Werd I/O

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.

I was tagged in a fairly critical SocialHub post about the Social Web Foundation launch announcement. I wasn’t in a position to add to the conversation then, but I’ve been thinking about it all week.

Before I dive further, a reminder: I am not an employee or founder of the Social Web Foundation. I am in touch with the founders and have been an unpaid advisor, but I can’t and don’t speak for it. This post is mine alone, and doesn’t necessarily reflect anyone else’s opinions or ideas. I also haven’t vetted or previewed it with anyone.

There are three main criticisms I’ve seen of the Social Web Foundation:

• Meta is a partner
• It’s called The Social Web Foundation but is focused on ActivityPub, ignoring AT Protocol, Nostr, and other decentralized social web protocols that are emerging elsewhere
• It’s focused on substantially growing the Fediverse, which is not something everyone wants

I believe they’re interrelated, and that these differences can be overcome.

Meta enters the chat

Perhaps the biggest red flag to critics is Meta’s presence as one of the SWF’s thirteen launch partners. Many consider it to be an extremely negative force on the web. Its presence is certainly divisive. I’ve been a critic of its Facebook product in particular since its inception: a company that imposes its centralized view of the world on the communications of its billions of users, and in the process has caused real harms.

Those harms include potential mental health and social media addiction effects in teenagers, failing to protect LGBTQ users, and more — up to and including enabling a genocide.

The last claim might seem outlandish, but it’s real. As Harvard Law School’s Systemic Justice Project pointed out:

Scholars, reporters, and United Nations investigators agree that the social media giant played a role in an explosion of ethnic conflict in 2017 that led to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands Rohingya Muslims in Northern Myanmar.

Given this, the argument goes, why would anyone — particularly an organization trying to build the future of the social web — even consider working with Meta? Doesn’t its presence as a partner taint the work of the Foundation?

As the writer, researcher, and community lead Erin Kissane has pointed out:

I think it’s unwise to assume that an organization that has demonstrably and continuously made antisocial and sometimes deadly choices on behalf of billions of human beings and allowed its products to be weaponized by covert state-level operations behind multiple genocides and hundreds (thousands? tens of thousands?) of smaller persecutions, all while ducking meaningful oversight, lying about what they do and know, and treating their core extraction machines as fait-accompli inevitabilities that mustn’t be governed except in patently ineffective ways will be a good citizen after adopting a new, interoperable technical structure.

These profoundly negative impacts are possible because it is one of the most prominent — potentially the most prominent — platform owner on the internet. Around four billion users use one of Meta’s products every month; that’s half all the humans on earth, or around 75% of all the people in the world aged 15 or older. Arguably no platform should ever be allowed to become this big or influential (can any government claim to have this level of reach or insight into this many people?). Still, at least for now, here it is.

For many people, Meta is the internet. This clearly doesn’t absolve aiding a genocide, throwing an election, or thwarting academic research, but it also makes Meta a platform owner that’s hard to ignore.

Meta sits in a position of influence over the social web. Threads, its fairly recent Twitter-like platform, is rolling out support for the ActivityPub standard that underlies the Fediverse, so it is poised to also be influential there. Once Threads supports the Fediverse bidirectionally, it will easily be the largest social platform on the network. It will consequently have an enormous amount of influence on how the network evolves, regardless of its participation in the Social Web Foundation.

What is a successful Fediverse?

Meta’s involvement and potential dominance inevitably raises the question: What kind of future do we want for the Fediverse? Whether we focus on technical interoperability or grassroots social activism, the answer to this question will shape how we approach growth, inclusivity, and the role of large corporations in the decentralized web.

If you see the Fediverse as a way to interoperate between social networks, such that a user on one platform can communicate with a user on another, you might welcome a large tech company supporting the standard (a bit like one might have welcomed a company to standards-based HTML a generation ago). If, on the other hand, you see the Fediverse as an antidote to technology corporations or a movement that is more about a collaborative grassroots movement than pure technical interoperability — a sort of work of activism — you might be quite alarmed.

These mindsets are analogous to Evan Prodromou’s Big Fedi / Small Fedi dichotomy, but I’d like to apply a slightly different lens.

If your model of the Fediverse is an interoperable standard that underpins all social networks:

• All parties should focus on a single technical standard in order ensure everyone can interoperate and the network can grow.
• The focus should be on onboarding, education, and developer experience.
• Growth is paramount. The goal is to bring the whole world in.
• Having the creator of the biggest social network join is an opportunity.
• The end state is likely a handful of very large social networks, followed by a significant long tail of small ones.

For ease of reference, let’s call this the growth Fediverse.

If your model of the Fediverse is a social movement intentionally set apart from corporate social media:

• A plurality of underlying protocols is allowable and maybe even desirable: the important thing is the support of grassroots communities outside the usual bounds of the tech industry.
• The focus should be on equity, community dynamics, relationships, and movement-building in service of community.
• Preserving the values of the existing community is paramount. The rest of the world can stay away; there’s no need for growth.
• The presence of the largest corporate social media vendor is inherently a threat.
• The end state is likely a collection of small, interoperable communities united by their desire for an alternative to “big tech”.

Let’s call this one the movement Fediverse.

Both models of the Fediverse clearly exist. I’m hardly the first to have discussed them, but the Social Web Foundation announcement has re-ignited the conversation.

Very clearly, the Foundation is closer to the first model than the second. As such, people who don’t care for that model have accused it of being an agent of oligarchy; of doing harm by partnering with Meta; of using the term “social web” while focusing solely on ActivityPub.

A false binary

The thing is, the lines between these two paths are blurry. It’s not necessarily an either-or. The priority for the first is growth of the network and a large, interoperable social web; the priority of the second is small, pro-social communities that exist outside of usual tech industry dynamics. Someone might well feel that the way to get to small, pro-social communities is as a by-product of interoperability, just as not everything on the web itself is corporate even though partners to the W3C body that defines web standards include Google and Amazon.

Some of the things that the movement Fediverse wants are intrinsically important to the growth Fediverse. You can’t grow a giant social network without caring about community safety, for example; over the two years since he acquired Twitter, Elon Musk has ably demonstrated that most users don’t want to stick around on a platform where they don’t feel safe. Community standards are therefore very important to any network that seeks to grow and retain users. Usability and accessibility are similarly vital: what use is a movement that is exclusionary to less-technical people, or, say, the visually-impaired? Any healthy network needs to support diverse voices and ensure that those authors are welcome. The list of shared values goes on.

But there are also undeniable differences. Hanging the needs of an anti-corporate social movement on a technology is a big ask. I’m not critical of the values of the people who do — I largely share them — but I don’t think you can reasonably expect everybody involved in a technology to have the same ideals.

Like any community, the movement Fediverse also has areas where it, too, could benefit from introspection and growth in order to live up to its own values. Some parts of the community have struggled with inclusivity, particularly when onboarding marginalized users who wished to discuss systemic injustice openly. As Marcia X recounted in Logic(s):

What took me aback regarding the fediverse is that my networks were mostly “leftists” and self-proclaimed radical thinkers regarding race, ableism, gender, patriarchy, sexuality, et cetera, and yet what I was being exposed to was a lot of naiveté or hostility for questioning whiteness as a basis for many people’s takes or approaches to these subject matters. And if I were to question or push back on their whiteness, I was often accused of being biased myself.

While many people in the movement are already working hard to address these issues, more can be done to ensure that all users feel safe, heard, and respected. In some cases, the movement Fediverse has fallen short when it comes to fully supporting the lived experiences of new users, especially those from marginalized groups. However, there is clear potential — and growing momentum — to improve this. By continuing to evolve and actively listen to new voices, the movement Fediverse can better embody the values of inclusivity and social justice that it stands for. But there is work to do.

In other words, it’s important to recognize that both groups have challenges to address. Each needs to continue working to ensure decisions are made inclusively, with an eye on the safety of users and the accessibility of communities. By recognizing these shared goals, there’s a real opportunity for mutual learning and growth.

Each has much to gain from each other. One doesn’t need to be a subscriber to the growth Fediverse to enjoy gains from user experience research, technology onboarding, and outreach conducted there. Similarly, one doesn’t need to subscribe to the ideals of the movement Fediverse to feel the benefit of their community dynamics and social goals. In fact, there may be a productive tension between the two that keeps each of their worst impulses in check. One might consider the movement Fediverse to be akin to a labor movement: a way for users to organize and advocate for stronger, safer, and more progressive community design. In turn, the growth Fediverse could be a check against becoming too insular and leaving the rest of the world out in the cold.

While the movement and growth Fediverse may have differing approaches, both share a commitment to user safety, inclusivity, and decentralization. The question is not whether these goals are shared, but how best to achieve them.

Moving forward

Just as unions create productive tensions in businesses that create better working conditions and higher productivity, I think the discussion between the movement Fediverse and the growth Fediverse has the potential to push the open social web further than might otherwise have been possible.

The checks and balances produced by an open debate between the two approaches are particularly useful when considering partners like Meta. The productive tension between these two visions could ensure that while larger platforms like Meta are held accountable, the values of grassroots communities — safety, inclusivity, and equity, for example — are not sacrificed in the pursuit of growth.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that Meta will dominate how the Social Web Foundation is run, but it’s also not a foregone conclusion that it won’t. The Social Web Foundation clearly states in its mission statement (emphasis mine):

A Fediverse that is controlled only by one company isn’t really a Fediverse at all. We think a productive, creative and healthy Fediverse needs multiple providers, none of whom dominate the space.

The goal is a multipolar federated social web. I think a large part of the solution is not to say this, but to show it: conduct meetings and make decisions with as much transparency as possible, so as to prove that Meta (and any other partner) is not dominant. By structurally providing as much sunlight as possible, allowing feedback and comment, and repeatedly demonstrating that this feedback is being considered and acted on where appropriate, both the potential harms and concerns from the movement Fediverse community can be reduced. Just as source code that is open to scrutiny is auditable and verifiable, decision-making process that are open to sunlight can be held accountable. Public meeting notes, decision documents, and so on, all help to support accountability.

In any event, the Social Web Foundation doesn’t need to be the foundation to cover all views of what the Fediverse should be. It’s a foundation that is going to try and do great work to expand the Fediverse. From its mission statement:

We believe that increased use of the Fediverse has the potential to make all of our online social experiences better, as well as to create lots of new opportunities for creation and self-expression. So we’re committed to growing the number of people using the Fediverse.

As Evan Prodromou said in that SocialHub thread abut people who don’t feel the Foundation represents them:

We want a united social web, using a single protocol for internetwork communication. I’d compare email, where proprietary LAN email protocols like Microsoft Exchange are gatewayed into the formal standard protocol SMTP. […] The SWF is not mandatory. People who want to do other things for the Fediverse should definitely do so. But I do want to extend the invitation for people who are interested to reach out.

This doesn’t have to be one size fits all. It’s worth considering what organizing more concretely for the movement Fediverse looks like, and how it might intersect and act as a check on the growth Fediverse.

It’s understandable that some in the movement Fediverse feel uncomfortable with large corporate platforms, particularly those with a history of past harms, joining the network. However, engaging with these platforms — rather than dismissing their involvement outright — may offer a unique opportunity to influence their practices and ensure they align with the values of the community. Constructive engagement with Meta and other large platforms could offer a unique opportunity for the movement Fediverse to influence how these entities engage with the broader social web, ensuring they uphold the values of safety, inclusivity, and equity.

Likewise, ignoring the concerns of the movement Fediverse is not wise: these are valid ideas rooted in real experiences. The tech industry carries real systemic inequalities that go all the way back to its origins in military funding. Addressing those inequities is a prerequisite to the web reaching its potential as a way for everyone in the world to connect and learn from each other. Companies like Meta, as I’ve explained at length above, have committed real harms as a byproduct of their priorities, business models, and funding partners. Grassroots communities that practice intentionality, activism, mutual aid, and radical equity have a lot to offer, and in many ways are models for how the world should be.

The movement Fediverse’s emphasis on mutual aid, radical equity, and intentionality offers invaluable lessons for how the larger Fediverse — and even corporate actors — could operate. Practices like community-driven moderation, transparent governance, and prioritizing marginalized voices could help ensure that the Fediverse grows without losing its soul.

Each group is approaching the problem in good faith. In the end, it’s up to all of us to ensure that the future of the web remains decentralized, inclusive, and safe. We must continue to engage, advocate, and, most importantly, listen to one another as we navigate and build this space together. The Fediverse is made of pluralities: of implementations, communities, vendors, and visions of the future. That’s at the heart of its beauty and its opportunity. The software interoperates; so should we.

I think there’s more work to be done to explore print as a modern product to support great writing and journalism. Lots has been said about its death — but comparatively little about its potential to live on in new forms.

I think print has a lot of life left in it: particularly if we overcome the idea of preserving the exact form it’s taken in the past and consider what a more modern, reconsidered print product might look like.

There’s a lot to be said for reading on paper. One of my more recent indulgences has been a daily subscription to The Financial Times, which on weekdays is a sober paper that reports the news fairly objectively. On weekends it’s a different beast: in particular it includes a magazine pull-out called How to Spend It that is apparently aimed at the worst people on earth and is generally indistinguishable from satire.

The Financial Times has been publishing since 1888, but some endeavors are much newer. Speaking of indistinguishable from satire, I subscribed to The Onion’s print edition, now it has been bought from its private equity owner. It’s been fun seeing it adopt similar membership strategies to other, more “serious” publications. Most exciting among those is its resumed print edition, which is an old idea given a new spin:

“I think for the same reason that 18-year-old kids are buying Taylor Swift on vinyl,” Jordan LaFlure, The Onion’s executive editor also told the Times, “we can introduce those same kids to the notion that a print publication is a much richer way to consume media.”

It’s not obvious to me that a similar strategy couldn’t work for other publications — or even as a digest of independent publications that work together. Would I buy a subscription to a paper edition of independent journalism across various topics? Absolutely I would, and I don’t think I’m alone. Think of it as a lo-fi RSS reader or a retro Apple News: articles I care about from around the web in a form factor that looks more like The New Yorker (or The Onion).

This product could take several forms. It could combine an algorithmic component — here are the writers I care about — with a more human-driven curatorial component from editors who want to highlight interesting journalism from sources the reader might not have encountered yet. Or it could be a purely editorial product with no algorithmic component: one size fits all, for every reader. Or you could subscribe to personalized editions with different human editors who get a cut of subscriptions for putting it all together. (A monthly tech periodical organized by Casey Newton or Molly White? Take my money.)

Publications like ProPublica (my current employer) and The 19th (which I’ve worked for previously) produce content that is more long-form journalism than breaking news, which is highly suitable for reading in a collected periodical. They also make their content freely available via a Creative Commons license, meaning that, technically, anyone could put this together. But it would clearly be better in partnership with newsrooms, with revenue and subscriber information flowing back to them in exchange for letting their journalism be included.

This isn’t a traditional startup: it’s hard for me to see how this product would enjoy the rapid growth or high valuations which justify venture investment. But it’s potentially a really interesting small business. If the numbers work out, it could also potentially be a fascinating add-on product for a service like Medium. There’s user and market research to be done here, but it’s possible that the decline of legacy print products does not necessarily mean that new print products won’t be successful.

The act of reading on paper feels different to sitting in front of a screen. Maybe I’m getting old, but I like sitting at the dining room table, leafing through print. It is an old school product that is a little like vinyl, but it also feels like I’m using my brain a bit differently. I’d love to do more of it. In a world where everything is digital, maybe a thoughtfully curated print product could be exactly what we need to slow down and engage more deeply. Or maybe not, but I think it would be cool.

I’d love to hear what you think. Am I alone in preferring an offline, analogue, tactile reading experience? Is there something here, or is the future of media entirely, irrevocably digital?