Ben Werdmuller

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 thought it would be fun to revisit Known, the open source publishing platform that powers my site.

How it works

Known allows a team or community to publish news on any topic to a single, searchable stream of content that’s easily accessible from any device. It is not a full CMS, and nor is it designed for independent publishers to sell subscriptions; instead, it’s optimized for publishing to a single feed.

Every Known site is a single feed of content that any number of users can publish to. You can have one user, as my site does; you could have thousands, if you wanted.

The stream can also be filtered by hashtag, author, or content type — so you can choose to only view content on a certain topic, or only photos, or some combination thereof.

Each stream, filtered or not, is shown as a standard web page by default. These can be themed, but it’s also easy to view different interfaces. RSS and JSON are available for every screen you can view as a web page, and it would be easy to add low bandwidth HTML, for example. (I once added an interface type that displayed everything as a Star Wars crawl. It got old fast.)

When you log in, you get a little menu bar that lets you publish different kinds of content. It’s a little bit like Tumblr’s bar, but here, every type of content is powered by a plugin. You can download new content types created by other people, or you can write your own. On my site I’ve created a kind of blog post called an “aside”, which I’ve decided to make a distinct content type.

Hit the button, and you can compose right on the page.

Known supports an idea called POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. You can elect to syndicate a post to a third-party site by enabling the toggle for that site below the compose window. In this illustration I have two example webhooks, but people have written plugins for Mastodon, etc. (In the beginning, Known had plugins for Twitter, Facebook, and so on, but all those APIs locked down over time. The promo image, which you can see above, includes Foursquare and Flickr as options, which is a clue about the era it originated from.)

You can also compose using any application that supports the Micropub standard. I tend to write all my blog posts in iA Writer.

Known supports Webmention, so when you publish a post that links to a site, that site will be notified. You can even use webmention to respond to someone else’s post elsewhere and have a conversation across the web.

It’s free and open source, and intentionally runs on the same LAMP stack as WordPress. Be warned though; as the screenshots suggest, it’s now a little old.

A little history

Known was originally called Idno. (“What does it stand for?” someone once asked me. “I d’no,” I replied. This is the level of humor you can generally expect from me.)

I wrote the first version of it when my mother was recovering from a double lung transplant: she was in need of community but absolutely didn’t want to discuss her condition on Facebook. I’d previously written Elgg, an older open source social networking platform, so I decided to think about what a social community platform might look like in the era of the mobile, ubiquitous web. What would it look like for a community to publish to a place where it could continue to own its own content, on its own domain? (It seems like a quaint exploration now, but remember that this was 2013.)

I became friends with the indieweb folks, and met Erin Richey at an IndieWebCamp. We decided to collaborate on the project. It was her idea to submit it to Matter, where we took part in the third accelerator class. Along the way, we did some focus group testing (Erin’s instigation) and chose Known as a permanent name.

It was a startup for a couple of years; there was a paid, hosted version; a Known-powered site even won an award for KQED. But it wasn’t the kind of thing that excited investors, and we weren’t making enough money for it to be sustainable. Ultimately, I allowed myself to be acquihired by Medium, which allowed us to pay Matter back, and we both settled into new jobs. The day before my first Medium paycheck, I spent my last five dollars on gas. (Erin and I welcomed our actual child — a human one — two years ago. So there’s a coda.)

But there are still users out there, myself included, and the open source project is still alive. It’s been slower over the last few years, because I haven’t had much time to devote to it. (The main thing I’ve been looking at is a command line exporter to allow people to more easily take their content into WordPress, as well as some experiments with ActivityPub.) But it remains a core part of the operating system that powers my identity online, and the identity of others.

Lately I’ve been thinking that there’s a place for this model of publishing. The internal architecture needs to be overhauled; the Bootstrap-driven default template needs to go; but I think there’s really something to the model of letting communities publish to a simple, queryable feed of content that syndicates out to the world.

Perhaps it’s finally time for Known 2, with an easy upgrade path from the original? If you’re intrigued by the idea — or if you’re a Known user — I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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?

More coverage of the Social Web Foundation has been rolling in today. (See my coverage of the announcement over here.)

The New Stack:

The fediverse has been a critical development in the open web over the past several years, since most of the social media landscape is dominated by centralized platforms — including Meta. If we want the open web to not just survive, but perhaps thrive again one day, we should all (hopefully including the father of the web) get behind the fediverse and support the Social Web Foundation.

WeDistribute:

“I wish I would’ve started it five years ago,” Evan explains in a call, “We’re seeing growth of ActivityPub in the commercial sector, we want to help guide that work, especially for devs that don’t know how to engage with the Fediverse, or the work that happens in private spaces. As we’re seeing a lot of growth, it’s important to help push that growth forward, we’re really filling in the crack no other organization is doing.”

TechCrunch:

Part of the group’s efforts will be focused on making the fediverse more user-friendly. Though Mastodon offers a service that functions much like Twitter/X, its decentralized nature — meaning there are multiple servers to choose from — makes getting started confusing and difficult for less technical users. Then, much like X, there’s the cold start problem of finding interesting people to follow.

The W3C:

We are happy to share that today the Social Web Foundation launched with a mission to help the fediverse to grow healthy, multi-polar, and financially viable. We are looking forward to continuing to support the work that [Evan Prodromou, Tom Coates, and Mallory Knodel] are planning in the new non-profit foundation for expanding and improving ActivityPub and the fediverse. We are delighted that to the Foundation will be becoming a W3C Member.

Vivaldi:

The Fediverse reminds us of the early days of the Web. We are competing against silos and corporate interests, using a W3C-based open standard and a distributed solution. It’s great that social networking companies are supporting the Fediverse, and Vivaldi is pleased to support Social Web Foundation so that we can once again have a town square free of algorithms and corporate control.

Independent Federated Trust & Safety:

ActivityPub has enabled thousands of platforms to communicate seamlessly across the Fediverse. This framework encourages a healthier online experience by supporting diversity of thought and content while redistributing governance back to the communities that can best serve their members. In an era where centralised networks dominate, the SWF’s commitment to open standards represents a renewed opportunity for a democratic and inclusive web.

And then Evan Prodromou wrote his own post on the launch:

Many people have ideas about what the Fediverse needs to be bigger, safer, and easier to use. But the solutions they propose fall between the cracks of any one implementer or service. We want the SWF to be the entity that takes on those jobs.

Not everyone agrees that the Fediverse needs to be available to more people. That’s OK. And not everyone is going to be comfortable with the mix of commercial and Open Source implementers plus civil society groups that form the support for the SWF. That’s OK too. Hopefully, our work will still benefit you.

Exciting times for the web.

I’m extraordinarily excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation, which has been created to promote and support the growth of the Fediverse: the interoperable social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol.

Users of services on the Fediverse can follow, share, and interact with each other, regardless of which service each one is using. The most famous Fediverse platform is Mastodon, but there are many more participants, including Threads, Flipboard, and Ghost.

From the announcement:

[…] Advocates of this increased platform choice say it will bring more individual control, more innovation, and a healthier social media experience. But there is work to do: journalism, activism, and the public square remain in a state of uncertain dissonance and privacy, safety and agency remain important concerns for anyone participating in a social network.

The Foundation’s founding members are Mallory Knodel, the former CTO of the Center for Democracy and Technology; Evan Prodromou, one of the creators of ActivityPub and its current editor (who just published the canonical book on the topic); and Tom Coates, a product designer and founder who was one of the earliest bloggers and has been involved in many things that have been good on the web. They become the Executive Director, Research Director, and Product Director respectively.

Excitingly, the Foundation’s partners are a who’s who of companies doing great work on the web today. Those include Automattic, Ghost, Flipboard, Fastly, Medium, and Mastodon itself. Meta is also a backer, in an indication of its continued investment in the Fediverse, moving away from the walled garden strategy that it used with Facebook and Instagram for decades.

In a conversation with Richard MacManus over on The New Stack, Evan explained the Foundation’s relationship with existing standards organizations like the W3C:

“W3C as a standards organization mostly does coordinating the work of a number of different groups to make protocols […] So we’ll still be participating in the W3C — we’re going to become a member organization of the W3C.”

Prodromou added that the SWF will take on the role of advocacy and user education, which is typically outside of the W3C’s purview for standards work.

My opinion: this is the future of the social web. Every new service and platform that contains social features — which is most of them — will support the ActivityPub protocol within the next few years. Service owners can use it to easily avoid the “cold start” problem when creating new networks, and to plug their existing platforms into a ready-made network of hundreds of millions of people. Publishers will use it to reach their audiences more easily. And it’s where the global conversation will be held.

When I was building social platforms in the 2000s, this is what we dreamed of. Elgg, the open source social networking platform which launched my career, was intended to be the center of a federated social web. Although we made some crucial steps towards open data protocols and embracing open standards, we didn’t get there. I’m beyond thrilled that the Fediverse and ActivityPub exist, and that there are so many robust platforms that support it. The Social Web Foundation is another great step towards building the social web that we all deserve.

As Casey Newton published just yesterday about the future of his publication, Platformer:

One way I hope it will evolve is to become part of the fediverse: the network of federated sites and apps that are built with interoperability in mind. The fediverse is built on top of protocols, not platforms, which offers us a chance to decentralize power on the internet and built a more stable foundation for media and social apps.

The Social Web Foundation’s existence as an advocacy, research, and development organization is another key step towards making that happen. But to be clear, its role is in support: each one of its partner organizations has already taken concrete steps towards supporting ActivityPub, and the movement is well underway.

Check out the Social Web Foundation and its projects at its website.

Updated: Read more coverage of the launch.

Yesterday the Internet Archive lost its appeal in the digital lending case it’s been fighting for the last few years.

In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, launched a program called the National Emergency Library, or NEL. Library closures caused by the pandemic had left students, researchers, and readers unable to access millions of books, and the Internet Archive has said it was responding to calls from regular people and other librarians to help those at home get access to the books they needed.

It was a useful program, and the archival has merit, but publishers argued that the Archive overstepped, and the courts eventually agreed.

Regardless of the merits of the case, I believe the Internet Archive is an obvious public good, and an outcome like this has the potential to do it real harm. This opinion led me to post an offhand comment on Threads:

People who follow me tend to also be at the intersection of tech and media, so I figured extra context wasn’t needed. They were on it. And I figured that anyone who wasn’t clued in probably didn’t care and could just keep scrolling.

Which, uh, is not how it went down.

The Threads algorithm apparently surfaced my post in the feeds of a bunch of other people with a wholly different set of interests, who were — inexplicably to me — incredibly angry that I hadn’t provided any further context.

A whole bunch of people apparently forgot they can, you know, just Google something:

But the comments that really surprised me were the ones that accused me of engagement farming. I’ve never received these before, and it made me wonder about the underlying assumptions. Why would this be engagement farming? Why would someone do this? Why would they assume that about me?

It might have something to do with Meta’s creators program, which pays people to post on the platform. The idea is that popular influencers will lure more users to the platform and it can therefore grow more quickly.

The amounts are not small: a single popular post can earn as much as $5,000. It’s an invite-only program that I am not a part of; it looks like you need to be an existing Instagram influencer to be asked. While I’m a lot of things, that is very far from being one of them.

Because the program is not available to all, and because it’s unlabeled, it’s not clear who is a part of it and who isn’t. So anyone could be trying to farm engagement in order to make some extra money. And because anyone could be, it becomes the default assumption for a lot of people. If you had the opportunity to make an extra $5,000 for a social media post, why wouldn’t you? And as a result, trust in peoples’ underlying motivations has disintegrated. Everyone must be just trying to get as many views on their posts as possible.

Over time, this has the potential to become pernicious, eroding trust in everything. If X has fake news, Threads is assumed to have fake views: engagement by any means necessary.

To be clear, if I was a part of the program — which, again, I’m not — I wouldn’t do anything differently, except to clearly announce that I was part of the program. I’m not an entertainer, an influencer, or a public figure. Like most of us, I’m just some person posting offhand thoughts into a social media app; anything else feels, honestly, disingenuous and like far too much work. But now I understand how fast trust has eroded, I wonder if the ability to build authentic communities on the platform is hanging on by a thread.

Some things I’ve learned about me and writing recently:

1. I’m impossibly distractible. It’s a learned behavior: I check all my social networks, take a look at my email, fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes. Writing on the iPad seems to help me a lot. Those things are there too, but they feel relatively inaccessible: I don’t have a Threads app, for example, and using it on the web on that device feels like a chore. I know, I know: those things do work fine on an iPad, but shhhh, I’m getting a lot of mileage out of convincing myself that they don’t.
2. Tiny goals help. I started using Todoist earlier this year, which is the first to-do list app that fits with the way my brain works. I have a lot of things I need to keep track of, and it’s been a huge relief across work and my life to have a list that I can keep referring to. These days, my Todoist “today” list drives my day as much as my calendar does. So it was easy to add a daily recurring “Write some novel words” task. I get to check it off if I make any progress at all; the trick is that once I start making some progress, momentum usually keeps me going until I’ve written a meaningful amount. I’ve even started logging supplementary tasks if I have a thematic idea that I want to experiment with later (today’s is a scene transition that I want to play with).
3. I’ve got to make do with the late evenings. Between taking a toddler to and from daycare, working at ProPublica, and dealing with everything I need to in the house, the only real time I have to make progress is late at night once everyone else has gone to bed. I’m exhausted by that time of night, but to my surprise, this routine has been effective for me: I settle in the living room with my iPad, and off I go. The ergonomics of slouching on my sofa with a tablet balanced across my knees are horrible, though.
4. I can’t stay completely serious. It turns out that I’m most motivated by my sense of humor. I tried to write a serious book, I really did, but the ironies and observations kept coming, and what I’ve wound up with is a serious topic and what I hope is a gripping plot, wrapped up in irony and a delight in poking at incongruities. Hopefully readers will find it more fun than self-indulgent; I’m having fun with it, and I hope they do too. When I have written more earnestly, I come back to my draft and instantly hate it. There’s detail in irony; it reveals truths that writing point-blank seems to miss.
5. Not a single soul will get to see this until I have polished it within an inch of its life. I got a plot suggestion from a writing tutor and it set me back six to nine months. The suggestion was good, but it meant reworking what I’d done so far. I lost momentum on the first draft and found myself stuck in editing mode, working on the same chapters again and again. Lesson learned. We can make substantive changes later, once the whole thing is committed to the page.
6. It’s not blogging. I’ve been blogging since 1998. Although I can always use proofreading and an editing pass, this muscle is fully-developed for me. I feel very little cognitive barrier to getting a blog post on the page, and I feel like I can do it quickly. Writing a book, on the other hand, requires much more craft: it’s like chiseling a story out of rock. I didn’t study this, and I am not a great sculptor. I wrote a lot more fiction when I was younger but dismissed it as a career path, even though it's where my heart truly lay. Only recently have I given myself permission to treat it as important. I’m under no illusions that I’m good at it, but I’m going to try anyway, because here’s what keeps me going:
7. I love it. That’s what matters most, in a way. I love making something substantial, and I love being in a creative flow state. I’m often cackling at ideas as I furiously write them down. I’m petrified of sharing what I’ve done later on, but I’m putting that out of my mind. For now, it doesn’t matter. For now, I’m just telling myself a story, and I’m enjoying it a great deal. What happens to it afterwards is a story for another time.

Back in May, I announced Unoffice Hours, inspired by something Matt Webb had established with his community. Anyone could book a 30 minute meeting with me, for any reason, on a Friday. No money, no strings, no expectations.

It’s been a wonderful experiment. I’ve met a host of new people who were new to their careers; had fascinating conversations with people I’ve been a huge fan of for years; and I’ve caught up with old friends and acquaintances.

It wasn’t without its glitches: there were a few times I had to move calendar slots around because of unexpected travel. There were also vastly more people who wanted to sign up than I had slots for (a nice problem to have!), so sometimes sessions were booked months out. Towards the end, there were a few no-shows, which isn’t perfect, but also isn’t too big a deal. On balance, the conversations were meaningful, and it was absolutely worth it.

So let’s do it again.

I’ve been a 2X startup founder, early-stage investor, software engineer, engineering lead, CTO, and CEO. I’ve taught product design to teams around the world, and I’ve built large-scale end-user open source projects. I’m deep into the fediverse and care deeply about the open web and ethical tech policy. I’ve also been trained in leadership coaching.

Here are some topics it might be interesting to chat about:

• Feedback on a project you’re working on (startups, software, a writing project)
• Following up on something I’ve written in this space
• Product and technology strategy in the public interest (news, education, libraries, other mission-driven organizations)
• The open social and indie web
• Fostering a collaborative organizational culture
• Saying hello

If you’d like to chat, book a 30-minute session here!

This past week I embarked upon two long car drives — from Philadelphia to Cape Cod and back again — with an almost-two year-old. He’s a remarkably good traveler who takes everything in his stride (as long as he has his puffy stickers and you agree to put Elmo on the radio from time to time).

The biggest challenge was finding places for him to eat well: restaurants that wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a toddler doing toddler things at the table, that also would have the kinds of food that he likes. (Yes, I packed snacks. But sometimes it’s time to sit down for a real meal.)

We made it work, but it was always a bit of a guessing game. Would X chain or Y mom-and-pop accommodate his needs? I found myself wishing that there was some kind of app that would just recommend somewhere to go — particularly as he could get hungry at a moment’s notice, and faffing around with restaurant reviews while I was driving was an impossibility.

So out of interest, once I returned, I asked ChatGPT for recommendations:

Find a restaurant suitable for attending with a toddler in Elkins Park, PA. Please just return the restaurant name and address; don't share any other information.

It returns:

The Creekside Co-op
7909 High School Rd, Elkins Park, PA 19027

That’s pretty good! Creekside is a local marketplace and brewery near where I live that absolutely is suitable for hanging out with a toddler.

I tried it in a few locations. In the part of Cape Cod where we were staying, it suggested the Moonakis Cafe, which is a superb choice. In the part of Oxford, England, where I grew up, it suggested The Victoria Arms — again, no complaints whatsoever. I’d eat there with my little one in a heartbeat.

So what if I want to make this a simple app, starting on the web?

It turns out that you can replace the name of the location in the query with its GPS coordinates, which simplifies matters a great deal. You can get the user’s current location via the web geolocation API: you can then plug that straight into the query, make an API call, and forward the user directly to a Google Maps view for the restaurant. Reverse geocoding APIs, which take latitude and longitude and return a human-readable name, are also available, and might be useful — but they tend to cost money, and the API call to ChatGPT is already an expense.

More refinements are possible, of course. Most crucially, it would be helpful to know if a given restaurant is actually open; on a road trip, it would also be very useful to find restaurants that are close to the freeway. I wouldn’t mind seeing a top 3 or top 5 list with the relative merits of each one. And being able to plan a trip around toddler-friendly eating spots in advance would be gold.

What’s sort of neat about the technology is that this is all actually very feasible — in an hour or two. Using AI as an engine in this way cuts out a lot of development time, not to mention the need to gather your own database. There are obviously ethical issues related to how these models were trained, which are sure to be litigated for years to come. But here we’re not creating any new content or replacing an artist: we’re making it easier to find our way to a local business.

The next time I’m on a road trip with my little one and I see that he’s starting to get hungry, I’ll be able to hit a button on my phone and get directions to a nearby place that will probably be appropriate for him to sit down and eat at. I think that’s cool.

I don’t invest any more, but here are some areas I’d be interested to see startups explore:

The hallway track for remote and hybrid teams. One reason many companies are enacting return to office policies is to re-establish cross-pollination across teams. Yes, a strong, intentional remote culture would render that moot, but not every company has that. So what does it look like to build scaffolding that goes beyond the water cooler and intentionally surfaces ideas and reactions across teams, including across timezones? Slack is a set of chatrooms at heart — what if you optimize for asynchronous reflection and building on ideas, not just real-time discussion?

Composable, local AI made easy. There are lots of use cases for AI in the enterprise, but for many high-value use cases sharing data with centralized services owned by OpenAI, Microsoft, or Google isn’t tenable. Sensitive data needs to be treated carefully, and protective contract terms often aren’t enough (consider what happens when a provider is subpoenaed, for example). Let’s make building AI tools that don’t share data beyond your local computer incredibly easy, even for people who can’t code.

Pro tools for the fediverse. The fediverse is going to continue to grow, in part because of the maturity of its underlying technology, and in part because countries across the world are tightening anti-monopoly rules, creating strong business reasons to adopt open standards and interoperability. Many fediverse platforms and services don’t meet the needs of larger organizations or professional use cases, due to the wrong mix or features or a more technical user experience. How can startups remove friction from taking advantage of the fediverse, and add ecosystem tools that grow in value as more users onboard? (By the way, I still think an API service that helps people build tools on the fediverse has legs.)

Substack (or Ghost) for indie and open source developers. Substack and Ghost have paved the way for a kind of journalist entrepreneur who can launch a subscription and make a living by themselves. What if we could do the same thing for indie developers who wanted to support their work? Imagine built-in subscriptions connected to a social discovery mechanism where developers recommend other developers’ work: a network that makes it far easier for developers to make a living from doing what they love independently. This is particularly important in a world where many developers have left big cities and are resisting return to office mandates: going it alone could be a viable alternative. Kickstarter et al let people support a project; this would allow you to support the creator, with more network effects and built-in software integrations than something like a Patreon.

Metrics in a box. A tool that connects to your analytics, payment processor, newsletter tool, etc, and automatically gives you insights, generates actionable reports on your preferred cadence, and answers questions without you needing to deal with schemas, configure specific views, or make queries yourself. You could refine its outputs by giving it feedback in natural language, and ask questions using the same. Another way of putting this: what if your in-house data analyst was software that you didn’t need to configure?

Redefine the US rail experience. Private rail cars (or — more ambitiously — whole trains?) that operate a bit like a WeWork: luxury accommodations, high-bandwidth satellite wifi, phone call booths, desks, private rooms with comfortable beds. Make it easy to choose to take a long-distance train instead of a flight without sacrificing comfort or connectivity. High-speed rail is great and important, and such a business would expand to get there, but in the meantime this experience would make the longer travel time matter a great deal less, while helping business travelers to lower their carbon footprint. One can imagine this initially working best between destinations like Miami and New York, or San Francisco and LA, but the real goal would be nationwide. (Hey, dream big.)

Magic for the elderly. A lot of people swear by services like Magic’s executive assistant offering: a way for executives and entrepreneurs to get remote help with doing important work. But we all need help as we get older. What does it look like for older people to get their own executive assistants to help them with administration and life’s daily chores?

Open bookkeeping and administration for distributed groups. There’s plenty of bookkeeping and administration software out there. Most of it is understandably privacy-focused, allowing very few people to access your sensitive information. But what happens if you’re part of a group — an extended family managing a house, say, or a loose co-operative — that needs to have a shared view of their finances and administration? There’s very little for them beyond, say, Open Collective, which is for a very specific kind of organizational unit. What does it look like for a group to share and stream their finances and decisions?

—

It’s been six years (gulp) since I last invested in a startup as part of any kind of fund, but I’m still excited by the idea and the ethos of startups. While there are plenty of bad businesses out there (for any definition of “bad”), the idea of a group of people getting together and trying to build a new, useful product as part of a sustainable business engine really appeals to me. There’s definitely a part of me that wishes I still could make financial bets into ventures. (Let’s be clear: I could never have invested in an idea like reinventing rail travel. That wasn’t my area. But wouldn’t it be cool?)

I really like Homebrew’s investment process statement, which is very close to how I’d want to do it too (commit the time and energy to help build an ethical, enduring, high-quality business). And this piece in particular stands out to me:

We invest in mission-driven founders who embrace big – big ideas, big impact, big risk.

The combination of real mission, impact, and risk is important. That’s where the exciting stuff is.

Greylock, the veteran Silicon Valley venture capital firm, recently put out a call for startups that was all AI, all the time. Long-time readers will know that I have a contrarian take on that — and that I worry AI is sucking oxygen away from other, genuinely useful products that could form the basis of great businesses. I also don’t shy away from AI completely: there are real applications for the technology that will linger long after the hype cycle has died down. Still, their post was the inspiration for this one: I think there are more interesting, broader, longer-term trends that are worth paying attention to.

What are you excited by? If you were an investor — or if you are — what would you be keeping your eye out for?

Here’s what I want to see from every technology-driven product team:

Do you know your user? Not “this is the industry we’re targeting” or “this is for everyone!”, but who, specifically, are you thinking of? What is their life like? Why is this important to them? What is the problem that they have? How do you know that this is their problem?

Have you solved their problem? What is the outcome of using your product for that user? How does it meaningfully make life better for them — not ideologically or conceptually, but actually, in the context of their day-to-day? How do you know that you’re solving their problem? (How have you tested it? Who did you ask?)

Why are you the team to solve it? What makes you think your team has the skills, life experiences, and kinship with your user that will make you successful? How are you making sure you don’t have blind spots? Can you build it?

Is this product sustainable for the user? If you’re successful, what does their life — and the life of their community — look like? Are you removing equity or agency from them? Can they step away? How do you know what the downsides of your product might be for them, and how are you avoiding them?

Is this product sustainable for you? If you’re building something good, how are you making sure you can keep doing it, while ensuring you have the answers to all of the above? Are you excited enough about it to keep going when times get tough? Is there enough money?

In other words, I don’t want to see ideology or conceptual ideas first and foremost. I want to see that a team knows the people they’re solving a problem for, and has taken steps to make sure that they’re actually solving that problem, rather than building something and hoping for the best.

This is particularly true for efforts that are trying to push the web or internet forward in some technological way. These are important efforts, but understanding concretely how a real person will benefit — again, not ideologically, but in their day-to-day lives — is non-optional.

The way to get there is through speaking to people — a lot. You need to identify which assumptions you’re making and validate them. You absolutely can’t get through this by being the smartest person in the room or winging it; you are never absolved from doing the real work of understanding and working with the people you’re trying to help. Speak to your users; speak to experts; do your research; avoid just making stuff up.

It’s not about being smart, or building something that you’re excited about. It’s about being of service to real people, doing it well, and setting yourself up for long-term success.

JD Vance is an obvious, bald-faced opportunist. It makes sense that Trump would pick him as his Vice Presidential candidate; they probably understand each other quite well.

It can’t have hurt that a bevy of tech billionaires told Trump to pick him, and it’s not unreasonable to assume they gated funding on that choice. Elon Musk has pledged to give $45 million a month to a PAC newly formed to back Trump; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, former Yammer founder David Sacks, and VC Chamath Palihapitiya have also raised money for the group. Eponymous Andreessen-Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pledged donations and Keith Rabois has also reportedly pledged a comparatively paltry $1 million. (The Winkelvoss twins are also donors, but I wouldn’t exactly call them Silicon Valley insiders.)

Andreessen explained why, saying that the future of America is at stake:

Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains is what Andreessen called “the final straw” that forced him to switch from supporting the current president to voting for Trump. If the unrealized capital gains tax goes into effect, startups may have to pay taxes on valuation increases. (Private companies’ appreciation is not liquid. However, the U.S. government collects tax in dollars.)

One could argue, of course, that the future of America is at stake. As The 19th reported about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s suggested plan for a next Trump administration whose authors include over 140 people who were a part of the last one:

Much of Project 2025 relates to gender, sexuality and race, aiming to end most all of the federal government’s efforts to achieve equity and even collect data that could be used to track outcomes across the public and private sectors.

The other sweeping changes it proposes include firing civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists, removing the Department of Education, gutting our already-insufficient climate change protections, reinstating the military draft, conducting sweeping immigration raids and mass deportations, and condemning more people to death sentences while making them swift enough to avoid retrial.

All this despite being on shaky legal ground:

Some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire them at will, for example. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally iffy.

Trump has lately distanced himself from the plan in public, but privately said something quite different at a Heritage Foundation dinner:

“This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do, and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

For his part, Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, said out loud on Steve Bannon’s podcast:

We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.

JD Vance is walking this line too. My employer, ProPublica, recently reported that he, among other things, believes that the Devil is real, and that he had some unpleasant things to say about trans people:

He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”

So, yes, all things considered, it feels a bit like America is in the balance.

What’s particularly bald about involvement from the Silicon Valley crowd is that they are, according to them, overlooking all of this and concentrating solely on their business interests. If policies like a tax on unrealized capital gains or tighter anti-trust actions are enacted, those investors may have to re-think some of their investment strategies.

For what it’s worth, those taxes are only applicable for individuals with a net worth of over $100M, with payments at an automatic minimum tax rate treated as prepayments against future realized gains. The effect could actually be to encourage startups to go public and realize their value sooner, which wouldn’t be a terrible thing for the ecosystem (but might limit the heights private valuations can reach). Given that people with that level of worth don’t usually make taxable income, this new levied tax on investment gains makes sense as a way to encourage the very wealthy to pay the same sorts of tax rates as the rest of us — but, clearly, Musk, Thiel, et al feel differently. (Invasive thought: where’s Sacks and Palihapitiya’s podcast co-host Jason Calacanis on this? Is he a sympathizer or just an enabler?)

Do tighter regulations and a new minimum tax for the wealthy risk the future of America, though? Maybe they have a different definition of America than I do. If, to them, it’s a place where you can make a bunch of money without oversight or accountability, then I can see how they might be upset. If, on the other hand, America is a place where immigrants are welcome and everyone can succeed, and where everyone has the freedom to be themselves, all built on a bedrock of infrastructure and support, then one might choose to take a different view. The tax proposal at hand is hardly socialism; it’s more like a correction. Even if you accept their premise, single-issue voting when the other issues include mass deportations and gutting public education is myopically self-serving, leave alone the barren inhumanity of leaving vulnerable communities out to dry.

Responses by prominent Republican supporters to the inclusion of a Sikh prayer in Punjabi in the Republican National Convention — one line reading, “in your grace and through your benevolence, we experience peace and happiness” — lay bare what the unhinged Christian nationalist contingent believes in:

Andrew Torba, CEO of the far-right social media platform Gab, ranted to his 400,000 followers on X, “Last night you saw why Christian Nationalism must be exclusively and explicitly Christian. No tolerance for pagan false gods and the synagogue of Satan.” Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers seemed to agree. “Christians in the Republican party nodding silently along to a prayer to a demon god is shameful,” he posted.

From my perspective, there are no upsides to a Trump win. Even if you accept the idea that Project 2025 has nothing to do with him (which, as I’ve discussed, is laughable), his own self-published Agenda 47 for his next administration is similarly horrible, and includes provisions like sending the National Guard into cities, destroying climate crisis mitigations, mass deportations, and removing federal funding for any educational institution that dares to teach the history of race in America. It also includes a version of Project 2025’s call to fire civil servants who are seen as disloyal. JD Vance wants to end no-fault divorce(ironically, given his running mate), trapping people in abusive relationships. The effects on the judicial system from his first administration will be felt for generations; a second administration will be similarly seismic. He will gut support for vulnerable communities. I have friends who will directly suffer as a result of his Presidency; he will create an America that I do not want to bring my son up in.

Silicon Valley is supposed to invent the future. That’s what’s so inspiring about it: for generations, it’s created new ways of sharing and working that have allowed people to communicate and work together wherever they are. These new moves make it clearer than ever that a portion of it has never believed in that manifesto; that it is there solely to establish itself as a new set of power-brokers, trying to remake the world in their own image. The rest of us need to oppose them with our full voices and everything we can muster.

I really like Lou Plummer’s list of 15 books which made the most impact on him, which I discovered via Tracy Durnell’s own list:

I think you can figure out a lot about a person if you know what books have had the most impact on them. At one point or another, each of these books was my current favorite. They all had a lasting impact on me. I'd love to see your list.

Tracy has smartly split hers up into categories. I’ll do the same here. And just as Lou said, I’d love to see your list!

Formative Books

These books disproportionately influenced me when I was a much younger adult, and helped contribute to the way I saw the world in a hundred ways, from my sense of what was possible to my sense of humor.

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams — I don’t quote it, but the clever irreverence still sweeps me off my feet. A large part of me wishes I was Douglas Adams and always will.
2. Constellations: Stories of the Future — a mind-blowing collection of science fiction short stories, some of which became episodes of The Twilight Zone and so on. Jerome Bixby’s It’s a Good Lifeand Fritz Leiber’s A Pail of Air are standouts for me.
3. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury — There’s a warm, beating heart at the center of this story, and that’s what draws me in every time (and I’ve reread it countless times). There are better Bradbury books which have probably aged better — you’re probably thinking of them right now — but at the time, it resonated.
4. Maus, by Art Spiegelman — It was much later until I really understood how my own family was affected by WWII, but I connected to this hard. It was also the first graphic novel that made me really think about the possibilities of the form: something that was clearly far beyond superheroes and fantasy.
5. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood — Practically a documentary at this point, but it’s always been a riveting work of speculative fiction that does what that genre does best: help us grasp with elements of our present. To most of us, it’s a warning. To the Heritage Foundation, I guess it’s a manual.
6. 1984, by George Orwell — It’s hard to imagine a more culturally influential science fiction novel. I love it: although it has a lot to say, I find it to be a page-turner. If you haven’t read Sandra Newman’s follow-up, Julia, run to get it: it’s an impressive work of fiction in its own right that reframes the story in brilliant ways.
7. Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland — Coupland sometimes reads like a funnier Bret Easton Ellis (which is to say zeitgeisty but hollow — Shampoo Planet and The Rules of Attraction are cousins), but at his best he captures something real. Microserfs gave me that first taste of the community and camaraderie around building software together: it’s set in an earlier version of the industry than I got to be a part of, but its depiction of those early years is recognizable. Even the outlandish characters don’t feel out of place. I don’t think it’s probably aged at all well, but it resonated with me hard in my early twenties.

Motivating External Change

These books helped me think about how we need to change, and what we might do.

1. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World, by Vincent Bevins — I’m convinced that every American citizen should read this, in order to better understand how we show up in the world. (Spoiler alert: we don’t show up well.)
2. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond — Visceral, accessible, memorable reporting on poverty and housing. Again, it should probably be required reading for American citizens.
3. The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson — There’s a very silly passage in this book about the role of blockchain in solving climate change (come on), as well as quite a bit in favor of climate engineering, which I think is highly dubious bordering on terrifying. But at the same time, the novel succeeds at painting a visceral picture of what the effects of the climate crisis could be.
4. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson — A key to understanding America. There’s a lot spelled out here that I simply didn’t know, running the gamut from the details of peoples’ everyday lived experiences to the chilling fact that Hitler based his Nazi caste system on Jim Crow.

Books That Changed Me

These books either left me a different person somehow or touched something in me I didn’t know existed.

1. Kindred, by Octavia Butler — I wish I’d discovered Butler earlier. Her work is immediate and deeply human, and while it shouldn’t have had to change a whole genre, it absolutely did. Parable of the Sower is seismic, of course, and rightly famous. (It’s also getting to be a harder and harder read in the current climate.) But it was Kindred that opened the doors to a different kind of science fiction to me, and through it, all kinds of possibilities.
2. How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu — I have never read a more effective metaphor for grief and change. I read it when I was in the depths of grief myself, and the way this book captures the nuance, the brutality, and the beauty is poetry. I still think about one chapter almost daily. (It’s the rollercoaster. If you know, you know.)
3. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker — A breathtaking example of a modern novel: a masterclass in form as well as content. Not a word is wasted in bringing the lived experiences of her characters to life (and through them, so many more). I’ve read this many times, and I’ve never made it through without absolutely weeping.
4. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott — So often recommended to writers for really good reasons, Bird by Bird is not just the best book I’ve ever read about writing but also about embarking upon any large project. It’s hopeful, nourishing, actionable, and lovely. Its lessons still motivate me.

Do you have a list of your own that you would like to share? Let me know!

My availability has opened up for a handful of consulting engagements in addition to my regular work as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica.

I’ve founded two startups (both based on open-source technology communities that I also founded). I’ve been a CTO, led product, and invested in early-stage startup ventures. I’ve also taught venture and product design to teams that include startups, top-tier educational institutions, and local newsrooms. My products have been used by social movements and Fortune 500 companies. I would love to help you to move faster and make stronger technology decisions.

Here are some ways I might be helpful to you:

A Sounding Board

I can be your technology and product sounding board for your products and how your product or engineering team is run. I offer regular check-ins, or I can be available on an ad hoc, as-needed basis.

I’ll help you solve problems and coach you through getting to enduring solutions and productive work cultures. In the process, you’ll avoid common pitfalls, take advantage of a new but experienced set of eyes on your problems, and have someone in your corner when you need.

Accelerated Technology Product Sprints

Do you need to quickly evaluate a product idea or a way to solve problems for a customer you’ve identified? Do you need to identify that customer or market?

I can lead you through a short design sprint, either remotely or in person. At the end of it, you’ll have a stronger idea of your user and customer, learned tools for quickly running experiments and making progress, and identified and evaluated the core hypotheses that your product rests upon.

You’ll iterate and get to market faster, increase your product’s chance of success, and build practices in your team to help you move faster long after we’ve finished working together.

Technical Evaluation and Advice

Are you wondering how a technology (perhaps AI or the fediverse) might be used in your business? Do you have an idea in mind that needs to be feasibility-tested?

I’ll learn about your product and business and report on how you can leverage available technology with the time, team, and resources you have.

You’ll more quickly understand what you can build, what’s technically possible, and where the technology opportunities are for your existing business.

Deck Review

Are you presenting a strategy to your board or managers? Are you a startup going out to raise money?

I can give you actionable feedback to help you build your deck and tell a more robust story that has a better chance of getting you to the outcome you’re looking for.

You’ll tell a stronger story, make a deeper emotional impact on your audience, and learn how to tell compelling stories in the future.

Courses

Any of the above can be provided as workshops for your larger course. They are available both in-person and remotely.

Get in Touch

If you’re interested in these — or if you think you could make use of my other skills and experiences — please email me directly at ben@werd.io to arrange an initial meeting. I’m excited to talk to you!

I’m a natural-born American citizen but never lived here until my early thirties. I have a complicated relationship with the country: I never thought I’d live here until I suddenly did. As it happened, my parents moved back to look after my grandmother, and ten years later, I came here to look after my mother. I was 21 when Bush became President, having been the state governor who had executed the most people; I marched against the Iraq War from Scotland. There was never a moment where I thought, “America is a place I want to live.” But I wound up here anywhere.

The America I had no intention of being a part of is still very much here. It’s the America where people love guns and the right own semi-automatic weapons is more important than the idea that we need to stop children from being slaughtered in their schools. It’s the America where the state murders prisoners by electrocuting them or injecting them with poison or by gassing them, and where the police can gun down a person of color and walk away. It’s the America that organizes coups in other countries to further its own interests and nobody sees anything wrong with it because it keeps gas prices down. It’s the America that won’t take the bus because that’s what poor people do (and the word “poor” is doing a lot of work here). It’s rugged individualism and wealth-hoarding over community inclusion and equity. It’s racial stereotypes and old-fashioned values. It’s flag-waving. It’s Bill O’Reilly and Pat Buchanan and George W Bush and Donald Trump.

I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to love that America. It’s a bad place to live. Objectively, even.

But that isn’t the only America. It turns out there are lots of them: not just in the sense that each state is its own mini-nation, although that’s true too, but also in terms of layers that spread from coast to coast.

There’s an America I’m delighted to be a part of; one that I’ve come to truly love. It’s the America that understands the impact it’s had and has, both on its own communities and on the world, and genuinely wants to do much better. It’s an America that is anti-drone, anti-war, and against the military-industrial complex. It’s the America that wants to spread equity and uplift communities instead of individuals. It’s the one where nobody would ever think of banning a book or a news source, where public libraries are for everyone, where it’s commonly understood that education should be free and for all. It’s the one that loves art and literature, that provides platforms for diverse lived experiences, that believes in reparations. It loves people of all religions, and no religion, equally, and knows that the separation of church and state is a vital tenet for an inclusive democracy. It believes in democracy, come to that, and science, and data and experimentation. It believes in the common public good and in social contracts. It preserves nature and protects vulnerable communities and makes sure nobody falls through the cracks. It fights fascism of all kinds, from the loud politicians who seeks to turn the country into a theocracy to the small voices who shun difference in their local communities. It believes that immigration makes the country great, and it invites people to join as is without needing to assimilate or dissolve into a melting pot. It believes that everyone should have the right to marry whoever they choose, have the right to do what they will with their own bodies, and assert their identities however they need to. It doesn’t care how much money you make, where you come from, or what you believe: it asserts that you deserve to live well. It is inclusive, and welcoming, and beautiful. It’s Noam Chomsky and bell hooks and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Daniel Ellsberg and Chelsea Manning. It takes the damn bus.

I assure you that it exists, and it’s everywhere. I’ve traveled across this country many times now, and there are pockets of this America in the places you’d least expect, alongside the places where you would expect it. There are people trying to make a better country, a more progressive and inclusive country, everywhere you go.

It’s not the only America, and it’s not the loudest America. But it’s the best one, by far. I think it’s worth saying that I do love it; I want to support it; I want it to be the defining experience of being in and from this country. I don’t think that’s inevitable, but I think, if we all work at it, that it as every chance of happening. I would love that to be the case.

Last year I wrote a little about how I hope AI will be used, using the GPS navigation in my car as an analogy:

I like my GPS. I use it pretty much every time I drive. But it’s not going to make the final decision about which way I go.

Perhaps it seems obvious, but I’d like to extend that analogy to news, media, and influencers.

We all need journalism — and particularly investigative journalism — to inform us and help us make better decisions. We need to take in sources, form opinions based on them, and vote accordingly as a baseline. But democratic participation doesn’t start and end with voting: we also need to know how to use our voices, spend our money, organize our communities, and, in areas we feel particularly strongly about, protest.

I do think we all need to use our voices. I’m wary when people are silent: whether this is their intention or not, silence is acquiescence to the status quo. If our government is doing something harmful on our behalf and we don’t speak out about it, or an atrocity is taking place somewhere and we choose not to speak up, our lack of action is an endorsement. Change only happens when people speak up.

But this only makes sense when we make up our own mind. If our opinions that copy what’s popular, or what a particular news outlet has to say, then we’re not exercising our democratic rights at all. We’re handing over that power to someone else. When we let someone make our mind up for us, using our voice is just amplifying their voice.

When people complain that we’re not all watching the same newscasts anymore, that’s the world they want to create: one where we’re all getting the same narrow band of information and forming opinions in the same way. That’s not democracy; that’s homogeny. It’s worth considering whose voices could be heard in that world. How diverse was it? Who was really represented?

Similarly, while there is certainly disinformation put out in the world that’s designed to coerce people to exercise their democratic rights in a particular direction (often towards fascism), some people have also used the words “misinformation” and “disinformation” (or “fake news”) to describe reporting that they simply don’t like.

This is the playbook of Trumpworld. When all of journalism is painted as biased and “fake news” — as Trump has taken pains to do — supporters are left with the officially-endorsed channels like Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax. They receive a narrow band of information that becomes the basis of their opinion-making. For example, during Trump’s presidency and beyond, these channels frequently pushed narratives that undermined trust in mainstream media, labeled critical reports as conspiracies, and even presented alternative facts about significant events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election results. This systematic discrediting of journalism fosters an echo chamber that isolates its audience from opposing viewpoints and critical analysis.

But there’s a streak of this in Democrat-land, too: a subset of the community that’s sometimes been described as “blue MAGA” for its use of similar rhetoric. Here, any voice that criticizes Biden is also described as fake news, or even a Putin plot. For instance, when progressive commentators or journalists critique Biden’s policies on immigration or healthcare, they are sometimes met with accusations of undermining the Democratic agenda or aiding Republican narratives. This phenomenon isn't as pervasive as Trumpworld’s approach, but it highlights a discomfort with internal criticism within certain Democratic circles. While I’d clearly prefer a Democratic America to one run by Trump, this dismissal of uncomfortable sources as being fake because we don’t like them is no less undemocratic.

And, of course, the same goes for people who learn how to vote and what to think from their places of worship. In some religious communities, congregants are encouraged to vote in line with specific doctrinal beliefs, which can limit their exposure to broader societal issues and alternative viewpoints. It’s a hell of a waste of a free mind and a democratic bill of rights.

We need to consume information from a variety of sources, be critically aware of the biases and origins of those sources so that we can properly evaluate and contextualize them, and then make up our own minds, regardless of whether our conclusions are popular or not.

Making up our own minds has gotten a bad name lately through people who “do their own research” and end up promoting ivermectin for covid, believing that vaccines cause autism, or that climate change isn’t real. I’m not arguing for abandoning critical reasoning or scientific fact here; quite the opposite. The antidote to this kind of quackery is stronger critical thinking and source evaluation, not — as some have argued — restricting our information diet to a few approved sources.

New voices and sources matter. The world changes. Lots of things that were wildly unpopular and sneered at in the past are now part of ordinary life. For example:

• Abolition
• Women’s suffrage
• Access to birth control
• Interracial marriage
• Marriage equality
• The 40 hour work-week

Each of these things were hard-won by people who were very much outside the mainstream until they weren’t. Consider what it would have meant to be silent while each of those struggles for basic rights were underway, or what it might say about a person if they stayed silent because doing otherwise would affect their job prospects or earnings potential. These ideas weren’t popular to begin with, but they were right.

Even the internet was dismissed as a weird fad in the nineties. The mainstream press didn’t think it would catch on; people inside newsrooms had to fight to establish the first news websites. Memorably, one British magazine called it “the new name for ham radio” — just a few years before it took over the world.

What matters is not adherence to the values of a tribe. We aren’t better people if we demonstrate that our values are the same as an accepted set. The world isn’t like supporting a sports team, where you put on a red or a blue jersey and sing the same songs in the stands. It’s nuanced, and each of us can and should have our own nuanced perspectives that are informed by our lived experiences and those of the people around us, and a set of diverse, freely-reported information sources.

For the avoidance of doubt, my values are vehemently anti-war, pro-immigration, and fiercely on the side of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I believe in the right to choose. I believe that trans women are women and trans men are men. I believe that too-small government leads to big corporate power, and too-big government leads to authoritarianism, so a continual balance must be found. I believe that universal healthcare is a fundamental human right. I believe guns must be controlled. I roll my eyes when people complain about socialism in America, because usually what they mean when they use that word is what I’d consider to be basic infrastructure. I think there needs to be a ceasefire in Gaza and in Ukraine. I dislike patriotism because I think it encourages people to care more about people who are geographically close to them. I believe Ayn Rand’s “morality of self-interest” is an excuse to act without compassion. I like startups and believe in the right to start and run a business — and that they can be the vehicle for great change. I think climate change is not just real and behind many of the geopolitical decisions we’re seeing playing out today. I believe that the civil rights marches and movements of the 2020s are the signs of really exciting progressive change. I believe Trump must not become President. I believe a progressive world is a better world.

And I believe in talking about those things and why I believe them. Loudly. Even when it’s uncomfortable. There is no media outlet I’m aware of that publishes based on that exact set of values. You might nod your head in agreement with some of them and be angered by others.

The news I read and the information I gather is my GPS. I appreciate the signal, and it will certainly inform my actions and beliefs. I’m still going to find my own way.

Imagine a life where you dictate your own schedule, free from the confines of a traditional job.

That’s a thought experiment I’ve been playing with lately: what would it look like if this was my last ever job? How might I optimize my lifestyle for freedom?

By that I don’t mean that it would be the last time I needed to earn money. I work in non-profit news; nobody does this because they want to become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Even tech salaries feel distant from this vantage point. To be clear, I’m doing this work because it’s important, and I have no plans to leave.

Regardless, I think it’s an important thought experiment. What if this was the last time I worked a job with regular hours and a boss and a hierarchy? What would it look like to have a lifestyle that was less bound to working norms, so that I could choose how to spend my day, or my week, or my year?

This desire to seek a lifestyle less bound by traditional working norms is shaped by two big influences:

• My working life in startups, which was very much self-driven
• My own parents, who had their own publishing startup for a key part of my childhood.

My parents’ ability to dictate their schedules and norms meant that I was able to have childhood experiences — in particular, trips to mainland Europe and the US — that would have been much harder otherwise. (These things didn’t need all that much money; they needed time.) That lifestyle did something else important, too: it showed me that it was attainable, and that a person doesn’t need a 9-5 to live. That perspective, in turn, allowed me to become a founder and build new things.

I would like to do the same for our son. Honestly, selfishly, I would also like to do it for me.

What are the roads to more independence when you aren’t independently wealthy?

Here are some options I’ve considered:

Startups

The first potential path to independence is through entrepreneurship.

I’ve founded two startups in my life. The first one was bootstrapped for the first couple of years before raising a round from British investors; the second was kicked off with a small amount ($50K) of accelerator seed money.

My life has changed since then. In particular, my capital needs have shot up. There’s a child and daycare and a mortgage in the picture, which is radically different from my life as a twenty-something prepared to live on Pot Noodles and scrape by with little money. A working life of open source, mission-driven startups, and non-profit news means that my savings are meager and wouldn’t support a new venture. A friends and family round is out of the question for me, as it is for anyone who doesn’t come from wealth.

Building a startup means working hard on it while holding down my day job, until it reaches the point where it has enough traction to raise a seed round. The barrier for that traction is rising steadily; it probably needs to be making tens of thousands of dollars a month for a seed investor to find it interesting. Still, that isn’t insurmountable — particularly with a co-founder. I have more product, engineering, and organizational growth skills than ever before, and I believe that I could do it.

But also: at the point where it’s making tens of thousands of dollars a month, assuming a low running cost, that’s more than enough to sustain me! It doesn’t need to be a high-growth startup. It could be a small business that is content to do quite well. A Zebra, perhaps. The disadvantage is that the upside is limited: it’s unlikely to make me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. But what if that isn’t the goal? If the goal is freedom, a modest income is wonderful.

Consulting or Coaching

I have coaching training, and I’ve previously coached founders across a portfolio of mission-driven startups. In many ways, my roles as a CTO / Head of Engineering / Director of Technology have been largely coaching-based too: effective 1:1s and frameworks for feedback are the lifeblood of building a team.

I’ve also got strong product design and design thinking training, and have run workshops and design sprints with many teams. I understand product fundamentals, how to instill product thinking in a team, and can shepherd a product (and product team) from insight to launch.

And I’m technical. I can architect software and write code; I can advise teams about how to think about new technologies like AI, or how to build their own software. I’ve done this in many different contexts, many, many times.

So I think I can offer a lot. The challenge with consulting of any kind, though, is that it’s essentially a freelance job: you’re working from contract to contract, or from session to session, which means that you’re constantly having to sell yourself for the next thing, at least until your reputation has reached the point where people are asking for you.

Perhaps a retainer model would work: enough people subscribing to receive your attention and you have a steady income. Too many, though, and you can’t support them all. Too few, and you need to be in sales mode all the time. Still, it seems attractive from the provider end; the question, of course, is whether any customers would actually go for that. My guess is probably not — at least until you have enough glowing referrals.

Selling Products

In a way, this seems like the most attractive option: sell a finite product that doesn’t require your direct involvement, so that you can spend your time building the next product to sell, until you have a portfolio of products that sell without you and generate a reasonable income.

There are plenty of influencers who peddle “passive income”. My strong belief is that they’re all scammers, and that the dream of financial independence is what they’re all actually selling. Still, there are clearly people who sell things on the internet, and some of them do quite well.

These include:

• Books: Yay for books! Of course, the idea that you’ll make an income from books alone is a pipe dream. Even bestselling published authors often don’t leave their jobs until they’ve had a few successes in a row. There are more books being published and it’s harder to break out. Full disclosure: I am writing a book! But I don’t expect it to cover my costs. I’m doing it because there’s a story I want to tell. (And then I’ll do it again, because there are more stories to tell.)
• Courses: Do people really make a lot of money from these? I mean, maybe. It feels like courses mostly fall into the same category as books: something you do because you want to share some knowledge or potentially demonstrate some expertise, but not something you do as a money-making venture in its own right.
• Apps: Hmm. This was a great idea in 2008. Some software really does support independent developers, though — but my suspicion is that the software that does the best are actually services, which fit better into my “startup / small business” description above.

A Portfolio

I think this is the real answer: it isn’t just one thing. Likely, a repeatable income is cobbled together from threads of at least some of the above elements: building a service, offering coaching or consulting, and selling individual products.

One danger here is that attention is spread too thinly: because multiple threads are required, you necessarily have less time to spend on each. Consequently, the quality of each element may suffer.

This approach no longer puts all eggs in one basket, which means there’s (in theory) more tolerance for one thread to fail. But it also means that you’re spinning plates in order to try and keep them all working. Because there’s less time for each, and attention is split, there’s a real chance of all of them failing.

Still, overall, it feels like the most resilient approach, with the most room for experimentation. It’s by no means the least work, but minimizing work isn’t the goal: that would be maximizing freedom, which isn’t the same thing.

What do you think? Have you made this leap? Did it work for you? I’d love to learn more.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how solving the challenges facing the news industry requires fundamentally changing newsroom culture. While newsrooms have depended on referrals from social media and search engines to find audiences and make an impact, both of those segments are in flux, and audiences are therefore declining. The only way to succeed is to experiment and try new things — and, therefore, to have a culture where experimentation and trying new things are supported.

While the article was focused on journalism, the same changes are required for any organization to succeed in the face of rapid technological change. Building an open culture of experimentation is just as important for technology and manufacturing companies as it is for news: every organization experiences challenges in the face of major change.

Okay, but how?

Building a great culture is non-negotiable. The question, of course, is how you build it.

There are a few versions of this question to consider. For me, the most interesting are:

1. How do you build a great culture from scratch in a new organization?
2. How do you build a great culture in an established organization that has not yet invested in building one?
3. How do you build a great culture in an established organization that has an entrenched bad culture?

Of course, to consider this, you have to have a firm opinion of what constitutes a good or bad culture. I strongly believe it relates to building an open, nurturing culture of experimentation, which I have previously written about in depth:

The best teams have a robust, intentional culture that champions openness, inclusivity, and continuous learning — which requires a lot of relationship-building both internally and with the organization in which it sits. These teams can make progress on meaningful work, and make their members valued, heard, and empowered to contribute.

One indicator

I believe the litmus test of such cultures is inclusivity.

Consider this hypothetical scenario: the individual contributors in an organization complain to management that underrepresented members of the team are not able to be heard in meetings and that their ideas are always overlooked.

The managers could react in a few different ways:

1. Dismiss the complaints outright.
2. Try to make the complaints go away as quickly as possible so everyone can get back to work.
3. Listen deeply to the complaints and to the people affected, then work with the whole organization to get real training and build better processes in order to ensure everyone can participate and is heard.

Only the third option represents an open, inclusive organization. The first is obviously dismissive; the second is arguably even worse, as it allows managers to delude themselves that they’re doing something while actively trying to do the bare minimum. (They might privately roll their eyes at having to do it to begin with.) In the third scenario, managers stop and listen to the people affected and work with them in order to effect real change.

Now consider: what happens if nobody brings that complaint to begin with?

In a truly inclusive organization, nobody has to bring that complaint, because managers are constantly assessing the well-being of their teams, and likely receiving continuous, honest feedback. This doesn’t happen by default: the culture of the organization has to be well-considered to ensure that a focus on inclusivity is a cherished value, and that everyone feels emotionally safe to contribute without needing to put on a work persona or mask away aspects of their identities.

This has certain prerequisites. In particular, it’s impossible for an organization with a top-down leadership style to be inclusive, by definition. Even if upper management is truly representative of the demographics and backgrounds of the wider organization and its customers (which is never true), top-down leadership misses the perspectives and ideas of people lower down the hierarchy. Gestures like “ideas boxes” are performative at best. If they wouldn’t be out of place in your organization, its culture is probably top-down.

Organizations can foster inclusivity by implementing regular feedback mechanisms, providing training on both inclusivity and management, promoting transparent communication, and establishing clear systems and boundaries which allow managers to say “yes” more often.

The received wisdom is that rules are barriers to innovation. But it turns out that establishing the right kind of structure helps innovation thrive.

The tyranny of structurelessness

News often does have a top-down culture, inherited from the editorial cultures of old-school newspapers. It’s not alone: finance, law, and many other legacy industries also suffer from this problem. This is a giant headwind for any kind of real innovation, because every new idea essentially has to achieve royal assent. There’s no leeway for experimentation, trying stuff, or getting things wrong — and managers are more likely to take credit for any successes. If something doesn’t fit into the manager’s worldview, the “no”s come freely. But, of course, that worldview is derived from their own experiences, backgrounds, and contexts, rather than the lived experiences of other people.

Structureless organizations, where culture has been under-invested in, tend to have these characteristics. If it’s not the managers dictating what happens, it’s the loudest people in the room, who tend to be the people who come from relative privilege. Without structure to ensure inclusivity, inevitably you’ll lose out on valuable perspectives and ideas.

It just so happens that the structures that establish inclusive practices also form the backbone of intentional cultures for everyone. It’s not just people from vulnerable communities who aren’t necessarily heard; by creating structures that intentionally lift those voices up, we lift up everybody and ensure everyone gets an equitable say.

Ensuring that all voices collaborate on the strategy of the organization and are able to define the work makes for better work, because a wider set of ideas and perspectives are considered — particularly those that managers might otherwise be blind to.

Inclusivity should never be considered a nice-to-have: in addition to being the morally correct path, it’s the key to unlocking an innovative culture that has the power to save existing industries and establish new ones. The people who roll their eyes at it are doomed to live out the status quo. Ultimately, inevitably, they will be left behind.

I consider myself really lucky that people stop by and read my posts. Thank you!

Every year I like to pause and ask folks a little bit more about themselves, what they’re worried about, and what they’re interested in. It’s a really short, anonymous survey that helps me out on many levels. Feedback is always a gift.

This year, there’s another reason for this survey, too: I’m considering offering services to organizations that want to tackle specific technology challenges — particularly educational institutions, newsrooms, and technology companies for whom engineering is not their primary activity.

I’ve led product design and innovation sprints for many different companies and have been directly involved in multiple innovation accelerators. I have a well-tested process that really works, and this is one way I might be able to add value.

This survey will help me figure out which problems and ideas people are thinking about, which will help me figure out how helpful I can be.

But I’d also just love to know what you’re thinking about.

To fill in the survey, click here. Thank you for your feedback!

Over the weekend, I started to notice a bunch of artists moving to Cara, a social network for artists founded by Jingna Zhang, herself an accomplished photographer.

The fediverse is a decentralized cooperative of social networks that can interact with each other: a user on one network can follow, reply, like, and re-share content from a user on another network. The whole thing depends on an open standard called ActivityPub, shared community norms, and a cooperative culture.

Of course, my first reaction was that Cara should be compatible with the fediverse so that its content could be more easily discoverable by users on social networks like Threads, Flipboard, and Mastodon. Cara is explicitly set up to be a network for human artists, with no AI-generated content, which will be increasingly valuable as the web becomes flooded with machine-made art. The fediverse would allow them to publish on sites like Cara that are set up to support their needs, while finding a broad audience across the entire web.

From its About page:

With the widespread use of generative AI, we decided to build a place that filters out generative AI images so that people who want to find authentic creatives and artwork can do so easily.

[…] We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation.

I’d love to follow artists on Cara from my Mastodon or Threads accounts. But how does Cara’s AI stance square with the fediverse? How might artists on Cara find a broad audience for their work across the web without risking that art being used as training data without permission?

The first thing a site can do to prevent its content from being used as training data is to add exclusion rules to its robots.txt file. These theoretically prevent crawlers owned by model vendors like OpenAI from directly accessing art from the site. There is nothing that legally binds crawlers from obeying robots.txt; it’s less enforceable than a handshake agreement. Still, most claim that they voluntarily do.

But even if robots.txt was an ironclad agreement, content published to the fediverse doesn’t solely live on its originating server. If Cara was connected to the fediverse, images posted there could still be found on its servers, but they would also be syndicated to the home servers of anyone who followed its users. If a user on Threads followed a Cara user, the Cara user’s images would be copied to Threads; if a user on a Mastodon instance followed that user, the images would be copied to that Mastodon instance. The images are copied across the web as soon as they are published; even if Cara protects its servers from being accessed by AI crawlers, these other downstream fediverse servers are not guaranteed to be protected.

By connecting to the fediverse, one might argue that servers implicitly license their content to be reused across different services. This is markedly different from RSS, where this is explicitly not the case: there is legal precedent that says my RSS feed cannot be used to republish my content elsewhere without my permission (although you can, of course, access its content in a private feed reader; that’s the point). But on the fediverse, the ability to reshare across platforms is core functionality.

The following things are all true:

• Content published to the fediverse may be both re-copied to and served from other peoples’ servers
• Those servers may have different policies regarding content use
• In the absence of a robots.txt directive, AI crawlers will scrape a website’s data, even if they don’t have the legal right to
• Some servers may themselves be owned by AI vendors and may use federated content to train generative models even without the use of a scraper

As a result, there is no way an author can protect it from being used in an AI training set. The owners of a fediverse site wouldn’t have the right to make a deal with an AI vendor to sell the content it hosted because they wouldn’t have the copyright to all of that content in the first place. But because AI crawlers greedily scrape content without asking for permission, unless the site explicitly opts out with robots.txt, it doesn’t matter.

This leads me to a few conclusions:

• It is a moral obligation for every fediverse site to prevent crawling of federated content by robustly setting robots.txt directives at a minimum
• Discussions about adding content licensing support to the fediverse are even more important than they appear
• Someone needs to legally prevent AI vendors from using all available data as training fodder

A fediverse (and a web!) where Cara can safely join while adhering to its principles is a more functional, safer network. To build it we’ll need to support explicit licensing on the fediverse, create a stronger standard for user protections across fediverse sites, and seek more robust legal protections against AI crawler activity. While these are ambitious goals, I believe they’re achievable — and necessary to support the artists and content creators who make the web their home.

I’m enamored with Matt Webb’s unoffice hours: a way to chat with him about anything, without needing to email him first, for 30 minutes.

As Matt says:

I loved those open conversations over coffee in the Before Times. There’s an ostensible reason to connect, so you talk about work, or compare notes about an idea, or whatever. But then the unexpected emerges. (Sometimes you have to hunt for it.) There are things in your head that you only know are there when you say them. And there are encounters with new ideas and new perspectives.

Exactly. So let’s do it.

Introducing my own Unoffice Hours: I’ve set aside a little time on Fridays to connect about anything.

Here are some topics that might be interesting to chat about:

• Feedback on a project you’re working on (startups, software, a writing project)
• Following up on something I’ve written in this space
• Product and technology strategy in the public interest (news, education, libraries, other mission-driven organizations)
• The indie web
• Fostering a collaborative organizational culture
• Saying hello

Matt calls the effect “manufactured serendipity”; I call it “intentional serendipity,” but the intent is the same. It’s good to chat and meet people, and you never know where it will lead.

To book a 30-minute chat, click here.