New competition is springing up in the microblogging space by the week these days, and to one degree or another, all these new services are attempting to reduce the centralization that led to the current sorry state of Twitter. In this ep we chat about the idea of federated social media -- that is, a bunch of communities loosely connected together -- and how it's being implemented on Mastodon and Bluesky, wrestle with the implications for moderation and network effects when everyone is no longer on the same service, and remember that the Internet has been here and done all this before.

Here's Bob Ballard's Titanic talk and the original press conference mentioned in the cold open:

2012 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q3eA6wYil4

1986 discovery press conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe54buLGWS8

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