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 Just Great. Molly’s not only an outspoken advocate for an open, ethical web, she’s also cracked the code on being a successful, autonomous creator herself. During this conversation with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, recorded live at SXSW 2025 on March 9, 2025, White explains her setup, philosophy, and learnings, and takes smart questions from the audience at the end.

Highlights include discussions of:

• Importance of owning your online identity
• Strategies for digital ownership
• Moving content freely without platform constraints
• Monetization and sustainable models
• Video content, e-commerce, surveillance capitalism 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ghost
• Cory Doctorow’s talk, “Tensions in Creative Labor & Generative AI”

🔎 You can find Molly at mollywhite.net.
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @[email protected] and @mmccue.bsky.social.
🌊 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/

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 kind that’s only possible in an open-source ecosystem.   

In this episode of Dot Social, Fraser takes host Mike McCue under the hood of Blacksky’s infrastructure, philosophy, and future plans. 

Highlights include discussions of:

• Mutual aid and community building
• The value of portable identity
• Lessons from running Blacksky so far
• Moderation, tools and business models
• Building for longevity

Mentioned in this episode:

• Rudy’s ATmosphere conference talk, “Beyond Horseless Carriages”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZN8y8kVFFI
• Rudy’s blog post, “An internet of many autonomous communities”: https://blog.rudyfraser.com/an-internet-of-many-autonomous-communities/
• Blacksky Labeler: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:d2mkddsbmnrgr3domzg5qexf
• Cypher: https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky/tree/main/cypher
• Rsky-Relay: https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky/pull/87
• SAFEskies: https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/SAFEskies
• New Yorker article mentioning Rudy: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/blueskys-quest-to-build-nontoxic-social-media

🔎 You can find Rudy at @rudyfraser.com.

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @mmccue.bsky.social.

🌊 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/

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 place where platforms prioritize business interests over user experience, leading to tragic declines in quality and trust. He talks about how to challenge platform monopolies and the importance of true federation.

Highlights include discussions of:

• The internet’s evolution and its current state
• The cycle of platform abuse
• The role of competition and regulation
• Benefits of RSS and the social web
• Cory’s new book, “Picks and Shovels”

🔎 You can find Cory at @[email protected]

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @[email protected]

🌊 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/

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 SXSW 2025, Frazee unpacks Bluesky’s first principles, what makes AT Protocol different from ActivityPub, why identity portability is a radical shift, and how decentralization could lead to more humane social spaces.

Other highlights include:

• Bluesky's growth spike and architecture first principles
• The challenges of bridging between federated networks
• What it means to build for composability
• How stackable moderation works
• Paul's take on full federation 
• Why this is a greenfield moment for developers 
• Bridging cultural echo chambers

Mentioned in this episode:

• Beaker Browser post-mortem

🔎 You can find Paul on Bluesky @pfrazee.com. 

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue all across the social web, including on Bluesky @mmccue.bsky.social.

🌊 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/

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/