Web, Social Networks, Social Web

The other day, a podcast episode caught my attention. It was titled “Can We Build a Better Social Network”, and it was a collaboration between Hard Fork and Search Engine. I thought it was just a discussion about the state of social networks, but then I read the description of the episode:

Over the past year, we’ve been working with the podcast "Search Engine" on a project that reimagines what the internet can be. What if instead of rage-baiting, a social platform incentivized friendly interaction and good-faith discussion? Today, we’re bringing "Hard Fork" listeners an episode we made with the "Search Engine" team called "The Fediverse Experiment", where we end up creating our own social media platform.

A year of work? Creating a social media platform? Reimagining the inte…

Over the past year, we’ve been working with the podcast "Search Engine" on a project that reimagines what the internet can be. What if instead of rage-baiting, a social platform incentivized friendly interaction and good-faith discussion? Today, we’re bringing "Hard Fork" listeners an episode we made with the "Search Engine" team called "The Fediverse Experiment", where we end up creating our own social media platform.

A year of work? Creating a social media platform? Reimagining the internet? Sounds ambitious, and also very interesting. As you probably know, calling me a skeptic of social media would be an understatement, but I’m still very much intrigued by people who want to try different approaches, and so I started listening.

Not even 5 minutes in, the conversation was already off the rails, and they were saying things that made absolutely no sense.

«So the fediverse is a way for people to take back the internet for themselves.» I’m sorry what? «It’s a way to have a identity and connect to other things that are important to you online and just not worry about having to fight through a Google algorithm or a Facebook algorithm. In fact, you could bring your own algorithm if you want to. I’m already doing such a bad job of explaining what the Fedverse is.» Ok at least they were aware that it was an awful explanation.

The first interesting bit of the podcast is at around 7 minutes, where they say something I find so infuriatingly wrong that I was about to stop listening.

The story these people told me went like this. Basically all of them, as different as they were from one another, had a shared view of what had gone wrong with our internet. The way they saw it in the nineties, even in the early two thousands, our internet had truly been an open place. Infinite websites, infinite message boards populated by all sorts of people with all sorts of values, free to live how they wanted in the little neighborhoods they’d made. If you wanted to move homes on that internet, say switch your email from Yahoo to Gmail, it was mildly annoying, but not a huge deal.

So far, so good.

But then social media arrived. To access those platforms, you usually needed a dedicated account. Once you started posting on that account, you were now in a game to build as large a following as possible.

Already, the fuck? First, even to access earlier platforms, you needed a dedicated account. Heck, you needed accounts for everything. Forums, message boards, you name it. Also, «Once you started posting on that account, you were now in a game to build as large a following as possible»? Says who? This is what social media became over time, sure, but social media didn’t start this way, and in the early days, it sure wasn’t only a matter of amassing an audience.

But the architects of the Fediverse, they had a more radical idea. The vision they held was that they could take control of social media out of the hands of the Musks and Zuckerbergs and reroute it back towards more open internet where no mogul would ever have the same kind of power they do now.

Did you spot the shift? We started with “our internet had truly been an open place”, and now we’re trying to take back control of social media. I don’t know about you, but to me, the internet ≠ social media. Wild take, I know.

Anyway, they then embark on this journey of, their words not mine, «finish building the fediverse» and I can only hope it was said jokingly. The whole episode is a wild ride if you know anything about these topics, and the very underwhelming outcome of all this is that what they built was…a Mastodon instance. And they’re not even self-hosting it. What they “built” is a Mastodon instance hosted by masto.host and, of course, since this is 2026, they had to use AI somehow to do it. Sigh…

If the episode was titled “We have set up a Mastodon server”, I’d not have bothered listening to it. That said, listening to the episode made me realize how some people have a very narrow view of what the internet is and can be from a social interaction standpoint.

Imagine a social platform that’s not controlled by a single billionaire. A platform that’s not powered by a closed-source algorithm. Usernames are unique, the underlying protocol powering it is flexible and very robust. Your profile page is infinitely customizable, and no two profiles need to look the same. It supports DMs and chats. A platform where you can post videos, photos, audio, 3D content, you name it, and where you can follow other people’s pages and be sure that no algorithm will hide that content from you. A platform that’s not censored or moderated by arbitrary rules set by a Silicon Valley billionaire.

How good does that sound to you? Because to me, a platform like that looks like a dream, if only we could figure out a way to build it.

January’s Thoughts and Interviews

Web, Social Networks, Social Web 18th Yancey Strickler 16th How You Read My Content 13th A moment with tea 12th Bix Frankonis 9th How Do You Read My Content 6th Yearly reminder to use RSS 5th V.H. Belvadi 2nd Year 10 1st

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