Werd I/O

I’m in Austin for The 19th’s Future of the Workforce event at the South Congress Hotel tomorrow. It’s free to attend in person, and I’d love to see you there! And if you’re further afield, you can still register to watch online.

From the event page:

Are the shifting norms of the last few years here to stay — or will large businesses continue to push for a return to pre-pandemic “normal?” How can business leaders balance economic growth and emerging technologies with the rights and needs of workers? The 19th is gathering business and policy leaders who think deeply about labor to discuss the future of the workforce.

It’s going to be a great event. Please join us.

I’m on an early flight to Austin for a really interesting work week: meeting The 19th’s board, attending and supporting our Future of the Workforce event, working on strategy with the leadership team, and building process with the product team. I’m hopeful that I’ll get to eat some tacos and spend some time walking around in between, but it’s a pretty full-on agenda.

It’s the first time I’ve left my son, and I’m not feeling great about that. I know he’s doing fine and will be well looked-after, but I can’t help but miss and worry about him.

I don’t like flying, and this is a really uncomfortable flight. I wish we had high speed rail. There are people who brag about being in the air all the time and that they have status; I think we’re long past the point where this is something to be proud of. I feel a bit ashamed whenever I board a plane, and honestly, I kind of think I should.

As Evan says, this is happening. The fediverse is growing much faster than any centralized social network, and you’re going to want to be involved.

I’ve been trying to explain what the fediverse actually is in a few different contexts. One thing that’s revealed to me is that there’s a whole generation of internet users whose entire model of how things work is based on the centralized, VC-funded service model. For them, a service is tied to a domain name and run by a company, and that’s it - even though they likely use email every day. It’s a surprising (to me) way that the prevailing business models for the web have changed the conversation.

So, here’s my attempt to explain it - and why you need to take part.

TLDR version

Everyone’s joining a new social network that is run as a commons instead of as a private company. Nobody can buy it or own it. And it’s growing very quickly.

Sign up using any server that fits with your own location and values and you can talk to anyone across the network, regardless of which server they use.

If you want, grab an app for your mobile device, and you’re good to go.

What is the fediverse?

Like Twitter or Facebook, the fediverse is a way to connect with people and have conversations with them on the web. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, nobody owns it, and it doesn’t have any central point. It’s like the web itself: anyone can run a website using any hosting provider, and then anyone with a web browser can access it. But instead of being a collection of pages, it’s conversations. Anyone can have a conversation using any fediverse provider, and anyone with fediverse software can access it and take part.

That also means there’s no business model; no ads; and no billionaire acquirer who can ruin it. It’s communally owned and maintained as a commons, like the web. (Technically it works using an open protocol called ActivityPub, but unless you’re a developer you don’t need to worry about that.)

Lots of different software can access the fediverse. The most popular right now is something called Mastodon.

How can I take part?

To be a part of the fediverse, you need to make an account and a profile on any fediverse-compatible service.

Lots of people run Mastodon instances. You can converse with anyone on the fediverse using them, but each one has its own rules and policies about what you can post if you create a fediverse account using it. For example, newsie.social is for people in journalism; mastodon.lol describes itself as “a community friendly towards anti-fascists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, hackers, and the like.” You’re likely to be booted off if you have conversations that go against the ethos of the server.

Anyone can install their own - either with their own technical server knowledge or using a hosting provider like masto.host. I maintain werd.social just for me. A lot of news organizations - and even the German government - run their own closed sites. When an account is hosted on a closed site for an organization, you can be sure that the user really is a member of that organization; it’s like verification on Twitter, back when verification meant something, but any organization can do it.

It’s all free, but it’s always a good idea to contribute to the instance’s server costs if you can. After all, there aren’t any venture capitalists with deep pockets, people buying ads, or surveillance capitalism business models paying for it all.

How can I find my friends?

If you’re moving from Twitter, it’s a good idea to stick your fediverse username in your profile. Mine is @ben@werd.social. Then there are a few different tools that let you find your Twitter friends’ new Mastodon accounts:

Fedifinder will scrape your followed users, your followers, and your lists for fediverse handles, and then export them in a format that you can import straight into Mastodon. Debirdify also does the same thing. Twitodon needs both parties to actually be registered with Twitodon itself to work.

What about finding interesting conversations?

The fediverse doesn’t have universal search. At some point, this will probably change: this is one place where someone is likely to find an opening for a VC-funded service, for better or worse. For now, you can find topics you’re interested in through hashtags.

Mastodon also has the concept of the content warning (“CW”), which you can think of as a wrapper around posts. If you’re posting something that you think others might not want to read, you can wrap it in a CW. So when you search for conversations attached to a hashtag, you might see a lot of CWs. There’s an easy setting in Mastodon to automatically open content wrapped in these warnings - if you don’t have triggers for certain topics, it’s a no-brainer to turn this on.

So is this just like Twitter?

No. It’s its own space with its own norms and forms. It’s far more flexible than Twitter, but also more welcoming in some important ways: communities tend to be more inclusive and considerate around things like alternative text on images for the visually impaired. It certainly also has its problems.

It’s undeniably true that it’s got rougher edges. This is an open source, decentralized space, with software that’s largely been written by volunteers. That’s how the web and email both got started; the software, and community norms on the fediverse itself, will both evolve over time. The exciting thing is that we all get to get involved and help it grow and change.

Yesterday I sent a memo to all staff advising them on the situation at Twitter and how it pertains to their own security. I thought it might be useful to share a version of this information with you, too.

Twitter’s Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Privacy Officer, and Chief Compliance Officer all quit on Wednesday night. One can reasonably infer that the team at Twitter is being asked to do things that these people were not comfortable with, and given their roles, it’s reasonable to consider Twitter to be insecure going forward.

At the same time, it’s still where a lot of people find community and reach. You might not want to leave it right now. Here, then, are some suggestions about how to stay safe while remaining on the platform.

Enable non-phone two-factor authentication. Twitter allows you to log in with two-factor auth. Using your phone number leaves you open to having that number leaked - or used for other purposes by the company - in the future. I always recommend using an authentication app. Authy is a good stand-alone app, but this functionality is also built into password managers like 1Password.

Remove your credit card number. If you’ve bought ads, remove your payment details from the system. We know that credit card numbers are stored insecurely on the platform.

Remove sensitive DMs. DMs on Twitter are not encrypted. They could be leaked or mined by the company for other purposes.

Use a password manager to generate your password. Don't try and use a password you've invented yourself. And don't share this password with any other system: it’s just for Twitter.

Use a canary email address, if you can. All Google-powered email addresses can have arbitrary labels added to them using a +. For example, the address ben+twitter@werd.io will still get to me - but if I use that label on my email address in my Twitter account, I'll know my account has been compromised when other entities start using it.

Post via the web or using a third-party app. We know that Twitter tracks very detailed location information from its app users. Web browsers keep you safe, so posting via the web does not carry the same risk.

Two service updates I’m interested in:

Substack has introduced a “bestseller” badge for its top-selling newsletters, as a sign of quality. Newsletters on Substack don’t need to have paid tiers, but this badge is only given out to newsletters that have a lot of paid subscribers. The implication is that non-paid newsletters will experience FOMO - and potentially a drop in new subscribers because they don’t have the badge - and try to climb the ladder. It’s the first time that Substack, to my knowledge, has tied quality visibly to revenue.

Twitter has started selling its blue “verified” badge for $8 a month, replacing the previous system that gave badges to notable individuals in order to protect them from impersonation and abuse. Twitter will also demote tweets from non-verified users, treating them like “email spam”, effectively meaning that you’ll need to pay a minimum of $96 a year to get reach on the platform. Again, this ties revenue to quality: the only people worth being heard, according to Twitter’s new leadership, are people with money. Notably, the feature is only available on iOS in the “US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK”, which fundamentally limits the global inclusivity, and therefore the value, of the platform. It’s an odd choice. Based on precedent from Musk, I expect it to be partially rolled-back on a whim, but it’s here for now.

The danger with both plans is that only people with money can be heard. A Substack newsletter by someone with no existing following is unlikely to make it into the bestsellers list; therefore, people who already have privilege and power will find it cemented by the platform. And while $96 might not seem like a lot of money from an upper middle class American perspective, for most people in the world it’s an unjustifiable cost. Without mitigations, we’re likely to find ourselves in a world where voices from vulnerable populations remain underheard or even suppressed.

That’s clearly a problem from an equity and inclusion standpoint - and therefore also in terms of reader experience. The narrower the context and demographics of the people who produce most visible content are, the more homogenous it becomes, and therefore the more boring. We all gain a lot by being exposed to people from contexts and backgrounds different to our own. Not only is building a platform that elevates diversity the right thing to do ethically, it builds a healthier community with more interesting conversations. It’s better all the way around.

I think we’ll see the two platforms diverge in their approaches. Substack will quickly figure out that it needs to elevate different voices to continue to grow: audience diversification is key to it. Twitter, meanwhile, will probably not figure this out in a way that it can act on, not because there isn’t a way for it to be acted on, but because it seems to have lost all semblance of acting on a coherent strategy or mindset under Musk. Substack has some real editorial ethics problems to contend with, but it seems to be adept at the fundamentals of community growth.

I also want to call out that Medium under Tony Stubblebine is figuring out these problems in a very thoughtful and transparent way. As Tony points out in the last link, the quality bar is not up for debate; the question is, who’s in consideration to find an audience to begin with.