In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, we discuss the various technologies and sites that comprise the Fediverse. Johannes Ernst and Tom Brown have explored the Fediverse since the early days of the movement for an alternative to big social media.

Johannes Ernst:

Think of social media as this one linear feed that somehow streams by you. The best we can do, all we can do, can be to organize this differently, for example, or have different kinds of friend classes, like the Google+ used to do back in the day. There's so many innovations and innovative things you could do if you could innovate as an innovator, which you can't do on top of Facebook or on top of Twitter or any of these things. But you can in the Fediverse. One of the big problems that the world has is that so many of our communication channels from mass media to social media are fundamentally manipulated by interests that we cannot see and we cannot understand, and we would probably disagree with if we knew what they were. And so one of the premises on the societal level that the Fediverse has is that we are building a communication network that at least can't be manipulated by unaccountable third parties, which is a huge proposition as far as I'm concerned.

Johannes Ernst (@[email protected] on Mastodon)is a technologist, entrepreneur and community organizer. At Dazzle, he works on technology and governance enabling people to get back control over their on-line lives including their identity and their personal data. He is also co-organizer of the Fediverse Developer Network and FediForum, a twice-yearly unconference for the people who move the Fediverse forward.

Tom Brown (@[email protected] on Mastodon) is a software developer and beer league hockey player.

Links:

* David Pierce in The Verge: 2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse - an excellent summary of the case for the Fediverse.

* Anil Dash in the Rolling Stone: The Internet is About to Get Weird Again — Dash argues that a 25-year draught in decentralized innovation is now ending.

* Johannes' notes from an interesting meeting at Meta on what they are up to with Threads: https://reb00ted.org/tech/20231208-meta-threads-data-dialogue/