Dot Social

Dot Social’s Mike McCue talks to PJ Vogt, host of the Search Engine podcast. PJ is also a co-founder of the Forkiverse, a Mastodon instance launched with the Hard Fork team as an experiment in community and a concrete way to show how a decentralized social network can work. 

The conversation is a timely reminder that the internet is still something we can — and should — build together. 

01:50 The Forkiverse origin story

Mentioned in this episode:

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

As Mastodon celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2026, the open source platform’s new Executive Director, Felix Hlatky, is focused on what it’ll take to make the next 10 years even more impactful. 

That vision includes an overhaul in version 5.0, a new feature called Collections, and continuing its critical role at the heart of the fediverse. 

Highlights of the conversation include:

00:56 What Felix is most excited about right now

02:11 Felix’s Mastodon history

04:16 Mastodon’s growth and organizational change

08:10 Getting set up for success

10:27 Collections — a major new feature

15:18 Lesson to learn from Bluesky

17:05 Weaponization, privacy, nuances around collections

19:35 Making social media more manageable 

21:00 Groups 

23:44 Power of building at the protocol level 

25:40 Collaborations across platforms and protocols 

27:27 Bridging technologies and standards work

31:15 Mastodon’s backend infrastructure

33:56 Funding and the EU

37:27 Governments use of Mastodon

40:05 The Forkiverse 

45:05 Podcasts in the fediverse

47:14 Custom feeds on Surf, ex dotsocial.surf.social

49:58 Vibrant creator communities on the social web

51:20 Mastodon 5.0, FASPS

53:59 Entering a new era

Mentioned in this episode:

What do TikTok, Mark Cuban and Bluesky have in common? Skylight.

When the future of TikTok was thrown into question in January 19, 2025, Skylight CEO Tori White and her co-founder/CTO Reed Harmeyer saw a moment and seized on it. 

But they took a new approach, one that puts creators in charge of their content, their audience relationships, and their reach. Giving creators all of the control and fun, and none of the uncertainty, fuels Tori’s mission. 

Today, Skylight is a great example of the open social at work, bringing videos from across the AT protocol community into a single experience people can enjoy.

The conversation includes:

• Skylight’s origin story

Mentioned in this episode:

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

AltStore co-founders Riley Testut and Shane Gill are the perfect example of necessity being the mother of invention. When Apple denied the launch of their retro video game app, Delta, in 2016, they realized that indie app developers needed another solution — one that could bring apps to communities without Apple dictating the rules and taking a cut. 

Founded in 2019, AltStore is that solution. The creators of the first decentralized app store share their journey, including what an open app store means for developers and how they’re investing in the fediverse.

The conversation includes:

1:11 Genesis of AltStore

Referenced:

Disclosure: Dot Social host Mike McCue serves on the board of AltStore.

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 Social, the trio talks about rediscovering the magic of the blogosphere; why formatting, identity, and interoperability are tricky problems to solve; and where writing belongs in the next chapter of the internet.

Highlights include:

• Importance to writers and bloggers
• Models for discovery 
• Core principles around bringing long-form to the social web
• Lessons from Web 2.0, email
• Rough edges and need for collaboration

Mentioned or related to this episode:

• Julian Lam of Node BB
• “Digital Sovereignty Is the New Influencer Status, with Citation Needed's Molly White”
• “Steps Forward in Long-form Text”

🔎 You can find John at  https://john.onolan.org/ and Matthias at https://pfefferle.dev/

✚ 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/

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/