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 DiSo Project, and the No. 1 hunter on Product Hunt. In this episode, Messina goes wide to explain where this next 20-year cycle of the internet is taking us. From the community-pulling power of the hashtag to decentralization and the massive shifts ignited by AI, he threads the needle on it all.

• Addressing Elon Musk’s disparaging comment about hashtags
• The history of the hashtag
• Under-appreciated elements of the hashtag
• Grappling with identity and reputation in a decentralized world
• Alignment between ActivityPub and LLMs

Mentioned in this episode and/or acronyms for clarity:

• bitly.com/tagchannels - original hashtag spec
• DID stands for “decentralized identifier” and is a self-owned, verifiable digital identity that operates without a central authority
• PGP is an encryption standard used for securing communication, data integrity, and authentication 

🔎 Learn more about Chris at his website, ChrisMessina.me, or find him on Bluesky @chrismessina.me, Mastodon @[email protected], and Threads @chris.

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue all across the social web, including on Bluesky @mmccue.bsky.social, Mastodon @[email protected] and Threads @mmccue.

🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new beta from the people at Flipboard. https://about.surf.social/

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 social web — not to mention a few ideas of his own. 

Highlights of this conversation:

• Why he’s rallied around ActivityPub
• The promise of social and the promise of the fediverse
• Self-hosting an instance
• Interesting apps and products built on top of ActivityPub
• Adopting a survivability mindset (as VCs, developers)

Services mentioned in this episode include:

Friendica - https://friendi.ca/ - a decentralized social network

Misskey - https://misskey-hub.net/en/ - a microblogging platform

Akkoma - https://akkoma.social/ - “sorta like the child of Twitter and email”

Macstodon - https://github.com/smallsco/macstodon - a Mastodon client for Classic Mac OS
DOStodon - https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon - a Mastodon client for MS-DOS

Amidon - https://github.com/BlitterStudio/amidon - a Mastodon client for Amiga computers

Sora - https://mszpro.com/sorasns - a futuristic iOS app for Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey; uses local machine learning to rank posts and feature contents to you

Bluesky Firehose - https://firesky.tv/ - republishes every new post/reply from the Bluesky firehose in real-time

Castling Club -  https://castling.club/ - chess game built on top of ActivityPub

🔎 You can find Chris in the fediverse at @[email protected]

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @[email protected] or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @[email protected]

💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

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, the pair researched and wrote a 40,000-word report on governance in the fediverse. Now they are deep in other projects designed to move the fediverse forward, including Erin’s new studio devoted to network work and Darius’ Fediverse Schema Observatory (software built to enhance the ecosystem’s interoperability while being sensitive to user data). You’ll hear about these projects and more in the latest episode of our Dot Social podcast.

Highlights of the conversation include:

• The impact of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election on this work
• Thoughts on the migration to Bluesky
• A model for how to socialize software in the fediverse
• What needs to be done next: a prioritized list
• The nutritional label analogy
• Funding and sustainability
• Bridging protocols and avoiding fragmentation

Mentioned in this episode:

• How to buy shoes in the fediverse
• Findings report: governance on fediverse microblogging servers
• Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University
• IFTAS
• Blacksky
• Fedify
• Bonfire Networks

🔎 You can find Erin at wreckage/salvage or learn more about her via her personal site. She’s also posting on Mastodon and Bluesky. 

🔎 Darius’s home on the Internet is at Tiny Subversions. He works at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University and he posts on Mastodon.  

✚ You can follow Mike at @[email protected] and @[email protected]

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave

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, 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.

• Addressing online media’s biggest challenge 
• Solving problems around discovery 
• Core selling points of decentralized social media
• Will Threads become the whale in this pond?
• Ghost vs Substack
• The threat of AI-generated content and how it plays algorithmically 

Mentioned in this episode:

• “What We Learned in Our First Year of 404 Media”
• “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement
• John O’Nolan’s Dot Social episode
• Threads announcement from 8/28
• “Protocol Wars - The Fediverse Explained!”(WVFRM podcast)

🔎 You can find  Ben at https://werd.io/ and @[email protected]. You can find Jason @[email protected] and 404 Media at @[email protected] 

✚ You can follow Mike at @[email protected] and @[email protected]

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here:  https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/

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’s time to open things up again, she states, like in the innovative early days of the internet. 

Highlights of this conversation:

• Bluesky’s origin story 
• The case for decentralization — and Bluesky
• Developer activity and other “wacky experimentation” 
• Workings of identity online and DIDs (decentralized identifiers)
• Bridging AT Protocol and ActivityPub
•  Bluesky’s exciting cultural moments

Mentioned in this episode:

• Hard Fork podcast episode featuring Jay Graber

🔎 You can find Jay at @jay.bsky.team

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @mmccue.bsky.social and at @[email protected]

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here:  https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/

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 explain how. Samantha co-authored a seminal paper, “Securing Federated Platforms: Collective Risks and Responses,” along with Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth. Jaz runs IFTAS, which offers trust and safety support for volunteer content moderators, community managers, admins and more. The two often collaborate and bring perspectives from the policy and operational sides. 

Highlights of this conversation:

• Moderation approaches in the fediverse
• Role of IFTAS
• Is moderation better in the fediverse?
• Collective intel and resources
• Scaling with AI tools and tooling overall

Mentioned in this episode:

• IFTAS Connect - https://connect.iftas.org/
• Samantha and Yoel Roth’s paper for Journal of Online Trust and Safety - https://www.tsjournal.org/index.php/jots/article/view/171
• Bluesky composable moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

🔎 You can find Samantha at @samlai.bsky.social and Jaz at @[email protected] 

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @[email protected] or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @[email protected]

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here:  https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/

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 scenario seem too good to be true? As you’ll hear in this conversation with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, John doesn’t think so. There’s still a lot to be figured out, but both entrepreneurs are here for whatever this next phase of the internet brings. 

Highlights of this conversation:

• Why John believes in ActivityPub
• Ghost’s ActivityPub integration
• Parallels with the early internet
• Being at a grassroots stage
• Decentralizing human connection
• Impact of catering to algorithms
• Micropayments and other models

🔎 You can find John at https://john.onolan.org/

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @[email protected] or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @[email protected]

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here:  https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/

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 shames, she is actually hopeful about how the internet is evolving in ways that are more open, collaborative, and in the user’s control. 

In this interview, Molly shares her thoughts on how the social web is transforming our lives, why everyone should be a blogger, and how the concept of digital ownership is changing before our eyes. She also explains the POSSE model — Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere — which has the potential to revolutionize how we share digital content and think about our online identities. 

Highlights of this conversation include:

• Why Molly is optimistic about the future of the web
• “Everyone is a blogger”
• POSSE — Post on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
• New framework for identity on the web
• Digital ownership and sovereignty
• Enabling creators to build relationships that transcend platforms
• Business models and public funding

🔎  You can find everything Molly’s posting via the POSSE implementation on her website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed. She’s also on Mastodon at @[email protected].

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the Fediverse, at @[email protected]

💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here:  https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/

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 held engineering leadership roles at Google, Color and NCX. 

Most recently, Ryan’s work to connect Bluesky, which uses the AT protocol, to Mastodon and other platforms using the ActivityPub protocol ignited a firestorm. Ryan wanted to advance the Fediverse’s promise of interoperability but he inadvertently stirred up culture clashes between platforms and fervent discussions around consent, maintaining safety, fears of commercialism, and what being an open standard really means.

Highlights of this conversation include:

• why Ryan strives to bridge disparate social networks
• the Bridgy Fed rollout — and fallout
• positive reactions and community feedback
• reaction on Bluesky and culture differences between platforms
• what motivates Ryan and keeps him going

🔎 You can follow Ryan  at /snarfed.org. He’s also on Mastodon at @[email protected] and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/snarfed.org

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at https://flipboard.social/@mike, or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the Fediverse, at https://flipboard.social/@[email protected]

💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here:  https://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/

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 the elephant in the room since it was announced in July 2023. Now that it’s actually happening, there is as much skepticism as excitement. Why is Threads doing this? How is the team working with the community? How are they thinking about moderation, monetization and privacy in these early days and going forward?

In this episode of Dot Social, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue talks to two key leaders tasked with building the Threads experience: Rachel Lambert, Director of Product Management, and Peter Cottle, Software Engineer. Both are long-time Meta employees with a genuine care for open-source software and communities, as well as trust and safety. In fact, Rachel launched the Oversight Board, which helps Meta be accountable for trust and safety decisions across its social apps. 

Highlights of this conversation:

• Meta’s motivations
• How foundational is the fediverse for Threads (vs. it being a “feature”)
• Deciding to use ActivityPub instead of another protocol
• Threads’ roadmap and next step
• Addressing community concerns around seriousness of investment, moderation, monetization and more
• Future of interoperability within Meta

🔎 You can follow Rachel at @[email protected] and Peter at @[email protected]

✚ You can follow Mike on Mastodon at @[email protected] and @[email protected], and on Threads at @[email protected]

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave