Social networks were built on short posts designed for speed and scale. But what if the next era of the web was built for something deeper? Two of the social web’s “longformers” are working on this. John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, and Matthias Pfefferle, the developer behind the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, are at the forefront of integrating social features with blogs, newsletters, essays — anything that doesn’t fit in a box of 500 characters or less. In this episode of Dot Soc...
Jun 27, 2025•56 min•Ep. 23
Thanks to the rise of the open social web, it’s more viable than ever for creators to take back ownership and control of the distribution of their work, their connection to their audiences, and their livelihoods overall. Real alternatives to walled-garden platforms aren’t just theoretical ideas — they’re here, and getting stronger every day. No one knows this better than Molly White , the researcher, writer and software engineer behind the Citation Needed newsletter and the project Web3 Is Going...
May 27, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 22
What if your social media experience weren’t controlled by an algorithm or a corporation, but by your community? That’s the idea behind Blacksky, a decentralized project built on the AT Protocol — the same infrastructure powering Bluesky. Though their names contain the same suffix, it’s important to know that Blacksky is not hitching its wagon to the Bluesky app, team or platform. The community, helmed by founder and CEO Rudy Fraser, is charting an independent and ideally replicable path, the ki...
May 20, 2025•59 min•Ep. 21
Blogger, journalist, author and activist Cory Doctorow can embark on a 10-minute monologue about what’s wrong with tech and still leave you hungering for more of his rapid-fire analysis and biting humor. It’s stunning to be presented with the big picture of the mess we’re in — and how to potentially get out of it. In this episode of Dot Social, recorded live at the Fediverse House at SXSW 2025, Doctorow unpacks the concept of “enshittification.” It’s a term he coined to show how we got to this p...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 20
From the outside, Bluesky may seem like a Twitter clone. But anyone who’s close to the technology — and the team — knows that they’re building something much deeper: they’re rethinking the internet’s architecture to create a more flexible, user-centric web. Bluesky’s CTO Paul Frazee is the perfect person to explain all this, as he’s fantastic at tying technical concepts to their practical application and wider impact. In this interview with Mike McCue, recorded live at the Fediverse House at SXS...
Apr 21, 2025•47 min•Ep. 19
n 2007, the hashtag was a simple, yet revolutionary, idea that changed the way we organize and amplify content. Today, it is either endangered or more useful than ever, depending on whom you talk to. On the open social web, hashtags are an important unifying mechanism — not just for content but for people too. Why is that? How did we get here? What’s next for this small but mighty feature and for the web at large? Here to tell us is Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, the creator of the ...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 18
When you’re building an open source community you’re a part of a collective effort with a common goal. In the fediverse, there are early adopters doing a lot of the heavy lifting now. They’re the voices you want to follow to make sense of the place. One such person is Chris Trottier. Chris describes himself as a “fediverse enthusiast” (he’s also passionate about video games). He’s a sage presence who makes smart observations and has a 10,000-foot view of all the innovation happening on the open ...
Mar 04, 2025•47 min•Ep. 17
Unlike traditional social media, the fediverse operates without a central authority. This creates a unique set of challenges and opportunities for how it’s governed. Luckily, there are thoughtful stewards who want to see decentralized social media succeed in the most human — and humane — fashion. Two of the most prominent are Erin Kissane, a writer and researcher working on new networks, and Darius Kazemi, a senior engineer at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University. Earlier in 2024, ...
Dec 11, 2024•56 min•Ep. 16
It’s tough being a media outlet these days. Audiences are fractured, referrals from search engines are dropping, and publishers are at the mercy of algorithms they don’t control. 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, ...
Oct 16, 2024•53 min•Ep. 15
There’s a reason journalist and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick calls the platform “the most interesting experiment going in social media.” Originally launched as a project within Twitter in 2019, Bluesky has since become an independent company intent on making social more like the web. What does that mean, exactly, and why does it matter? Bluesky founder and CEO Jay Graber says social media is stagnating because “we're in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out.” It’...
Oct 01, 2024•59 min•Ep. 14
The fediverse offers an opportunity to rethink how trust and safety works in social media. In a decentralized environment, creating safe and welcoming places relies on community moderation, transparent governance, and innovation in tooling. No longer is one company making — and enforcing — its own rules. It’s a collective responsibility. Samantha Lai, senior research analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Jaz-Michael King, the executive director of IFTAS, are here to expl...
Aug 01, 2024•56 min•Ep. 13
John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, calls himself “the inverse Peter Thiel.” That’s because he wants to build a tech company that bucks the usual narratives, with as few monopolies as possible. His open-source publishing platform is structured as a nonprofit and is integrating with the ActivityPub protocol, giving creators digital sovereignty. No longer do writers have to perform for an algorithm to succeed or get stuck inside closed systems that monetize off their backs. Does this scena...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 12
Molly White is a leading cryptocurrency critic, but get to know her and you’ll see she’s anything but cynical. In fact, this researcher, writer and software engineer cares so deeply about free and open access to high-quality information that she’s been a Wikipedia editor since she was a teenager. Now Molly is the force behind the Citation Needed newsletter and the Web3IsGoingGreat site, and frequently speaks to journalists and makes media appearances. Despite tracking and writing about crypto’s ...
May 16, 2024•49 min•Ep. 11
The beauty of an open system is that anyone can build on top of it and try to make it a better place. In the Fediverse, software engineer Ryan Barrett is one such developer. Ryan’s been building social network bridges and related tools for over 12 years, including Bridgy, which connects personal websites and blogs to centralized social networks, and Bridgy Fed, which connects them to the Fediverse. He’s also a co-founder of Google AppEngine, which informed Google Cloud’s infrastructure, and has ...
Apr 30, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 10
On March 21, Meta’s Threads entered the fediverse . This means that people on other ActivityPub-powered platforms, like Mastodon, can follow federated Threads profiles and see, like, reply to, and repost posts from the fediverse. (Eventually, you’ll be able to follow other fediverse accounts from Threads, too.) It’s still early days, but Threads’ entry shows the ecosystem coming together at a larger scale, starting with the promise of interoperability. Threads’ presence in the fediverse has been...
Apr 22, 2024•41 min•Ep. 9
For stewards of the fediverse (they sound like superheroes, right?), FediForum is a key date on the calendar. The third edition of the “unconference” is happening soon, on March 19-20, 2024. With Threads saying it will federate later this year, FediForum comes at a time of growing curiosity and promises juicy topics and demos. What are the issues that are top of mind for the developers and leaders in this movement? What needs to happen for the fediverse to cross the chasm from early adopters to ...
Mar 15, 2024•44 min•Ep. 8
Something happened when the internet turned into an ad-driven business. Incentives became oriented around grabbing attention over valuing substance and connection. What’s happening now in the Fediverse gives us a chance to reverse that. To pivot out of the attention economy into something more meaningful. Tony Stubblebine has already emphasized a focus on quality at Medium. As the publisher of Better Humans and its sister publications, Tony was one of Medium’s most successful community members. ...
Jan 16, 2024•50 min•Ep. 7
The Fediverse is not a monolithic place. It’s constantly evolving and being shaped by smart, passionate people who want to make sure that the open social web is better than the social media we’ve had before. One steward everyone should know is Tim Chambers, the co-founder of Dewey Digital out of the Dewey Square Group, a public affairs firm in Washington D.C. Tim is the author of the quarterly Twitter Migration report, which tracks the exodus from X and other trends unfolding as a result. He is ...
Jan 09, 2024•52 min•Ep. 6
It’s been a momentous time for the Fediverse. New versions of Mammoth and Ivory launched. WordPress and Tumblr reaffirmed their commitment to integrating ActivityPub. And then both Threads and Flipboard rolled out their plans to federate. What does this all mean for the Fediverse? How will moderation work as the Fediverse grows in leaps and bounds? Who will be next to federate? Mastodon’s founder and CEO Eugen Rochko goes deep with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue for a sprawling conversation that looks...
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 5
The Internet as we know it is now over 30 years old, and author John Battelle says we must get over the ‘extraordinary inertia’ of the system we’ve built. He would know: As a founder of WIRED Magazine and as an entrepreneur himself, John’s been tracking and writing about the evolution of technology and its impact on society for a long time. What exactly is the difference between what he calls “the internet that we have and the one that we deserve”? Why are we now at an inflection point? Can we s...
Dec 12, 2023•48 min•Ep. 4
We’re on the precipice of a new wave of innovation in the Fediverse, and it’s important that even established organizations listen up and see what’s unfolding. One person watching closely is the BBC’s Ian Forrester. As the Senior Firestarter in the broadcaster’s R&D Lab, Ian susses out new technologies and opportunities so that the public service broadcaster can stay current and true to its values. Among those values is trust, so the chance to verify its own journalists and run a social medi...
Dec 05, 2023•48 min•Ep. 3
There was a time where people couldn’t email each other unless they were using the same email client. That changed when developers came up with a protocol that made it so it didn’t matter if you were using AOL or CompuServe or Prodigy — it just worked. The same analogy explains how things work in the Fediverse , an open-source system of interconnected, interoperable social networks. The Fediverse is powered by a protocol called ActivityPub , which provides an API for creating, updating and delet...
Nov 28, 2023•53 min•Ep. 2
In the 1990s, we saw an acceleration from walled gardens like America Online to the open web. This marked an era of exciting innovation and meteoric growth. But, over time, we witnessed the rise of a new set of walled gardens: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Is history about to repeat itself? Will the open social web become a mainstream alternative to the walled gardens we live in today? Will people own their online relationships, or will there always be a company that owns t...
Nov 21, 2023•59 min•Ep. 1
