool, for example to run Fediverse-aware experiments on their own sites, do data research (free for accredited academic institutions and non-profit newsrooms), build new tools that work with Fediverse VIP, or use live feeds of content on TV or at other events.

What do you think?

Those are some ideas I have. But I’m curious: what do you think would be most effective? Is this even an important goal?

I’d love to hear what you think.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Mike McCue, CEO at Flipboard, and 404 Media co-founder (and former Motherboard Editor-in-Chief) Jason Koebler to talk about the future of media and its intersection with the future of the social web.

Savvy journalists at forward-thinking newsrooms are not letting this happen to them. Instead, they’re doing the work that arguably has been most critical all along: building direct connections with their audiences. It’s common to do this through email lists and subscription models, but the open social web offers a new, more equitable ecosystem for quality journalism to thrive.

Two people on the frontlines of this movement are Jason Koebler, a journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, and Ben Werdmuller, the senior director of technology at ProPublica. In this episode of Dot Social, the two talk about their fediverse experiences so far and why they’re hopeful for publishing in the future.

I loved being a part of this conversation. You can watch / listen over here.

I’m worried I’ve become cynical about technology as I’ve gotten older. But maybe technology really is worse.

Someone asked me the other day: “what [in media and technology] are you excited about right now?”

We both agreed that it was a surprisingly difficult question. And then came the follow-up:

“Do you think it’s just because we’re older now, or is the web really less exciting?”

And to be honest, I’m not sure.

I used to be so excited. If you sneak a glance at my high school yearbook, you’ll see that I wanted to be a journalist. Telling stories was my first love. It’s still where my brain feels the most comfortable. I love the flow state of writing more than doing just about anything else. That’s why I keep writing here, and why my long-term plan is to pivot from a technology career to one where I get to write all the time.

But in 1994 or so, I got distracted by the web: what an amazing medium for stories. Many of us share the experience of trying out a browser like NCSA Mosaic, discovering voices from all over the world, and getting stuck into writing our own HTML code without having to ask anyone for permission or buy a software license to get started. I vividly remember when we got the ability to add our own background images to web pages, for example. For a long time, I was a master at table-based layouts.

In the UK, where I grew up, you were effectively forced to pick your university degree at 16. You were required to choose three or four A-level subjects to focus on for your last two years of high school; then you had to apply to do a particular degree at each university, knowing that each degree had subject requirements. If you wanted to study English at university, you needed to have chosen the English A-level; good luck getting in if you hadn’t.

Specifically because I was distracted by the web, I put myself on the Computer Science track. Even then, I kept a Theater A-level, because I couldn’t imagine a world where there wasn’t some art and writing in my life. Most British universities correspondingly dismissed me for not being focused enough, but Edinburgh took me, so that’s where I went. Even while I was doing the degree, I built a satirical website that got over a million pageviews a day - in 2001. I blogged, of course, and although I haven’t kept a consistent platform or domain for all that time, I’ve been writing consistently on the web since 1998.

It was a platform I got to approach with a sense of play; a sense of storytelling; a sense of magical discovery as I met new people and learned from their creativity.

The web sits apart from the rest of technology; to me, it’s inherently more interesting. Silicon Valley’s origins (including the venture capital ecosystem) lie in defense technology. In contrast, the web was created in service of academic learning and mutual discovery, and both built and shared in a spirit of free and open access. Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and CERN did a wonderful thing by building a prototype and setting it free. As CERN points out on its page about the history of the web:

An essential point was that the web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system.

That ethos is how it succeeded; it’s why the web changed the world. And it’s why someone like me — over in Scotland, with no networks, wealth, or privilege to speak of — was able to break in and build something that got peoples’ attention. It’s also why I was interested to begin with. “The internet is people,” I used to say; more than protocols and pipes, the web was a fabric of interconnectedness that we were all building together. Even in the beginning, some people saw the web and thought, “this is a way I can make a lot of money.” For me, it was always a way to build community at scale.

And then Facebook — it always seems to be Facebook — became the first web company to reach a billion dollar valuation, in a year that happened to also see the launch of the iPhone. Building community at scale became finding customers at scale. There was a brief reprieve while global financial markets tumbled at the hands of terrible debt instruments that had been built on shaky foundations, and then the tech industry started investing in new startups in greater and greater numbers. Y Combinator, which had started a few years earlier, started investing in more and more startups, with higher and higher checks ($6,000 per founder for the first cohort, compared to half a million dollars per startup today). The number of billion-dollar-plus web startups grows by the hundreds every year.

The web I loved was swamped by a mindset that was closer to Wall Street. It’s been about the money ever since.

It’s so rare these days to find people who want to build that interconnectedness; who see it as a mission and a movement. People in tech talk excitedly about their total Compensation (which has earned its own shorthand acronym, TC), and less so what exciting thing they got to build, and what it allowed people to do. Maybe they’ll give you a line about what they allow for the enterprise or increasing some company’s bottom line, but it’s usually devoid of the humanist idealism that enchanted me about the early web.

I realized some time ago that the startups I personally founded in this era couldn’t have succeeded, because my focus was all wrong. I wanted to be paid to explore and build this wonderful platform, and was not laser focused on how to build investor value. I still want to be paid to build and explore, try and make new things happen, with a sense of play. That’s not, I’m afraid to say, how you build a venture-scale business.

So, let’s return to the question. Given this disillusionment, and my lack of alignment with what the modern tech industry expects of us, what am I excited about?

My cynicism has been tempered by the discovery that there are still movements out there that remind me of the web’s original promise — efforts that focus on reclaiming independence and fostering real community. Despite the commercialization of the web, these are still places where that original spirit of openness and community-building thrives.

The Indieweb is one. It’s an interdisciplinary group of people that advocates for everyone owning their own websites and publishing from their own domains. It’s happening! From the resurgence of personal blogs to new independent publications like Platformer and User Mag, many people see the value of owning their presence on the internet and their relationships with their community. Independence from sites like Facebook and Google is surging.

The other is the Fediverse: a way to have conversations on the web that isn’t owned by any single company or entity. The people who are building the Fediverse (through communities, platforms like Mastodon, cultural explorations) are expanding a patchwork of conversations through open protocols and collaborative exploration, just like the web itself was grown decades ago. It’s phenomenally exciting, with a rapidly-developing center of gravity that’s even drawing in some of the companies who previously were committed to siloed, walled-garden models. I haven’t been this enthused about momentum on the web for twenty years.

I was afraid I had become too cynical to find excitement in technology again. It wasn’t true.

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.