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Mike McCue introduces Surf: Flipboard's founder and CEO demonstrated their new social browser app that aggregates content from ActivityPub, AT Proto, and RSS into unified feeds, allowing users to follow people across platforms and create curated content collections. OpenAI Adjusts Reorganization Plans: OpenAI will maintain its non-profit arm while converting its for-profit division into a public benefit corporation similar to Anthropic, pending regulatory approval. AI Criticism Blog Post: A blog highlighted practical AI concerns beyond the singularity, focusing on coordinated inauthentic behavior, misinformation, and non-consensual pornography. AI Workplace Misuse: Nearly half of workers admit to using AI inappropriately at work according to a Fast Company report. AI Academic Cheating: New York Magazine investigated widespread AI cheating in colleges, including students using AI for all assignments while maintaining excellent grades. "I Smell AI": The team discussed unreliable AI detection methods and embarrassing AI-generated news errors, including Alberta being incorrectly described as "French-speaking." Instagram Co-founder on AI Chatbots: Kevin Systrom claims AI assistants are designed to maximize engagement metrics rather than utility, though Leo demonstrated how these behaviors can be modified. Google Labs' AI Experiments: The hosts explored Google's new AI Mode search interface, language learning tools, and a career recommendation system. New York Times Subscriber Growth: The NYT added 250,000 digital subscribers with a 14% jump in digital subscription revenue, with nearly half subscribing to multiple products. Auburn University's Phone Help Desk: The hosts discussed Auburn's 70-year tradition of librarians answering public phone questions, continuing through technological changes. San Francisco's Orb Store: World opened a downtown storefront where visitors scan their irises with "orbs" to verify humanity and receive WorldCoin cryptocurrency. Driverless Trucks Begin Regular Routes: Aurora launched fully autonomous semi-trucks between Dallas and Houston, raising both safety hopes and public perception concerns. Waymo Safety Study: Data showed Waymo's autonomous vehicles significantly reduced injury crashes, though the hosts questioned aspects of the data presentation. AI-Generated Video in Court: An AI-generated video of a deceased shooting victim "forgiving" his killer was shown in an Arizona courtroom, raising ethical and legal questions. Paris's Game Recommendation - Norco: Paris recommended the Southern Gothic narrative game Norco, set in industrial Louisiana with a surreal atmosphere similar to Disco Elysium. Leo's Game Recommendation - Tippy Coco: Leo shared a simple browser-based ball-bouncing game at TippyCoco.com as an easy option for casual players. Jeff's Pick - World Bank Data Sets: Jeff highlighted World Bank's release of hundreds of public data sets intended for AI training that provide insight into global technology adoption. Google Invests in Wonder: Google Ventures invested in virtual kitchen company Wonder, which raised $600 million despite questions about food delivery business sustainability. These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines/episodes/818 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Mike McCue Sponsors: monarchmoney.com with code IM spaceship.com/twit bigid.com/im Melissa.com/twit
Mike McCue introduces Surf: Flipboard's founder and CEO demonstrated their new social browser app that aggregates content from ActivityPub, AT Proto, and RSS into unified feeds, allowing users to follow people across platforms and create curated content collections. OpenAI Adjusts Reorganization Plans: OpenAI will maintain its non-profit arm while converting its for-profit division into a public benefit corporation similar to Anthropic, pending regulatory approval. AI Criticism Blog Post: A blog highlighted practical AI concerns beyond the singularity, focusing on coordinated inauthentic behavior, misinformation, and non-consensual pornography. AI Workplace Misuse: Nearly half of workers admit to using AI inappropriately at work according to a Fast Company report. AI Academic Cheating: New York Magazine investigated widespread AI cheating in colleges, including students using AI for all assignments while maintaining excellent grades. "I Smell AI": The team discussed unreliable AI detection methods and embarrassing AI-generated news errors, including Alberta being incorrectly described as "French-speaking." Instagram Co-founder on AI Chatbots: Kevin Systrom claims AI assistants are designed to maximize engagement metrics rather than utility, though Leo demonstrated how these behaviors can be modified. Google Labs' AI Experiments: The hosts explored Google's new AI Mode search interface, language learning tools, and a career recommendation system. New York Times Subscriber Growth: The NYT added 250,000 digital subscribers with a 14% jump in digital subscription revenue, with nearly half subscribing to multiple products. Auburn University's Phone Help Desk: The hosts discussed Auburn's 70-year tradition of librarians answering public phone questions, continuing through technological changes. San Francisco's Orb Store: World opened a downtown storefront where visitors scan their irises with "orbs" to verify humanity and receive WorldCoin cryptocurrency. Driverless Trucks Begin Regular Routes: Aurora launched fully autonomous semi-trucks between Dallas and Houston, raising both safety hopes and public perception concerns. Waymo Safety Study: Data showed Waymo's autonomous vehicles significantly reduced injury crashes, though the hosts questioned aspects of the data presentation. AI-Generated Video in Court: An AI-generated video of a deceased shooting victim "forgiving" his killer was shown in an Arizona courtroom, raising ethical and legal questions. Paris's Game Recommendation - Norco: Paris recommended the Southern Gothic narrative game Norco, set in industrial Louisiana with a surreal atmosphere similar to Disco Elysium. Leo's Game Recommendation - Tippy Coco: Leo shared a simple browser-based ball-bouncing game at TippyCoco.com as an easy option for casual players. Jeff's Pick - World Bank Data Sets: Jeff highlighted World Bank's release of hundreds of public data sets intended for AI training that provide insight into global technology adoption. Google Invests in Wonder: Google Ventures invested in virtual kitchen company Wonder, which raised $600 million despite questions about food delivery business sustainability. These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines/episodes/818 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Mike McCue Sponsors: monarchmoney.com with code IM spaceship.com/twit bigid.com/im Melissa.com/twit
Mike McCue introduces Surf: Flipboard's founder and CEO demonstrated their new social browser app that aggregates content from ActivityPub, AT Proto, and RSS into unified feeds, allowing users to follow people across platforms and create curated content collections. OpenAI Adjusts Reorganization Plans: OpenAI will maintain its non-profit arm while converting its for-profit division into a public benefit corporation similar to Anthropic, pending regulatory approval. AI Criticism Blog Post: A blog highlighted practical AI concerns beyond the singularity, focusing on coordinated inauthentic behavior, misinformation, and non-consensual pornography. AI Workplace Misuse: Nearly half of workers admit to using AI inappropriately at work according to a Fast Company report. AI Academic Cheating: New York Magazine investigated widespread AI cheating in colleges, including students using AI for all assignments while maintaining excellent grades. "I Smell AI": The team discussed unreliable AI detection methods and embarrassing AI-generated news errors, including Alberta being incorrectly described as "French-speaking." Instagram Co-founder on AI Chatbots: Kevin Systrom claims AI assistants are designed to maximize engagement metrics rather than utility, though Leo demonstrated how these behaviors can be modified. Google Labs' AI Experiments: The hosts explored Google's new AI Mode search interface, language learning tools, and a career recommendation system. New York Times Subscriber Growth: The NYT added 250,000 digital subscribers with a 14% jump in digital subscription revenue, with nearly half subscribing to multiple products. Auburn University's Phone Help Desk: The hosts discussed Auburn's 70-year tradition of librarians answering public phone questions, continuing through technological changes. San Francisco's Orb Store: World opened a downtown storefront where visitors scan their irises with "orbs" to verify humanity and receive WorldCoin cryptocurrency. Driverless Trucks Begin Regular Routes: Aurora launched fully autonomous semi-trucks between Dallas and Houston, raising both safety hopes and public perception concerns. Waymo Safety Study: Data showed Waymo's autonomous vehicles significantly reduced injury crashes, though the hosts questioned aspects of the data presentation. AI-Generated Video in Court: An AI-generated video of a deceased shooting victim "forgiving" his killer was shown in an Arizona courtroom, raising ethical and legal questions. Paris's Game Recommendation - Norco: Paris recommended the Southern Gothic narrative game Norco, set in industrial Louisiana with a surreal atmosphere similar to Disco Elysium. Leo's Game Recommendation - Tippy Coco: Leo shared a simple browser-based ball-bouncing game at TippyCoco.com as an easy option for casual players. Jeff's Pick - World Bank Data Sets: Jeff highlighted World Bank's release of hundreds of public data sets intended for AI training that provide insight into global technology adoption. Google Invests in Wonder: Google Ventures invested in virtual kitchen company Wonder, which raised $600 million despite questions about food delivery business sustainability. These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines/episodes/818 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Mike McCue Sponsors: monarchmoney.com with code IM spaceship.com/twit bigid.com/im Melissa.com/twit
Mike McCue introduces Surf: Flipboard's founder and CEO demonstrated their new social browser app that aggregates content from ActivityPub, AT Proto, and RSS into unified feeds, allowing users to follow people across platforms and create curated content collections. OpenAI Adjusts Reorganization Plans: OpenAI will maintain its non-profit arm while converting its for-profit division into a public benefit corporation similar to Anthropic, pending regulatory approval. AI Criticism Blog Post: A blog highlighted practical AI concerns beyond the singularity, focusing on coordinated inauthentic behavior, misinformation, and non-consensual pornography. AI Workplace Misuse: Nearly half of workers admit to using AI inappropriately at work according to a Fast Company report. AI Academic Cheating: New York Magazine investigated widespread AI cheating in colleges, including students using AI for all assignments while maintaining excellent grades. "I Smell AI": The team discussed unreliable AI detection methods and embarrassing AI-generated news errors, including Alberta being incorrectly described as "French-speaking." Instagram Co-founder on AI Chatbots: Kevin Systrom claims AI assistants are designed to maximize engagement metrics rather than utility, though Leo demonstrated how these behaviors can be modified. Google Labs' AI Experiments: The hosts explored Google's new AI Mode search interface, language learning tools, and a career recommendation system. New York Times Subscriber Growth: The NYT added 250,000 digital subscribers with a 14% jump in digital subscription revenue, with nearly half subscribing to multiple products. Auburn University's Phone Help Desk: The hosts discussed Auburn's 70-year tradition of librarians answering public phone questions, continuing through technological changes. San Francisco's Orb Store: World opened a downtown storefront where visitors scan their irises with "orbs" to verify humanity and receive WorldCoin cryptocurrency. Driverless Trucks Begin Regular Routes: Aurora launched fully autonomous semi-trucks between Dallas and Houston, raising both safety hopes and public perception concerns. Waymo Safety Study: Data showed Waymo's autonomous vehicles significantly reduced injury crashes, though the hosts questioned aspects of the data presentation. AI-Generated Video in Court: An AI-generated video of a deceased shooting victim "forgiving" his killer was shown in an Arizona courtroom, raising ethical and legal questions. Paris's Game Recommendation - Norco: Paris recommended the Southern Gothic narrative game Norco, set in industrial Louisiana with a surreal atmosphere similar to Disco Elysium. Leo's Game Recommendation - Tippy Coco: Leo shared a simple browser-based ball-bouncing game at TippyCoco.com as an easy option for casual players. Jeff's Pick - World Bank Data Sets: Jeff highlighted World Bank's release of hundreds of public data sets intended for AI training that provide insight into global technology adoption. Google Invests in Wonder: Google Ventures invested in virtual kitchen company Wonder, which raised $600 million despite questions about food delivery business sustainability. These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines/episodes/818 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Mike McCue Sponsors: monarchmoney.com with code IM spaceship.com/twit bigid.com/im Melissa.com/twit
Mike McCue introduces Surf: Flipboard's founder and CEO demonstrated their new social browser app that aggregates content from ActivityPub, AT Proto, and RSS into unified feeds, allowing users to follow people across platforms and create curated content collections. OpenAI Adjusts Reorganization Plans: OpenAI will maintain its non-profit arm while converting its for-profit division into a public benefit corporation similar to Anthropic, pending regulatory approval. AI Criticism Blog Post: A blog highlighted practical AI concerns beyond the singularity, focusing on coordinated inauthentic behavior, misinformation, and non-consensual pornography. AI Workplace Misuse: Nearly half of workers admit to using AI inappropriately at work according to a Fast Company report. AI Academic Cheating: New York Magazine investigated widespread AI cheating in colleges, including students using AI for all assignments while maintaining excellent grades. "I Smell AI": The team discussed unreliable AI detection methods and embarrassing AI-generated news errors, including Alberta being incorrectly described as "French-speaking." Instagram Co-founder on AI Chatbots: Kevin Systrom claims AI assistants are designed to maximize engagement metrics rather than utility, though Leo demonstrated how these behaviors can be modified. Google Labs' AI Experiments: The hosts explored Google's new AI Mode search interface, language learning tools, and a career recommendation system. New York Times Subscriber Growth: The NYT added 250,000 digital subscribers with a 14% jump in digital subscription revenue, with nearly half subscribing to multiple products. Auburn University's Phone Help Desk: The hosts discussed Auburn's 70-year tradition of librarians answering public phone questions, continuing through technological changes. San Francisco's Orb Store: World opened a downtown storefront where visitors scan their irises with "orbs" to verify humanity and receive WorldCoin cryptocurrency. Driverless Trucks Begin Regular Routes: Aurora launched fully autonomous semi-trucks between Dallas and Houston, raising both safety hopes and public perception concerns. Waymo Safety Study: Data showed Waymo's autonomous vehicles significantly reduced injury crashes, though the hosts questioned aspects of the data presentation. AI-Generated Video in Court: An AI-generated video of a deceased shooting victim "forgiving" his killer was shown in an Arizona courtroom, raising ethical and legal questions. Paris's Game Recommendation - Norco: Paris recommended the Southern Gothic narrative game Norco, set in industrial Louisiana with a surreal atmosphere similar to Disco Elysium. Leo's Game Recommendation - Tippy Coco: Leo shared a simple browser-based ball-bouncing game at TippyCoco.com as an easy option for casual players. Jeff's Pick - World Bank Data Sets: Jeff highlighted World Bank's release of hundreds of public data sets intended for AI training that provide insight into global technology adoption. Google Invests in Wonder: Google Ventures invested in virtual kitchen company Wonder, which raised $600 million despite questions about food delivery business sustainability. These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines/episodes/818 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Mike McCue Sponsors: monarchmoney.com with code IM spaceship.com/twit bigid.com/im Melissa.com/twit
Mike McCue introduces Surf: Flipboard's founder and CEO demonstrated their new social browser app that aggregates content from ActivityPub, AT Proto, and RSS into unified feeds, allowing users to follow people across platforms and create curated content collections. OpenAI Adjusts Reorganization Plans: OpenAI will maintain its non-profit arm while converting its for-profit division into a public benefit corporation similar to Anthropic, pending regulatory approval. AI Criticism Blog Post: A blog highlighted practical AI concerns beyond the singularity, focusing on coordinated inauthentic behavior, misinformation, and non-consensual pornography. AI Workplace Misuse: Nearly half of workers admit to using AI inappropriately at work according to a Fast Company report. AI Academic Cheating: New York Magazine investigated widespread AI cheating in colleges, including students using AI for all assignments while maintaining excellent grades. "I Smell AI": The team discussed unreliable AI detection methods and embarrassing AI-generated news errors, including Alberta being incorrectly described as "French-speaking." Instagram Co-founder on AI Chatbots: Kevin Systrom claims AI assistants are designed to maximize engagement metrics rather than utility, though Leo demonstrated how these behaviors can be modified. Google Labs' AI Experiments: The hosts explored Google's new AI Mode search interface, language learning tools, and a career recommendation system. New York Times Subscriber Growth: The NYT added 250,000 digital subscribers with a 14% jump in digital subscription revenue, with nearly half subscribing to multiple products. Auburn University's Phone Help Desk: The hosts discussed Auburn's 70-year tradition of librarians answering public phone questions, continuing through technological changes. San Francisco's Orb Store: World opened a downtown storefront where visitors scan their irises with "orbs" to verify humanity and receive WorldCoin cryptocurrency. Driverless Trucks Begin Regular Routes: Aurora launched fully autonomous semi-trucks between Dallas and Houston, raising both safety hopes and public perception concerns. Waymo Safety Study: Data showed Waymo's autonomous vehicles significantly reduced injury crashes, though the hosts questioned aspects of the data presentation. AI-Generated Video in Court: An AI-generated video of a deceased shooting victim "forgiving" his killer was shown in an Arizona courtroom, raising ethical and legal questions. Paris's Game Recommendation - Norco: Paris recommended the Southern Gothic narrative game Norco, set in industrial Louisiana with a surreal atmosphere similar to Disco Elysium. Leo's Game Recommendation - Tippy Coco: Leo shared a simple browser-based ball-bouncing game at TippyCoco.com as an easy option for casual players. Jeff's Pick - World Bank Data Sets: Jeff highlighted World Bank's release of hundreds of public data sets intended for AI training that provide insight into global technology adoption. Google Invests in Wonder: Google Ventures invested in virtual kitchen company Wonder, which raised $600 million despite questions about food delivery business sustainability. These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/intelligent-machines/episodes/818 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Guest: Mike McCue Sponsors: monarchmoney.com with code IM spaceship.com/twit bigid.com/im Melissa.com/twit
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 principlesThe challenges of bridging between federated networksWhat it means to build for composabilityHow stackable moderation worksPaul's take on full federation Why this is a greenfield moment for developers Bridging cultural echo chambersMentioned in this episode:Beaker Browser post-mortem
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 hashtagsThe history of the hashtagUnder-appreciated elements of the hashtagGrappling with identity and reputation in a decentralized worldAlignment between ActivityPub and LLMsMentioned in this episode and/or acronyms for clarity:bitly.com/tagchannels - original hashtag specDID stands for “decentralized identifier” and is a self-owned, verifiable digital identity that operates without a central authorityPGP is an encryption standard used for securing communication, data integrity, and authentication
Starlink is in the White House, Siri is still bad, Pebble is back, up is down, everything is chaos. In this episode, Nilay and David start the show by running through some big gadget news, from a Siri-related shakeup at Apple to the new Google Pixel 9A. After that, The Verge's Lauren Feiner talks us through some of the latest in tech regulation: Trump's illegal firings at the FTC, the confusing state of the TikTok ban, OpenAI and Google arguing their case for free-for-all AI, and more. Finally, in the lightning round, Nilay and David talk about the latest Tesla recall, the hugely popular book about Meta, some exciting ActivityPub news, and Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos gently zinging Apple TV Plus. Further reading: From Bloomberg: Apple Shuffles AI Executive Ranks in Bid to Turn Around Siri The first new Pebble smartwatches are coming later this year Europe is trying to get non-Apple smartwatches to work better with iPhones Google's Pixel 9A gets a bigger screen and beefier water resistance Google briefly delays Pixel 9A release to investigate ‘component quality issue' Huawei's new flip phone is weirdly wide Nvidia says ‘the age of generalist robotics is here' Nvidia's cute ‘Digits' AI desktop is coming this summer with a new name and a big brother Nvidia announces Blackwell Ultra GB300 and Vera Rubin, its next AI ‘superchips' Musk's Starlink gets deployed at the White House Federal rural broadband program loses head Oracle is reportedly in the lead to save TikTok from US ban A”high-level” deal to save TikTok can probably happen by the April 5th deadline, Vance says. Democratic FTC commissioners say they were ‘illegally fired' by Trump Fired FTC commissioner warns of the ‘corrupting influence of billionaires' Democratic FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks will resign this spring WBEZ, 12 other public media stations under investigation CTIA Announces Ajit Pai as New CEO and President OpenAI and Google ask the government to let them train AI on content they don't own Hundreds of celebrities warn against letting OpenAI and Google ‘freely exploit' Hollywood Google Search charged with breaking EU antitrust rules DHS's airport panopticon is getting people deported and detained Space science is under threat from the anti-DEI purge DOGE stranded USAID workers with laptops full of sensitive data They're removing webpages about Black soldiers by adding ‘DEI' to the URL. ‘Tesla Takedown' protesters planning ‘biggest day of action' Tesla recalls more than 46,000 Cybertrucks after trim starts falling off From NYMag: Elon Musk Has Become Too Toxic for YouTube ‘Careless People' debuts at the top of the NYT best sellers list. Threads finally lets you set the following feed as default Ghost connects its newsletters to the open web Netflix's CEO talks Apple TV, Amazon, and the NFL Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Hong Minhee is an open source developer and the creator of the Fedify ActivityPub server framework. We talk about how applications like Mastodon and Misskey communicate with one another using ActivityPub. This includes discussions on built-in activites, extending the specification in a backwards compatible way, difficulties implementing JSON-LD, the inbox model, and his experience implementing the specification. Hong Minhee: activitypub profile fedify hollo Specifications: ActivityPub W3C specification JSON Linked Data Resource Description Framework W3C Semantic Web Standards ActivityPub and WebFinger ActivityPub and HTTP Signatures ActivityPub implementations: Mastodon Misskey Akkoma Pleroma Pixelfed Lemmy Loops GoToSocial ActivityPub support in Ghost Threads has entered the Fediverse ActivityPub tools: ActivityPub Academy BrowserPub fedify CLI -- Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. What's ActivityPub? [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today, I'm talking to Hong Minhee. He is the developer of Fedify. A TypeScript library for building ActivityPub server applications. The first thing I think we should start with is defining ActivityPub. what is ActivityPub? [00:00:16] Hong: ActivityPub is the protocol that lets social networks talk to each other and it's officially recommended by W3C. It's what powers this thing we call the Fediverse which is basically a way for different social media platforms to work together. Users of ActivityPub [00:00:39] Jeremy: Can you give some examples that people might have heard of -- either users of ActivityPub or things that are a part of this fediverse? [00:00:50] Hong: Mastodon is probably the biggest one out there. And you know what's interesting? Meta threads has actually started implementing ActivityPub this summer. So this still pretty much a one way street right now. In East Asia, especially Japan, there's this really popular microblogging platform called misskey. It's got so many forks that people actually joke around and called them forkeys. but it's not just about Twitter style microblogging, there's Pixelfed which is kind of like Instagram, but for the fediverse. And those same folks recently launched loops. Which is basically doing what TikTok does, but in the Fediverse. Then you've got stuff like Lemmy and which are doing the reddit thing up in the Fediverse. [00:02:00] Jeremy: Oh like Reddit. [00:02:01] Hong: Yeah. There are so much more out there that I haven't even mentioned. Um, most of it is open source, which is pretty cool. [00:02:13] Jeremy: So the first few examples you gave, Mastodon and Meta's threads, they're very similar to, to Twitter, right? So that's what you were calling the, the Microblogging applications. And I think what you had said, which is a little bit interesting is you had said Metas threads is only one way. So could you kind of describe like what you mean by that? [00:02:37] Hong: Currently meta threads only can be followed by other ActivityPub applications but you cannot follow other people in the fediverse. [00:02:55] Jeremy: People who are using another Microblogging platform like Mastodon can follow someone on Meta's Threads platform. But the other way is not true. If you're on threads, you can't follow someone on Mastodon. [00:03:07] Hong: Yes, that's right. [00:03:09] Jeremy: And that's not a limitation of the protocol itself. That's a design decision or a decision made by Meta. [00:03:17] Hong: Yeah. They are slowly implementing ActivityPub and I hope they will implement complete ActivityPub in the future. Interoperability through Activities [00:03:27] Jeremy: And then the other examples you gave, one is I believe it was Pixel Fed is very similar to Instagram. And then the last examples you gave was I think it was Lemmy, you said it's similar to Reddit. Because you mentioned the term Fediverse before and you mentioned that these all use ActivityPub and since these seem like different kinds of applications, what does it mean for them to interact? Because with Mastodon and Threads I can kind of understand because they're both similar to Twitter. So you're posting messages and replying, but, but what does it mean, for example, for someone on Mastodon to interact with someone on Lemmy which is like Reddit because they seem very different. [00:04:16] Hong: People in Lemmy and Mastodon are called actors and can follow each other. They have interactions between them called activities. And there are several types of activities like, create and follow and undo, like, and so on. So, ActivityPub applications tend to, use these vocabulary to implement their features. So, for example, Lemmy uses like activities for upvoting and like activities for down voting and it's translated to likes in Mastodon. So if you submit a post on Lemmy and it shows up on your Mastodon timeline. If you like that post (it) is upvoting in Lemmy. [00:05:36] Jeremy: And probably similarly with Pixelfed, which you said is like Instagram, if you follow someone's Pixelfed account in Mastodon and they post a photo in Pixel Fed, they would see it as a post in Mastodon natively and they could give it a like there. Adding activities or properties [00:05:56] Jeremy: And these activities that you mentioned -- So the like and the dislike are those part of ActivityPub itself? [00:06:05] Hong: Yes, and this vocabulary can be extended. [00:06:10] Jeremy: So you can add, additional actions (activities) or are you adding information (properties) to the existing actions? [00:06:37] Hong: It is called activity vocabulary, and there are, things like accept, add, arrive, block, create lead, dislike, flag, follow, ignore invite, join, and so on. So, basically, almost everything you need to build social media is already there in the vocabulary, but if you want to extend some more, you can define your, own vocabulary. [00:06:56] Jeremy: Most of the things that an Instagram or a Twitter, or a Reddit would need is already there. But you're saying that you can have your own vocabulary. So if there's an action or an activity that is not covered by the specification, you can create one yourself. [00:07:13] Hong: Yes. For example, Misskey and Pleroma defined emoji reactor to represent emoji reactions. [00:07:25] Jeremy: Because the systems can extend the vocabulary. What are some other examples of cases where mastodon or any other of these systems has found that the existing vocabulary is not enough. What are some other examples of applications extending it? [00:07:45] Hong: For example, uh, mastodon defined suspended -- suspended property. They are not activities, but they are properties in the activity. ActivityPub consists of several types of objects and there are activities and normal objects like, article. they can have properties and there are several existing properties, but they can be also extended. So Mastodon extended some properties they need. So for example, they define suspended or discoverable. [00:08:44] Hong: Suspended for to tell if an actor is suspended by moderators. Discoverable tells if an actor itself wants to be, searched and indexed, and there are much more properties. Mastodon extended. Actors [00:09:12] Jeremy: And these are, these are properties of the actor. These are properties of the user? [00:09:19] Hong: Yes. Actors. [00:09:21] Jeremy: Cause I think earlier you mentioned that. The concept of a user is an actor, and it sounds like what you're saying is an actor can have all these properties. There's probably a, a username and things like that, but Mastodon has extended the properties so that, you can have a property on whether you wanna be searched or indexed you can have a property that says you're suspended. So I guess your account, is still there, but can't be used anymore. Something we should probably talk about then is, so you have these actors, you have these activities that I'm assuming the actors are performing on one another. What does that data look like and what does the communication look like? [00:10:09] Hong: Actors have their own dereferencable URI and when you look up that URI you get all the info about the actor in JSON-LD format [00:10:22] Jeremy: JSON-LD? [00:10:23] Hong: Yeah. JSON-LD. linked data. (The) Actor has all the stuff you expect to find on a social account name, bio URL to the profile page, profile picture, head image and more. And there are five main types of actors: application, group, organization, person and service. And you know how sometimes on Mastodon you will see an account marked as a bot? [00:10:58] Jeremy: A bot? [00:10:59] Hong: Yeah. Bot and that's what an actor of type service looks like. And the ActivityPub spec actually let you create other types beyond these five. But I haven't seen anyone actually do that yet. JSON-LD [00:11:15] Jeremy: And you mentioned that these are all JSON objects. but the LD part, the linked data part, I'm not familiar with. So what different about the linked data part of the JSON? [00:11:31] Hong: So JSON-LD is the special way of writing RDF. Which was originally used in the semantic web. Usually RDF uses (a) format (that) is called triples. [00:11:48] Jeremy: Triples? [00:11:49] Hong: Yeah, subject and predicate and object. [00:11:55] Jeremy: Subject, predicate, object. Can you give an example of what those three would be? [00:12:00] Hong: For example, is a person, it's a triple. John is a subject and is a predicate [00:12:11] Jeremy: is, is the predicate. [00:12:12] Hong: Okay. And person is a object. That's great for showing how things are connected, but it is pretty different from how we usually handle data in REST for APIs and stuff. Like normally we say a personal object has property like name, DOB, bio, and so on. And a bunch of subject predicated object triples that's where JSON-LD comes in -- is designed to look more like the JSON we are used to working with, while still being able to represent RDF Graphs. RDF graph are ontology. It's a way to represent factual data, but is, quite different from, how we represent data in relational database. And it's a bunch of triples each subject and objects are nodes and predicates connect these nodes. Semantic Web [00:13:30] Jeremy: You mentioned the Semantic web, what does that mean? What is the semantic web? [00:13:35] Hong: It's a way to represent web in the structural way, is machine readable so that you can, scan the data in the web, using scrapers or crawlers. [00:13:52] Jeremy: Scrapers -- or what was the second one? Crawling. [00:13:59] Hong: Yeah. Then you can have graph data of web and you can, query information about things from the data. [00:14:14] Jeremy: So is the web as it exists now, is that the Semantic web or is it something different? [00:14:24] Hong: I think it is partially semantic web, you have several metadata in Your HTML. For example, there are several specification for semantic web, like, OpenGraph metadata. [00:14:32] Jeremy: Cause when I think about OpenGraph, I think about the metadata on a webpage that, that tells other applications or websites that if you link to this page: show this image or show this title and description. You're saying that specifically you consider part of the semantic web? [00:15:05] Hong: That's, semantic web. To make your website semantic web. Your website should be able to, provide structural data. And other people can make Scrapers to scan, structural data from your website. There are a bunch of attributes and text for HTML to represent metadata. For example you have relation attribute rel so if you have a link with rel=me to your another social profile. Then other people can tell two web pages represent the same person. [00:16:10] Jeremy: Oh, I see. So you could have more than one website. Maybe one is your blog and maybe one is your favorite birds or something like that. But you could put a rel tag with information about you as a person so that someone who scrapes both websites could look at that tag and see that both of these websites are by, Hong, by this person. JSON-LD is difficult to implement and not used as intended [00:16:43] Hong: Yeah. I think JSON-LD is, designed for semantic web, but in reality, ActivityPub implementations, most of them are, not aware of semantic web. [00:17:01] Jeremy: The choice of JSON Linked Data, the JSON-LD, by the people who made the specification -- They had this idea that things that implemented ActivityPub would be a part of this semantic web, but the actual implementation of a Mastodon or a Pixelfed, they use JSON-LD because it's part of the specification, but the way they use it, it ends up not really being a part of this semantic web. [00:17:34] Hong: Yeah, that's exactly.. [00:17:37] Jeremy: You've mentioned that implementing it is difficult. What makes implementing JSON LD particularly hard? [00:17:48] Hong: The JSON-LD is quite complex. Which is why a lot of programming language don't even have JSON-LD implementations and it's pretty slow compared to just working with the regular JSON. So, what happens is a lot of ActivityPub implementations just treat JSON-LD like (it) is regular JSON without using a proper JSON-LD processor. You can do that, but it creates a source of headache. In JSON-LD there are weird equivalences like if a property is missing or if it's an empty array, that means the same thing. Or if a property has one value versus an array with just that one value in it, same thing. So when you are writing code to parse JSON-LD, you've got to keep checking if something's an array how long it is and all that is super easy to mess up. It's not just reading JSON-LD that's tricky. Creating it is just as bad. Like you might forget to include the right context metadata for a vocabulary and end up with a JSON-LD document that's either invalid or means something totally different from what you wanted. Even the big ActivityPub implementations mess this up pretty often. With Fedify we've got a JSON-LD processor built in and we keep running into issues where major ActivityPub implementations create invalidate JSON-LD. We've had to create workaround for all of them, but it's not pretty and causes kind of a mess. [00:19:52] Jeremy: Even though there is a specification for JSON-LD, it sounds like the implementers don't necessarily follow it. So you are kind of parsing JSON-LD, but not really. You're parsing something that. Looks like JSON-LD, but isn't quite it. [00:20:12] Hong: Yes, that's right. [00:20:14] Jeremy: And is that true in the, the biggest implementations, Mastodon, for example, are there things that it sends in its activities that aren't valid JSON-LD? [00:20:26] Hong: Those implementations that had bad JSON-LD tends to fix them soon as a possible. But regressions are so often made. Yeah. [00:20:45] Jeremy: Even within Mastodon, which is probably one of the largest implementers of ActivityPub, there are cases where it's not valid, JSON-LD and somebody fixes it. But then later on there are other messages or other activities that were valid, but aren't valid anymore. And so it's this, it's this back and forth of fixing them and causing new issues it sounds ... [00:21:15] Hong: Yeah. Yeah. Right. [00:21:17] Jeremy: Yeah. That sounds very difficult to deal with. How instances communicate (Inbox) [00:21:20] Jeremy: We've been talking about the messages themselves are this special format of JSON that's very particular. but how do these instances communicate with one another? [00:21:32] Hong: Most of time, it all starts with a follow. Like when John follows Alice, then Alice adds both John and John's inbox URI to her followers list, and after John follows Alice, Whenever Alice posts something new that activities get sent to John's inbox behind the scenes. This is just one HTTP post request. Even though ActivityPub is built on HTTP. It doesn't really care about the HTTP response beyond did it work or not. If you want to reply to an activity, you need to figure out the standard inbox, URI and send or reply activity there. [00:22:27] Jeremy: If we define all the terms, there's the actor, which is the person, each actor can send different activities. those activities are in the form of a JSON linked data. [00:22:40] Hong: Yeah. [00:22:42] Jeremy: And everybody has an inbox. And an inbox is an HTTP URL that people post to. [00:22:50] Hong: Right. [00:22:52] Jeremy: And so when you think about that, you had mentioned that if you have a list of followers, let's say you have a hundred followers, would that mean that you have the URLs to all hundred of those follower's inboxes and that you would send one HTTP post to each inbox every time you had a new message? [00:23:16] Hong: Pretty much all ActivityPub implementations have, a thing called shared inbox, it's exactly what it sounds like. One inbox that all actors on a server share. Private stuff like DMs don't go there (it) is just for public posts and thoughts. [00:23:36] Jeremy: I think we haven't really talked about the fact that, when you have multiple users, usually they're on a server, right? That somebody chooses. So you could have tens of thousands, I don't know how many people can fit on the same server. But, rather than, you having to post to each user individually, you can post to the shared inbox on this server. So let's say, of your 100 followers, 50 them are on the same server, and you have a new post, you only need to post to the shared inbox once. [00:24:16] Hong: Yes, that's right. [00:24:18] Jeremy: And in that message you would I assume have links to each of the profiles or actors that you wanted to send that message to. [00:24:30] Hong: Yeah. Scaling challenges [00:24:31] Jeremy: Something that I've seen in the past is there are people who have challenges with scaling. Their Mastodon instance or their implementations of ActivityPub. As the, the number of followers grow, I've seen a post about, ghost one of the companies you work with mentioning that they've had challenges there. What are the challenges there and, and how do you think those can be resolved? [00:25:04] Hong: To put this in context, when Ghost mentioned the scaling, they were not using Message Queue yet. I'm pretty sure using Message Queue would help a lot of their scaling problems. That said it is definitely true that a lot of activity post software has trouble with scaling right now. I think part of the problem is that everyone's using this purely event driven approach to sending activities around. One of the big issues is that when their delivery fails it's the sender who has to retry and not the receiver. Plus there's all this overhead because the sender has to authenticate itself with HTTP signatures every time. Actually the ActivityPub spec suggests using polling too so I'd love to see more ActivityPub software try using both approaches together. [00:26:16] Jeremy: You mean the followers would poll who they're following instead of the person posting the messages having to send their posts to everyone's inboxes. [00:26:29] Hong: Yeah. [00:26:29] Jeremy: I see. So that's a part of the ActivityPubs specification, but not implemented in a lot of ActivityPub implementations, And so it sounds like maybe that puts a lot of burden on the servers that have people with a lot of followers because they have to post to every single, follower server and maybe the server is slow or they can't reach it. And like you said, they have to just keep trying and trying. There could be a lot of challenges there. [00:27:09] Hong: Right. Account migration [00:27:10] Jeremy: We've talked a little bit about the fact that each person each actor is hosted by a server and those servers can host multiple actors. But if you want to move to another server either because your server is shutting down or you just would like to change servers, what are some of the challenges there? [00:27:38] Hong: ActivityPub and Fediverse already have the specification for an account move. It's called FEP-7628 Move Actor. First thing you need to do when moving an account is prove that both the old and new accounts belong to the same person. You do this by adding the all accounts, add the URI to the new account's AlsoKnownAs property. And then the old account contacts all the other instances it's moving by sending out a move activity. When a server gets this move activity, it checks that both accounts really do belong to the same parts, and then it makes all the accounts that, uh, were following the, all the accounts start to, following the new one instead. that's how the new account gets to keep all the, all the accounts follow us. pretty much all, all the major activity post software has this feature built in, for example, Mastodon Misskey you name it. [00:29:04] Jeremy: This is very similar to the post where when you execute a move, the server that originally hosted that actor, they need to somehow tell every single other server that was following that account that you've moved. And so if there's any issues with communicating with one of those servers, or you miss one, then it just won't recognize that you've moved. You have to make sure that you talk to every single server. [00:29:36] Hong: That's right. [00:29:38] Jeremy: I could see how that could be a difficult problem sometimes if you have a lot of followers. [00:29:45] Hong: Yeah. Fedify [00:29:46] Jeremy: You've created a TypeScript library Fedify for building ActivityPub powered applications. What was the reason you decided to create Fedify? [00:29:58] Hong: Fedify is (a) ActivityPub servers framework I built for TypeScript. It basically takes away a lot of headaches you'd get trying to implement (an) ActivityPub server from scratch. The whole thing started because I wanted to build hollo -- A single user microblogging platform I built. But when I tried, to implement ActivityPub from (the) ground up it was kind of a nightmare. Imagine trying to write a CGI program in Perl or C back in the late nineties, where you are manually printing, HTTP headers and HTML as bias. there just wasn't any good abstraction layer to go with. There were already some libraries and frameworks for ActivityPub out there but none of them really hit the sweet spot I was looking for. They were either too high level and rigid. Like you could only build a mastodon clone or they barely did anything at all. Or they were written in languages I didn't really know. Ghost and Fedify [00:31:24] Jeremy: I saw that you are doing some work with, ghost. How is Ghost using fedify? [00:31:30] Hong: Ghost is an open source publishing platform. They have put some money into fedify which is why I get to work on it full time now. Their ActivityPub feature is still in private beta but it should be available to everyone pretty soon. We work together to improve fedify. Basically they are a user of fedify. They report bugs request new features to fedify then I fix them or implement them, first. [00:32:16] Jeremy: Ghost to my understanding is a blogging platform and a a newsletter platform. So what does it mean for them to implement ActivityPub? What would somebody using Mastodon, for example, get when they follow somebody using Ghost? [00:32:38] Hong: Ghost will have a fediverse handle for each blog. If you follow them in your mastodon or something (similar) then a new post is published. These post will show up (in) your timeline in Mastodon and you can like them or share them. Andin the dashboard of Ghost you can see who liked their posts or shared their posts and so on. It is like how mastodon works but in Ghost. [00:33:26] Jeremy: I see. So if you are writing a ghost blog and somebody follows your blog from Mastodon, sort of like we were talking about earlier, they can like your post, and on the blog itself you could show, oh, I have 200 likes. And those aren't necessarily people who were on your ghost website, they could be people that were liking your post from Mastodon. [00:33:58] Hong: Yes. Misskey / Forkey development in Asia [00:34:00] Jeremy: Something you mentioned at the beginning was there is a community of developers in Asia making forks of I believe of Mastodon, right? [00:34:13] Hong: Yeah. [00:34:14] Jeremy: Do you have experience working in that development community? What's different about it compared to the more Western centric community? [00:34:24] Hong: They are very similar in most ways. The key difference is language of course. They communicate in Japanese primarily. They also accept pull requests with English. But there are tons of comments in Japanese in their code. So you need to translate them into English or your first language to understand what code does. So I think that makes a barrier for Western developers. In fact, many Western developers that contribute to misskey or forkey are able to speak a little Japanese. And many of the developers of misskey and forkey are kind of otaku. [00:35:31] Jeremy: Oh otaku okay. [00:35:33] Hong: It's not a big deal, but you can see (the) difference in a glance. [00:35:41] Jeremy: Yeah. You mentioned one of the things that I believe misskey implemented was the emoji reactions and maybe one of the reasons they wanted that was so that they could react to each other's posts with you know anime pictures or things like that. [00:35:58] Hong: Yeah, that's right. [00:36:01] Jeremy: You've mentioned misskey and forkey. So is misskey a fork of Mastodon and then is forkey a fork of misskey? [00:36:10] Hong: No, misskey is not a fork of mastodon. (It) is built from scratch. It's its own implementation. And forkeys are forks of Mastodon. [00:36:22] Jeremy: Oh, I see. But both of those are primarily built by Japanese developers. [00:36:30] Hong: Yes. Whereas Mastodon (is) written in Ruby. Ruby on Rails. But misskey is built in TypeScript. [00:36:40] Jeremy: And because of ActivityPub -- they all implement it. So you can communicate with people between mastodon and misskey because they all understand the same activities. [00:36:56] Hong: Yes. Backwards compatible activity implementations [00:36:57] Jeremy: You did mention since there are extensions like misskey has the emoji reactions. When there is an activity that an implementation doesn't support what happens between the two servers? Do you send it to a server's inbox and then the server just doesn't do anything with it? [00:37:16] Hong: Some implementers consider backwards compatibility. So they design (it) to work with other implementations that don't support that activity. For example misskey uses like activity for emoji reaction. So if you put an emoji to a Mastodon post then in Mastodon you get one like. So it's intended behavior by misskey developers that they fall back to normal likes. But sometimes ActivityPub implementers introduce entirely new activity types. For example Pleroma introduced the emoji react. And if you put emoji reaction to Mastodon post from Pleroma in Mastodon you have nothing to see because Mastodon just ignores them. [00:38:37] Jeremy: If I understand correctly, both misskey and Pleroma are independent implementations of ActivityPub, but with misskey, they can tell when or their message is backwards compatible where it's if you don't understand the emoji reaction, it'll be embedded inside of a like message. Whereas with Pleroma they send an activity that Mastodon can't understand at all. So it just doesn't do anything. [00:39:11] Hong: Yes, right. But, Misskey also understands (the) emoji react activity. So between pleroma and misskey they have exchanged emoji reactions with no problem. [00:39:27] Jeremy: Oh, I see. So they, they both understand that activity. They both implement it the same way, but then when misskey communicates with Mastodon or with an instance that it knows doesn't understand it, it sends something different. [00:39:45] Hong: Yeah, that's right. [00:39:47] Jeremy: The servers -- can they query one another to know which activities they support? [00:39:53] Hong: Usually ActivityPub implementations also implement NodeInfo specification. It's like a user agent-like thing in Fediverse. Implementations tell the other instance (if it) is Mastodon or something else. You can query the type of server. [00:40:20] Jeremy: Okay, so within ActivityPub are each of the servers -- is the term node is that the word they use for each server? [00:40:31] Hong: Yes. Right. [00:40:32] Jeremy: You have the nodes, which can have any number of actors and the servers send activities to one another, to each other's inboxes. And so those are the way they all communicate. [00:40:49] Hong: Yeah. Building an ActivityPub implementation [00:40:50] Jeremy: You've implemented ActivityPub with Fedify because you found like there weren't good enough implementations or resources already. Did you implement it based off of the specification or did you look at existing implementations while you were building your implementation? [00:41:12] Hong: To be honest, instead of just, diving into the spec. I usually start by looking at actually ActivityPub software code first. The ActivityPub spec is so vague that you can't really build something just from reading it. So when we talk about ActivityPub, we are actually talking about a whole bunch of other technical standards too, WebFinger, HTTP signatures and more. So you need to understand all of these as well. [00:41:47] Jeremy: With the specification alone, you were saying it's too vague and so what ends up being -- I'm not sure if it's right to call it a spec, but looking at the implementations that people have already made that collectively becomes the spec because trying to follow the spec just by itself is maybe too difficult. [00:42:12] Hong: Yes. [00:42:14] Jeremy: Maybe that brings up the issues you were talking about before where you have specifications like JSON-LD where they're so complicated that even the biggest implementations aren't quite following it exactly. [00:42:28] Hong: Yeah. [00:42:29] Jeremy: If somebody wanted to, to get started with understanding a little bit more about ActivityPub or building something with it where would you recommend they start? [00:42:44] Hong: I recommend to dig into a lot of code from actual implementations. First, Mastodon, Misskey, Akkoma and so on. There are are some really cool tools that have been so helpful. For example, ActivityPub Academy is this awesome mastodon server for debugging ActivityPub. It makes it super easy to create a temporary account and see what activities are going back and forth. There is also BrowserPub. BrowserPub is this neat tool for looking up and browsing ActivityPub objects. It's really handy when you want to see how different ActivityPub software handles various features. I also recommend to use Fedify. I've got to mention the Fedify CLI, which comes with some really useful tools. [00:43:46] Jeremy: So if someone uses Fedify they're writing an application in TypeScript, then it sounds like they have to know the high level concepts. They have to know what are the different activities, what is inside of an actor. But the actual implementation of how do I create and parse JSON linked data, those kinds of things are taken care of by the library. [00:44:13] Hong: Yes, right. [00:44:16] Jeremy: So in some ways it seems like it might be good to, like you were saying, use the tools you mentioned to create a test Mastodon account, look at the messages being sent back and forth, and then when you're trying to implement it, starting with something like Fedify might be good because then you can really just focus on the concepts and not worry so much about the, the implementation details. [00:44:43] Hong: Yes, that's right. [00:44:45] Jeremy: Is there anything else you. Wanted to mention or thought we should have talked about? [00:44:52] Hong: Mm. I want to, talk about, a lot of stuff about ActivityPub but it's difficult to speak in English for me, so, it's a shame to talk about it very little. [00:45:15] Jeremy: We need everybody to learn Korean right? [00:45:23] Hong: Yes, please. (laughs) [00:45:23] Jeremy: Yeah. Well, I wanna thank you for taking the time. I know it must have been really challenging to give an interview in, you know, a language that's not your native one. So thank you for spending the time to talk with me. [00:45:38] Hong: Thank you for having me.
Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
Hong Minhee, an open source developer and creator of the Fedify ActivityPub library, discusses the ActivityPub protocol and the fediverse with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung. They explore ActivityPub use cases, including microblogging applications such as Mastodon and Misskey, as well as activities built into the specification such as Like, Follow, and Accept. They also discuss extending the specification to include properties like Discoverable and Suspended, how different implementations communicate when they don't implement the same extensions, ND the use of JSON-LD and why it is challenging to implement. Finally, they consider the HTTP-based inbox communication model, difficulties with scaling when using a push rather than a pull model, account migration, and resources for implementing the ActivityPub specification. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Robotaxis: in. EVs: Out? The Verge's Andy Hawkins joins the show to talk about the goings-on in the transportation industry, including the reasons car makers are slowing down on EV production (but not giving up entirely) and why suddenly everyone's back in on robotaxis. Then, The Social Web Foundation's Evan Prodromou tells us what's new with the fediverse. We talk about Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and the increasingly ambitious plans for the ActivityPub protocol. Finally, we talk through some feedback on last week's episode about the pricing of the iPhone 16E, and how the way you buy your phone changes the way you feel about its price. Further reading: EV truck maker Nikola goes bust Senate Republicans introduce bills to make EVs more expensive Volkswagen claims it's actually making that $20,000 EV and will show it next month Ford lost $5 billion on EVs in 2024, teases new models Lyft eyes robotaxi launch in 2026 Uber to Austin: get ready for Waymo The fediverse, explained: Mastodon, Threads, and the open future of social networking Flipboard's Surf app is a feed reader for the fediverse Tumblr's fediverse integration might finally happen soon. The Social Web Foundation Apple launches the iPhone 16E Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Social media platforms have become the “default” for most of the world's 5.5 billion Internet users, which means everything we see and post online is controlled by billionaires and squeezed for maximum profit – shredding democracy, mental health, and human rights in the process. But what if it didn't have to be this way? In fact, the Web wasn't this way until very recently. So how did we get here? And how can we claw it back? The bad news is it will take a LOT of work, investment, and convincing. The good news is, we already know how to do it - and it's way easier than you think. This week, activist and public interest technologist Mallory Knodel joins Matt to discuss a huge initiative to reinvent social media and rescue online discourse from billionaire control. Mallory is the executive director and founder of the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit working to build sustainable and fair social network infrastructure. She's also a custodian of Free Our Feeds, a coalition proposing new standards and protocols that would make social media open, inter-operable, and free from billionaire control. In layman's terms: Imagine if friends on Bluesky could subscribe to your Instagram Reels. Imagine if you decided to leave YouTube and take all your videos with you to Mastodon. Imagine a social media ecosystem where everyone can talk, free from sensationalist algorithms and constant surveillance. It's not only possible, but happening now, via federated networks like ActivityPub and AT Protocol. But as Mallory explains, getting your friends to ditch TikTok for Bluesky is a “hearts and minds” battle that's just getting started. Mallory and Matt discuss why all of our public discourse has moved onto “private property,” the importance of data portability, the burden of “switching costs,” and why now is the time to free our feeds from the billionaire class. Plus, some Amish trivia and your questions and voicemails. Learn more about Free Our Feeds: https://freeourfeeds.com/ The Social Web Foundation: https://socialwebfoundation.org/ And subscribe to Mallory's newsletter, Internet Exchange: https://internet.exchangepoint.tech/ This show is made possible by listener support: https://www.patreon.com/influencepod Listen & subscribe wherever you get podcasts:
Stargate' Squares Some AI Circles Old enough to remember Trump's Foxconn factory What Stargate Means and What It Doesn't Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law SkyTok, BlueSky's TikTok, made with Surf on ActivityPub The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers Google will let you control your Chromebook with your face Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200 million debacle Nokia's reaction to the iPhone The Ankler launches standalone trade publication on the creator economy Bassinet backlash reflects debate over adding fees to connected devices Elon Musk admits cheating at video games, chat transcript appears to show The Whole World is Whining Netflix's UK Audience Reach Overtook BBC1 For The First Time Last Year Genrevision podcast Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: zscaler.com/security
"Stargate" Squares Some AI Circles Old enough to remember Trump's Foxconn factory What Stargate Means and What It Doesn't Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law SkyTok, BlueSky's TikTok, made with Surf on ActivityPub The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers Google will let you control your Chromebook with your face Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200 million debacle Nokia's reaction to the iPhone The Ankler launches standalone trade publication on the creator economy Bassinet backlash reflects debate over adding fees to connected devices Elon Musk admits cheating at video games, chat transcript appears to show The Whole World is Whining Netflix's UK Audience Reach Overtook BBC1 For The First Time Last Year Genrevision podcast Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: zscaler.com/security
"Stargate" Squares Some AI Circles Old enough to remember Trump's Foxconn factory What Stargate Means and What It Doesn't Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law SkyTok, BlueSky's TikTok, made with Surf on ActivityPub The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers Google will let you control your Chromebook with your face Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200 million debacle Nokia's reaction to the iPhone The Ankler launches standalone trade publication on the creator economy Bassinet backlash reflects debate over adding fees to connected devices Elon Musk admits cheating at video games, chat transcript appears to show The Whole World is Whining Netflix's UK Audience Reach Overtook BBC1 For The First Time Last Year Genrevision podcast Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: zscaler.com/security
"Stargate" Squares Some AI Circles Old enough to remember Trump's Foxconn factory What Stargate Means and What It Doesn't Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law SkyTok, BlueSky's TikTok, made with Surf on ActivityPub The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers Google will let you control your Chromebook with your face Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200 million debacle Nokia's reaction to the iPhone The Ankler launches standalone trade publication on the creator economy Bassinet backlash reflects debate over adding fees to connected devices Elon Musk admits cheating at video games, chat transcript appears to show The Whole World is Whining Netflix's UK Audience Reach Overtook BBC1 For The First Time Last Year Genrevision podcast Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: zscaler.com/security
"Stargate" Squares Some AI Circles Old enough to remember Trump's Foxconn factory What Stargate Means and What It Doesn't Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law SkyTok, BlueSky's TikTok, made with Surf on ActivityPub The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers Google will let you control your Chromebook with your face Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200 million debacle Nokia's reaction to the iPhone The Ankler launches standalone trade publication on the creator economy Bassinet backlash reflects debate over adding fees to connected devices Elon Musk admits cheating at video games, chat transcript appears to show The Whole World is Whining Netflix's UK Audience Reach Overtook BBC1 For The First Time Last Year Genrevision podcast Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: zscaler.com/security
"Stargate" Squares Some AI Circles Old enough to remember Trump's Foxconn factory What Stargate Means and What It Doesn't Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law SkyTok, BlueSky's TikTok, made with Surf on ActivityPub The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers Google will let you control your Chromebook with your face Walgreens replaced its refrigerator doors with digitized ad-laden glass. It might become a $200 million debacle Nokia's reaction to the iPhone The Ankler launches standalone trade publication on the creator economy Bassinet backlash reflects debate over adding fees to connected devices Elon Musk admits cheating at video games, chat transcript appears to show The Whole World is Whining Netflix's UK Audience Reach Overtook BBC1 For The First Time Last Year Genrevision podcast Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to This Week in Google at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: zscaler.com/security
La semana pasada se publicó la aplicación oficial de Pixelfed tanto para iOS como para Android, lo que ha dado un gran impulso a esta red social de fotografía. Basada en el fediverso y utilizando el protocolo ActivityPub, es lo que Instagram nunca debió dejar de ser.
Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
Paul Frazee, CTO of Bluesky, speaks with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung about the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATProto) used by the Bluesky decentralized social network. They discuss why ATProto was created, as well as how it differs from the ActivityPub open standard, the scaling limitations of peer-to-peer solutions, cryptographic decentralized identifiers, and creating a protocol based on experience with distributed systems. They also examine the role of personal data servers, relays, and app views, the benefits of using domain names, allowing users to create algorithmic feeds and moderation tools, and the challenges of content moderation. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Paul Frazee is the CTO of Bluesky. He previously worked on the Beaker browser and the peer-to-peer social media protocol Secure Scuttlebutt. Paul discusses how Bluesky and ATProto got started, scaling up a social media site, what makes ATProto decentralized, lessons ATProto learned from previous peer-to-peer projects, and the challenges of content moderation. Episode transcript available here. My Bluesky profile. -- Related Links Bluesky ATProtocol ATProto for distributed systems engineers Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) ActivityPub Webfinger Beaker web browser Secure Scuttlebutt -- Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I am talking to Paul Frazee. He's the current CTO of bluesky, and he previously worked on other decentralized applications like Beaker and Secure Scuttlebutt. [00:00:15] Paul: Thanks for having me. What's bluesky [00:00:16] Jeremy: For people who aren't familiar with bluesky, what is it? [00:00:20] Paul: So bluesky is an open social network, simplest way to put it, designed in particular for high scale. That's kind of one of the big requirements that we had when we were moving into it. and it is really geared towards making sure that the operation of the social network is open amongst multiple different organizations. [00:00:44] So we're one of the operators, but other folks can come in, spin up the software, all the open source software, and essentially have a full node with a full copy of the network active users and have their users join into our network. And they all work functionally as one shared application. [00:01:03] Jeremy: So it, it sounds like it's similar to Twitter but instead of there being one Twitter, there could be any number and there is part of the underlying protocol that allows them to all connect to one another and act as one system. [00:01:21] Paul: That's exactly right. And there's a metaphor we use a lot, which is comparing to the web and search engines, which actually kind of matches really well. Like when you use Bing or Google, you're searching the same web. So on the AT protocol on bluesky, you use bluesky, you use some alternative client or application, all the same, what we're we call it, the atmosphere, all one shared network, [00:01:41] Jeremy: And more than just the, the client. 'cause I think sometimes when people think of a client, they'll think of, I use a web browser. I could use Chrome or Firefox, but ultimately I'm connecting to the same thing. But it's not just people running alternate clients, right? [00:01:57] Paul: Their own full backend to it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. The anchoring point on that being the fire hose of data that runs the entire thing is open as well. And so you start up your own application, you spin up a service that just pipes into that fire hose and taps into all the activity. History of AT Protocol [00:02:18] Jeremy: Talking about this underlying protocol maybe we could start where this all began so people get some context for where this all came from. [00:02:28] Paul: For sure. All right, so let's wind the clock back here in my brain. We started out 2022, right at the beginning of the year. We were formed as a, essentially a consulting company outside of Twitter with a contract with Twitter. And, uh, our goal was to build a protocol that could run, uh, Twitter, much like the way that we just described, which set us up with a couple of pretty specific requirements. [00:02:55] For one, we had to make sure that it could scale. And so that ended up being a really important first requirement. and we wanted to make sure that there was a strong kind of guarantees that the network doesn't ever get captured by any one operator. The idea was that Twitter would become the first, uh, adopter of the technology. [00:03:19] Other applications, other services would begin to take advantage of it and users would be able to smoothly migrate their accounts in between one or the other at any time. Um, and it's really, really anchored in a particular goal of just deconstructing monopolies. Getting rid of those moats that make it so that there's a kind of a lack of competition, uh, between these things. [00:03:44] And making sure that, if there was some kind of reason that you decided you're just not happy with what direction this service has been going, you move over to another one. You're still in touch with all the folks you were in touch with before. You don't lose your data. You don't lose your, your your follows. Those were the kind of initial requirements that we set out with. The team by and large came from, the decentralized web, movement, which is actually a pretty, large community that's been around since, I wanna say around 2012 is when we first kind of started to form. It got really made more specifically into a community somewhere around 2015 or 16, I wanna say. [00:04:23] When the internet archives started to host conferences for us. And so that gave us kind of a meeting point where all started to meet up there's kind of three schools of thought within that movement. There was the blockchain community, the, federation community, and the peer-to-peer community. [00:04:43] And so blockchain, you don't need to explain that one. You got Federation, which was largely ActivityPub Mastodon. And then peer-to-peer was IPFS, DAT protocol, um, secure scuttlebutt. But, those kinds of BitTorrent style of technologies really they were all kind of inspired by that. [00:05:02] So these three different kind of sub communities we're all working, independently on different ways to attack how to make these open applications. How do you get something that's a high scale web application without one corporation being the only operator? When this team came together in 2022, we largely sourced from the peer-to-peer group of the decentralized community. Scaling limitations of peer-to-peer [00:05:30] Paul: Personally, I've been working in the space and on those kinds of technologies for about 10 years at that stage. And, the other folks that were in there, you know, 5-10 each respectively. So we all had a fair amount of time working on that. And we had really kind of hit some of the limitations of doing things entirely using client devices. We were running into challenges about reliability of connections. Punching holes to the individual device is very hard. Synchronizing keys between the devices is very hard. Maintaining strong availability of the data because people's devices are going off and on, things like that. Even when you're using the kind of BitTorrent style of shared distribution, that becomes a challenge. [00:06:15] But probably the worst challenge was quite simply scale. You need to be able to create aggregations of a lot of behavior even when you're trying to model your application as largely peer wise interactions like messaging. You might need an aggregation of accounts that even exist, how do you do notifications reliably? [00:06:37] Things like that. Really challenging. And what I was starting to say to myself by the end of that kind of pure peer-to-peer stent was that it can't be rocket science to do a comment section. You know, like at some point you just ask yourself like, how, how hard are we willing to work to, to make these ideas work? [00:06:56] But, there were some pretty good pieces of tech that did come out of the peer-to-peer world. A lot of it had to do with what I might call a cryptographic structure. things like Merkel trees and advances within Merkel Trees. Ways to take data sets and reduce them down to hashes so that you can then create nice signatures and have signed data sets at rest at larger scales. [00:07:22] And so our basic thought was, well, all right, we got some pretty good tech out of this, but let's drop that requirement that it all run off of devices. And let's get some servers in there. And instead think of the entire network as a peer-to-peer mesh of servers. That's gonna solve your scale problem. [00:07:38] 'cause you can throw big databases at it. It's gonna solve your availability problems, it's gonna solve your device sync problems. But you get a lot of the same properties of being able to move data sets between services. Much like you could move them between devices in the peer-to-peer network without losing their identifiers because you're doing this in direction of, cryptographic identifiers to the current host. [00:08:02] That's what peer-to-peer is always doing. You're taking like a public key or hash and then you're asking the network, Hey, who has this? Well, if you just move that into the server, you get the same thing, that dynamic resolution of who's your active host. So you're getting that portability that we wanted real bad. [00:08:17] And then you're also getting that kind of in meshing of the different services where each of them is producing these data sets that they can sink from each other. So take peer-to-peer and apply it to the server stack. And that was our kind of initial thought of like, Hey, you know what? This might work. [00:08:31] This might solve the problems that we have. And a lot of the design fell out from that basic mentality. Crytographic identifiers and domain names [00:08:37] Jeremy: When you talk about these cryptographic identifiers, is the idea that anybody could have data about a person, like a message or a comment, and that could be hosted different places, but you would still know which person that originally came from. Is that, is that the goal there? [00:08:57] Paul: That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. You wanna create identification that supersedes servers, right? So when you think about like, if I'm using Twitter and I wanna know what your posts are, I go to twitter.com/jeremy, right? I'm asking Twitter and your ID is consequently always bound to Twitter. You're always kind of a second class identifier. [00:09:21] We wanted to boost up the user identifier to be kind of a thing freestanding on its own. I wanna just know what Jeremy's posts are. And then once you get into the technical system it'll be designed to figure out, okay, who knows that, who can answer that for you? And we use cryptographic identifiers internally. [00:09:41] So like all the data sets use these kind of long URLs to identify things. But in the application, the user facing part, we used domain names for people. Which I think gives the picture of how this all operates. It really moves the user accounts up into a free standing first class identifier within the system. [00:10:04] And then consequently, any application, whatever application you're using, it's really about whatever data is getting put into your account. And then that just exchanges between any application that anybody else is using. [00:10:14] Jeremy: So in this case, it sounds like the identifier is some long string that, I'm not sure if it's necessarily human readable or not. You're shaking your head no. [00:10:25] Paul: No. [00:10:26] Jeremy: But if you have that string, you know it's for a specific person. And since it's not really human readable, what you do is you put a layer on top of it which in this case is a domain that somebody can use to look up and find the identifier. [00:10:45] Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we just use DNS. Put a TXT record in there, map into that long string, or you could do a .well-known file on a web server if that's more convenient for you. And then the ID that's behind that, the non-human readable one, those are called DIDs which is actually a W3C spec. Those then map to a kind of a certificate. What you call a DID document that kind of confirms the binding by declaring what that domain name should be. So you get this bi-directional binding. And then that certificate also includes signing keys and active servers. So you pull down that certificate and that's how the discovery of the active server happens is through the DID system. What's stored on a PDS [00:11:29] Jeremy: So when you refer to an active server what is that server and what is that server storing? [00:11:35] Paul: It's kinda like a web server, but instead of hosting HTML, it's hosting a bunch of JSON records. Every user has their own document store of JSON documents. It's bucketed into collections. Whenever you're looking up somebody on the network you're gonna get access to that repository of data, jump into a collection. [00:11:58] This collection is their post collection. Get the rkey (Record Key), and then you're pulling out JSON at the end of it, which is just a structured piece of stuff saying here's the CreatedAt, here's the text, here's the type, things like that. One way you could look at the whole system is it's a giant, giant database network. Servers can change, signing keys change, but not DID [00:12:18] Jeremy: So if someone's going to look up someone's identifier, let's say they have the user's domain they have to go to some source, right? To find the user's data. You've mentioned, I think before, the idea that this is decentralized and by default I would, I would picture some kind of centralized resource where I send somebody a domain and then they give me back the identifier and the links to the servers. [00:12:46] So, so how does that work in practice where it actually can be decentralized? [00:12:51] Paul: I mentioned that your DID that non-human readable identifier, and that has that certificate attached to it that lists servers and signing keys and things like that. [00:13:00] So you're just gonna look up inside that DID document what that server is your data repository host. And then you contact that guy and say, all right, I'm told you're hosting this thing. Here's the person I'm looking for, hand over the hand over the data. It's really, you know, pretty straightforward. [00:13:18] The way that gets decentralized is by then to the fact that I could swap out that active server that's in my certificate and probably wanna rotate the signing keys 'cause I've just changed the, you know. I don't want to keep using the same signing keys as I was using previously because I just changed the authority. [00:13:36] So that's the migration change, change the hosting server, change out the signing keys. Somebody that's looking for me now, they're gonna load up my document, my DID document. They're gonna say, okay, new server, new keys. Pull down the data. Looks good, right? Matches up with the DID doc. [00:13:50] So that's how you get that level of portability. But when those changes happen, the DID doesn't change, right? The DID document changes. So there's the level of indirection there and that's pretty important because if you don't have a persistent identifier whenever you're trying to change out servers, all those backlinks are gonna break. [00:14:09] That's the kind of stuff that stops you from being able to do clean migrations on things like web-based services. the only real option is to go out and ask everybody to update their data. And when you're talking about like interactions on the social network, like people replying to each other, there's no chance, right? [00:14:25] Every time somebody moves you're gonna go back and modify all those records. You don't even control all the records from the top down 'cause they're hosted all over the web. So it's just, you can't do it. Generally we call this account portability, that you're kinda like phone number portability that you can change your host, but, so that part's portable, but the ID stays the same. [00:14:45] And keeping that ID the same is the real key to making sure that this can happen without breaking the whole system. [00:14:52] Jeremy: And so it, it sounds like there's the decentralized id, then there's the decentralized ID document that's associated with that points you to where the actual location of your, your data, your posts, your pictures and whatnot. but then you also mentioned that they could change servers. [00:15:13] So let's say somebody changes where their data is, is stored, that would change the servers, I guess, in their document. But [00:15:23] then how do all of these systems. Know okay. I need to change all these references to your old server, to these new servers, [00:15:32] Paul: Yeah. Well, the good news is that you only have to, you, you got the public data set of all the user's activity, and then you have like internal caches of where the current server is. You just gotta update those internal caches when you're trying to contact their server. Um, so it's actually a pretty minimal thing to just like update like, oh, they moved, just start talking to update my, my table, my Redis, that's holding onto that kind of temporary information, put it on ttl, that sort of thing. Most communication won't be between servers, it will be from event streams [00:16:01] Paul: And, honestly, in practice, a fair amount of the system for scalability reasons doesn't necessarily work by servers directly contacting each other. It's actually a little bit more like how, I told you before, I'm gonna use this metaphor a lot, the search engines with the web, right? What we do is we actually end up crawling the repositories that are out in the world and funneling them into event streams like a Kafka. And that allows the entire system to act like a data processing pipeline where you're just tapping into these event streams and then pushing those logs into databases that produce these large scale aggregations. [00:16:47] So a lot of the application behavior ends up working off of these event logs. If I reply to somebody, for instance, I don't necessarily, it's not, my server has to like talk to your server and say, Hey, I'm replying to you. What I do is I just publish a reply in my repository that gets shot out into the event logs, and then these aggregators pick up that the reply got created and just update their database with it. [00:17:11] So it's not that our hosting servers are constantly having to send messages with each other, you actually use these aggregators to pull together the picture of what's happening on the network. [00:17:22] Jeremy: Okay, so like you were saying, it's an event stream model where everybody publishes the events the things that they're doing, whether that's making a new post, making a reply, that's all being posted to this event stream. And then everybody who provides, I'm not sure if instances is the right term, but an implementation of the atmosphere protocol (Authenticated Transfer protocol). [00:17:53] They are listening for all those changes and they don't necessarily have to know that you moved servers because they're just listening for the events and you still have the same identifier. [00:18:10] Paul: Generally speaking. Yeah. 'cause like if you're listening to one of these event streams what you end up looking for is just the signature on it and making sure that the signature matches up. Because you're not actually having to talk to their live server. You're just listening to this relay that's doing this aggregation for you. [00:18:27] But I think actually to kind of give a little more clarity to what you're talking about, it might be a good idea to refocus how we're talking about the system here. I mentioned before that our goal was to make a high scale system, right? We need to handle a lot of data. If you're thinking about this in the way that Mastodon does it, the ActivityPub model, that's actually gonna give you the wrong intuition. Designing the protocol to match distributed systems practices (Event sourcing / Stream processing) [00:18:45] Paul: 'cause we chose a dramatically different system. What we did instead was we picked up, essentially the same practices you're gonna use for a data center, a high scale application data center, and said, all right, how do you tend to build these sorts of things? Well, what you're gonna do is you're gonna have, multiple different services running different purposes. [00:19:04] It gets pretty close to a microservices approach. You're gonna have a set of databases, and then you're going to, generally speaking for high scale, you're gonna have some kind of a kafka, some kind of a event log that you are tossing changes about the state of these databases into. And then you have a bunch of secondary systems that are tapping into the event log and processing that into, the large scale, databases like your search index, your, nice postgres of user profiles. [00:19:35] And that makes sure that you can get each of these different systems to perform really well at their particular task, and then you can detach them in their design. for instance, your primary storage can be just a key value store that scales horizontally. And then on the event log, you, you're using a Kafka that's designed to handle. [00:19:58] Particular semantics of making sure that the messages don't get dropped, that they come through at a particular throughput. And then you're using, for us, we're using like ScyllaDB for the big scale indexes that scales horizontally really well. So it's just different kind of profiles for different pieces. [00:20:13] If you read Martin Kleppman's book, data Intensive applications I think it's called or yeah. A lot of it gets captured there. He talks a lot about this kind of thing and it's sometimes called a kappa architecture is one way this is described, event sourcing is a similar term for it as well. [00:20:30] Stream processing. That's pretty standard practices for how you would build a traditional high scale service. so if you take, take this, this kind of microservice architecture and essentially say, okay, now imagine that each of the services that are a part of your data center could be hosted by anybody, not just within our data center, but outside of our data center as well and should be able to all work together. [00:20:57] Basically how the AT Proto is designed. We were talking about the data repository hosts. Those are just the primary data stores that they hold onto the user keys and they hold onto those JSON records. And then we have another service category we call Relay that just crawls those data repositories and sucks that in that fire hose of data we were talking about that event log. App views pull data from relay and produces indexes and threads [00:21:21] Paul: And then we have what we call app views that sit there and tail the index and tail the log, excuse me, and produce indexes off of it, they're listening to those events and then like, making threads like okay, that guy posted, that guy replied, that guy replied. [00:21:37] That's a thread. They assemble it into that form. So when you're running an application, you're talking to the AppView to read the network, and you're talking to the hosts to write to the network, and each of these different pieces sync up together in this open mesh. So we really took a traditional sort of data center model and just turned it inside out where each piece is a part of the protocol and communicate it with each other and therefore anybody can join into that mesh. [00:22:07] Jeremy: And to just make sure I am tracking the data repository is the data about the user. So it has your decentralized identifier, it has your replies, your posts, And then you have a relay, which is, its responsibility, is to somehow find all of those data repositories and collect them as they happen so that it can publish them to some kind of event stream. [00:22:41] And then you have the AppView which it's receiving messages from the relay as they happen, and then it can have its own store and index that for search. It can collect them in a way so that it can present them onto a UI. That's sort of thing that's the user facing part I suppose. [00:23:00] Paul: Yeah, that's exactly it. And again, it's, it's actually quite similar to how the web works. If you combine together the relay and the app view, you got all these different, you know, the web works where you got all these different websites, they're hosting their stuff, and then the search engine is going around, aggregating all that data and turning it into a search experience. [00:23:19] Totally the same model. It's just being applied to, more varieties of data, like structured data, like posts and, and replies, follows, likes, all that kinda stuff. And then instead of producing a search application at the end. I mean, it does that too, but it also produces a, uh, you know, timelines and threads and, um, people's profiles and stuff like that. [00:23:41] So it's actually a pretty bog standard way of doing, that's one of the models that we've seen work for large scale decentralized systems. And so we're just transposing it onto something that kind of is more focused towards social applications [00:23:58] Jeremy: So I think I'm tracking that the data repository itself, since it has your decentralized identifier and because the data is cryptographically signed, you know, it's from a specific user. I think the part that I am still not quite sure about is the relays. I, I understand if you run all the data repositories, you know where they are, so you know how to collect the data from them. [00:24:22] But if someone's running another system outside of your organization, how do they find, your data repositories? Or do they have to connect to your relay? What's the intention for that? Data hosts request relays to pull their data [00:24:35] Paul: That logic runs, again, really similar to how search engines find out about websites. So there is actually a way for, one of these, data hosts to contact Relay and say, Hey, I exist. You know, go ahead and get my stuff. And then it'll be up to the relay to decide like if they want it or not. [00:24:52] Right now, generally we're just like, yeah, you know, we, we want it. But as you can imagine, as the thing matures and gets to higher scale, there might be some trust kind of things to worry about, you know? So that's kind of the naive operation that currently exists. But over time as the network gets bigger and bigger, it'll probably involve some more traditional kind of spiraling behaviors because as more relays come into the system, each of these hosts, they're not gonna know who to talk to. Relays can bootstrap who they know about by talking to other relays [00:25:22] Paul: You're trying to start a new relay. What they're gonna do is they're going to discover all of the different users that exist in the system by looking at what data they have to start with. Probably involve a little bit of a manual feeding in at first, whenever I'm starting up a relay, like, okay, there's bluesky's relay. [00:25:39] Lemme just pull what they know. And then I go from there. And then anytime you discover a new user you don't have, you're like, oh, I wanna look them up. Pull them into the relay too. Right. So there's a, pretty straightforward, discovery process that you'll just have to bake into a relay to, to make sure you're calling as much the network as possible. ActivityPub federation vs AT Proto [00:25:57] Jeremy: And so I don't think we've defined the term federation, but maybe you could explain what that is and if that is what this is. [00:26:07] Paul: We are so unsure. [00:26:10] Jeremy: Okay. [00:26:11] Paul: Yeah. This has jammed is up pretty bad. Um, because I think everybody can, everybody pretty strongly agrees that ActivityPub is federation, right? and ActivityPub kind of models itself pretty similarly to email in a way, like the metaphors they use is that there's inboxes and outboxes and, and every ActivityPub server they're standing up the full vertical stack. [00:26:37] They set up, the primary hosting, the views of the data that's happening there. the interface for the application, all of it, pretty traditional, like close service, but then they're kind of using the perimeter. they're making that permeable by sending, exchanging, essentially mailing records to each other, right? [00:26:54] That's their kind of logic of how that works. And that's pretty much in line with, I think, what most people think of with Federation. Whereas what we're doing isn't like that we've cut, instead of having a bunch of vertical stacks communicating horizontally with each other, we kind of sliced in the other direction. [00:27:09] We sliced horizontally into, this microservices mesh and have all the different, like a total mix and match of different microservices between different operators. Is that federation? I don't know. Right. we tried to invent a term, didn't really work, you know, At the moment, we just kind of don't worry about it that much, see what happens, see what the world sort of has to say to us about it. [00:27:36] and beyond that, I don't know. [00:27:42] Jeremy: I think people probably are thinking of something like, say, a Mastodon instance when you're, when you're talking about everything being included, The webpage where you view the posts, the Postgres database that's keeping the messages. [00:28:00] And that same instance it's responsible for basically everything. [00:28:06] Paul: mm-Hmm [00:28:06] Jeremy: And I believe what you're saying is that the difference with, the authenticated transfer protocol, is that the [00:28:15] Paul: AT Protocol, Yep. [00:28:17] Jeremy: And the difference there is that you've, at the protocol level, you've split it up into the data itself, which can be validated completely separately from other parts of the system. [00:28:31] You could have the JSON files on your hard drive and somebody else can have that same JSON file and they would know that who the user is and that these are real things that user posted. That's like a separate part. And then the relay component that looks for all these different repositories that has people's data, that can also be its own independent thing where its job is just to output events. [00:29:04] And that can exist just by itself. It doesn't need the application part, the, the user facing part, it can just be this event stream on itself. and that's the part where it sounds like you can make decisions on who to, um, collect data from. I guess you have to agree that somebody can connect to you and get the users from your data repositories. [00:29:32] And likewise, other people that run relays, they also have to agree to let you pull the users from theirs. [00:29:38] Paul: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. [00:29:41] Jeremy: And so I think the Mastodon example makes sense. And, but I wonder if the underlying ActivityPub protocol forces you to use it in that way, in like a whole full application that talks to another full application. [00:29:55] Or is it more like that's just how people tend to use it and it's not necessarily a characteristic of the protocol. [00:30:02] Paul: Yeah, that's a good question actually. so, you know, generally what I would say is pretty core to the protocol is the expectations about how the services interact with each other. So the mailbox metaphor that's used in ActivityPub, that design, if I reply to you, I'll update my, local database with what I did, and then I'll send a message over to your server saying, Hey, by the way, add this reply. [00:30:34] I did this. And that's how they find out about things. That's how they find out about activity outside of their network. that's the part that as long as you're doing ActivityPub, I suspect you're gonna see reliably happening. That's that, I can say for sure that's a pretty tight requirement. [00:30:50] That's ActivityPub. If you wanted to split it up the way we're talking about, you could, I don't know, I don't know if you necessarily would want to. Because I don't know. That's actually, I think I'd have to dig into their stack a little bit more to see how meaningful that would be. I do know that there's some talk of introducing a similar kind of an aggregation method into the ActivityPub world which I believe they're also calling a relay and to make things even more complicated. [00:31:23] And NOSTR has a concept of a relay. So these are three different protocols that are using this term. I think you could do essentially what a search engine does on any of these things. You could go crawling around for the data, pull them into a fire hose, and then, tap into that aggregation to produce, bigger views of the network. [00:31:41] So that principle can certainly apply anywhere. AT Protocol, I think it's a little bit, we, we focused in so hard from that on that from the get go, we focus really hard on making sure that this, the data is, signed at rest. That's why it's called the authenticated transfer protocol. And that's a nice advantage to have when you're running a relay like this because it means that you don't have to trust the relay. [00:32:08] Like generally speaking, when I look at results from Google, you know, I'm trusting pretty well that they're accurately reflecting what's on the website, which is fine. You know, there's, that's not actually a huge risk or anything. But whenever you're trying to build entire applications and you're using somebody else's relay, you could really run into things where they say like, oh, you know what Paul tweeted the other day, you know, I hate dogs. [00:32:28] They're like, no, I didn't. That's a lie, right? You just sneak in Little lies like that over a while, it becomes a problem. So having the signatures on the data is pretty important. You know, if you're gonna be trying to get people to cooperate, uh, you gotta manage the trust model. I know that ActivityPub does have mechanisms for signed records. Issuers with ActivityPub identifiers [00:32:44] Paul: I don't know how deep they go if they could fully replace that, that utility. and then Mastodon ActivityPub, they also use a different identifier system that they're actually taking a look at DIDs um, right now, I don't know what's gonna happen there. We're, we're totally on board to, you know, give any kind of insight that we got working on 'em. [00:33:06] But at, at the moment, they use I think it's WebFinger based identifiers they look like emails. So you got host names in there and those identifiers are being used in the data records. So you don't get that continuous identifier. They actually do have to do that hey, I moved update your records sort of thing. [00:33:28] And that causes it to, I mean, it works like decently well, but not as well as it could. They got us to the point where it moves your profile over and you update all the folks that were following you so they can update their follow records, but your posts, they're not coming right, because that's too far into that mesh of interlinking records. [00:33:48] There's just no chance. So that's kind of the upper limit on that, it's a different set of choices and trade-offs. You're always kind of asking like, how important is the migration? Does that work out? Anyway, now I'm just kind of digging into differences between the two here. Issues with an identifier that changes and updating old records [00:34:07] Jeremy: So you were saying that with ActivityPub, all of the instances need to be notified that you've changed your identifier but then all of the messages that they had already received. They don't point to the new identifier somehow. [00:34:24] Paul: Yeah. You run into basically just the practicalities of actual engineering with that is what happens, right? Because if you imagine you got a multimillion user social network. They got all their posts. Maybe the user has like, let's say a thousand posts and 10,000 likes. And that, activity can range back three years. [00:34:48] Let's say they changed their identifier, and now you need to change the identifier of all those records. If you're in a traditional system that's already a tall order, you're going back and rewriting a ton of indexes, Anytime somebody replied to you, they have these links to your posts, they're now, you've gotta update the identifiers on all of those things. [00:35:11] You could end up with a pretty significant explosion of rewrites that would have to occur. Now that's, that's tough. If you're in a centralized model. If you're in a decentralized one, it's pretty much impossible because you're now, when you notify all the other servers like, Hey, this, this changed. How successful are all of them at actually updating that, that those, those pointers, it's a good chance that there's things are gonna fall out of correctness. that's just a reality of it. And if, so, if you've got a, if you've got a mutable identifier, you're in trouble for migrations. So the DID is meant to keep it permanent and that ends up being the anchoring point. If you lose control of your DID well, that's it. Managing signing keys by server, paper key reset [00:35:52] Paul: Your, your account's done. We took some pretty traditional approaches to that, uh, where the signing keys get managed by your hosting server instead of like trying to, this may seem like really obvious, but if you're from the decentralization community, we spend a lot of time with blockchains, like, Hey, how do we have the users hold onto their keys? [00:36:15] You know, and the tooling on that is getting better for what it's worth. We're starting to see a lot better key pair management in like Apple's ecosystem and Google's ecosystem, but it's still in the range of like, nah, people lose their keys, you know? So having the servers manage those is important. [00:36:33] Then we have ways of exporting paper keys so that you could kind of adversarially migrate if you wanted to. That was in the early spec we wanted to make sure that this portability idea works, that you can always migrate your accounts so you can export a paper key that can override. [00:36:48] And that was how we figured that out. Like, okay, yeah, we don't have to have everything getting signed by keys that are on the user's devices. We just need these master backup keys that can say, you know what? I'm done with that host. No matter what they say, I'm overriding what they, what they think. and that's how we squared that one. [00:37:06] Jeremy: So it seems like one of the big differences with account migration is that with ActivityPub, when you move to another instance, you have to actually change your identifier. [00:37:20] And with the AT protocol you're actually not allowed to ever change that identifier. And maybe what you're changing is just you have say, some kind of a lookup, like you were saying, you could use a domain name to look that up, get a reference to your decentralized identifier, but your decentralized identifier it can never change. [00:37:47] Paul: It, it, it can't change. Yeah. And it shouldn't need to, you know what I mean? It's really a total disaster kind of situation if that happens. So, you know that it's designed to make sure that doesn't happen in the applications. We use these domain name handles to, to identify folks. And you can change those anytime you want because that's really just a user facing thing. [00:38:09] You know, then in practice what you see pretty often is that you may, if you change hosts, if you're using, we, we give some domains to folks, you know, 'cause like not everybody has their own domain. A lot of people do actually, to our surprise, people actually kind of enjoy doing that. But, a lot of folks are just using like paul.bsky.social as their handle. [00:38:29] And so if you migrated off of that, you probably lose that. Like your, so your handle's gonna change, but you're not losing the followers and stuff. 'cause the internal system isn't using paul.bsky.social, it's using that DID and that DID stays the same. Benefits of domain names, trust signal [00:38:42] Jeremy: Yeah. I thought that was interesting about using the domain names, because when you like you have a lot of users, everybody's got their own sub-domain. You could have however many millions of users. Does that become, does that become an issue at some point? [00:39:00] Paul: Well, it's a funny thing. I mean like the number of users, like that's not really a problem 'cause you run into the same kind of namespace crowding problem that any service is gonna have, right? Like if you just take the subdomain part of it, like the name Paul, like yeah, only, you only get to have one paul.bsky.social. [00:39:15] so that part of like, in terms of the number of users, that part's fine I guess. Uh, as fine as ever. where gets more interesting, of course is like, really kind of around the usability questions. For one, it's, it's not exactly the prettiest to always have that B sky.social in there. If we, if we thought we, if we had some kind of solution to that, we would use it. [00:39:35] But like the reality is that, you know, now we're, we've committed to the domain name approach and some folks, you know, they kind of like, ah, that's a little bit ugly. And we're like, yeah that's life. I guess the plus side though is that you can actually use like TLD the domain. It's like on pfrazee.com. [00:39:53] that starts to get more fun. it can actually act as a pretty good trust signal in certain scenarios. for instance, well-known domain names like nytimes.com, strong authentication right there, we don't even need a blue check for it. Uh, similarly the .gov, domain name space is tightly regulated. [00:40:14] So you actually get a really strong signal out of that. Senator Wyden is one of our users and so he's, I think it's wyden.senate.gov and same thing, strong, you know, strong identity signal right there. So that's actually a really nice upside. So that's like positives, negatives. [00:40:32] That trust signal only works so far. If somebody were to make pfrazee.net, then that can be a bit confusing. People may not be paying attention to .com vs .net, so it's not, I don't wanna give the impression that, ah, we've solved blue checks. It's a complicated and multifaceted situation, but, it's got some juice. [00:40:54] It's also kinda nice too, 'cause a lot of folks that are doing social, they're, they've got other stuff that they're trying to promote, you know? I'm pretty sure that, uh, nytimes would love it if you went to their website. And so tying it to their online presence so directly like that is a really nice kind of feature of it. [00:41:15] And tells a I think a good story about what we're trying to do with an open internet where, yeah, everybody has their space on the internet where they can do whatever they want on that. And that's, and then thethese social profiles, it's that presence showing up in a shared space. It's all kind of part of the same thing. [00:41:34] And that that feels like a nice kind of thing to be chasing, you know? And it also kind of speaks well to the naming worked out for us. We chose AT Protocol as a name. You know, we back acronymed our way into that one. 'cause it was a @ simple sort of thing. But like, it actually ended up really reflecting the biggest part of it, which is that it's about putting people's identities at the front, you know, and make kind of promoting everybody from a second class identity that's underneath Twitter or Facebook or something like that. [00:42:03] Up into. Nope, you're freestanding. You exist as a person independently. Which is what a lot of it's about. [00:42:12] Jeremy: Yeah, I think just in general, not necessarily just for bluesky, if people had more of an interest in getting their own domain, that would be pretty cool if people could tie more of that to something you basically own, right? [00:42:29] I mean, I guess you're leasing it from ICANN or whatever, but, [00:42:33] yeah, rather than everybody having an @Gmail, Outlook or whatever they could actually have something unique that they control more or less. [00:42:43] Paul: Yeah. And we, we actually have a little experimental service for registering domain names that we haven't integrated into the app yet because we just kind of wanted to test it out and, and kind of see what that appetite is for folks to register domain names way higher than you'd think we did that early on. [00:43:01] You know, it's funny when you're coming from decentralization is like an activist space, right? Like it's a group of people trying to change how this tech works. And sometimes you're trying to parse between what might come off as a fascination of technologists compared to what people actually care about. [00:43:20] And it varies, you know, the domain name thing to a surprising degree, folks really got into that. We saw people picking that up almost straight away. More so than certainly we ever predicted. And I think that's just 'cause I guess it speaks to something that people really get about the internet at this point. [00:43:39] Which is great. We did a couple of other things that are similar and we saw varied levels of adoption on them. We had similar kinds of user facing, opening up of the system with algorithms and with moderation. And those have both been pretty interesting in and of themselves. Custom feed algorithms [00:43:58] Paul: So with algorithms, what we did was we set that up so that anybody can create a new feed algorithm. And this was kind of one of the big things that you run into whenever you use the app. If you wanted to create a new kind of for you feed you can set up a service somewhere that's gonna tap into that fire hose, right? [00:44:18] And then all it needs to do is serve a JSON endpoint. That's just a list of URLs, but like, here's what should be in that feed. And then the bluesky app will pick that up and, and send that, hydrate in the content of the posts and show that to folks. I wanna say this is a bit of a misleading number and I'll explain why but I think there's about 35,000 of these feeds that have been created. [00:44:42] Now, the reason it's little misleading is that, I mean, not significantly, but it's not everybody went, sat down in their IDE and wrote these things. Essentially one of our users created, actually multiple of our users made little platforms for building these feeds, which is awesome. That's the kinda thing you wanna see because we haven't gotten around to it. [00:44:57] Our app still doesn't give you a way to make these things. But they did. And so lots of, you know, there it is. Cool. Like, one, one person made a kind of a combinatorial logic thing that's like visual almost like scratch, it's like, so if it has this hashtag and includes these users, but not those users, and you're kind of arranging these blocks and that constructs the feed and then probably publish it on your profile and then folks can use it, you know? [00:45:18] And um, so that has been I would say fairly successful. Except, we had one group of hackers do put in a real effort to make a replacement for you feed, like magic algorithmic feed kind of thing. And then they kind of kept up going for a while and then ended up giving up on it. Most of what we see are actually kind of weird niche use cases for feeds. [00:45:44] You get straightforward ones, like content oriented ones like a cat feed, politics feed, things like that. It's great, some of those are using ML detection, so like the cat feed is ML detection, so sometimes you get like a beaver in there, but most of the time it's a cat. And then we got some ones that are kind of a funny, like change in the dynamic of freshness. [00:46:05] So, uh, or or selection criteria, things that you wouldn't normally see. Um, but because they can do whatever they want, you know, they try it out. So like the quiet posters ended up being a pretty successful one. And that one just shows people you're following that don't post that often when they do just those folks. [00:46:21] It ended up being, I use that one all the time because yeah, like they get lost in the noise. So it's like a way to keep up with them. Custom moderation and labeling [00:46:29] Paul: The moderation one, that one's a a real interesting situation. What we did there essentially we wanted to make sure that the moderation system was capable of operating across different apps so that they can share their work, so to speak. [00:46:43] And so we created what we call labeling. And labeling is a metadata layer that exists over the network. Doesn't actually live in the normal data repositories. It uses a completely different synchronization because a lot of these labels are getting produced. It's just one of those things where the engineering characteristics of the labels is just too different from the rest of the system. [00:47:02] So we created a separate synchronization for this, and it's really kind of straightforward. It's, here's a URL and here's a string saying something like NSFW or Gore, or you know, whatever. then those get merged onto the records brought down by the client and then the client, you know, based on the user's preferences. [00:47:21] We'll put like warning screens up, hide it, stuff like that. So yeah, these label streams can then, you know, anybody that's running a moderation service can, you know, are publishing these things and so anybody can subscribe to 'em. And you get that kind of collaborative thing we're always trying to do with this. [00:47:34] And we had some users set up moderation services and so then as an end user you find it, it looks like a profile in the app and you subscribe to it and you configure it and off you go. That one has had probably the least amount of adoption throughout all of 'em. It's you know, moderation. [00:47:53] It's a sticky topic as you can imagine, challenging for folks. These moderation services, they do receive reports, you know, like whenever I'm reporting a post, I choose from all my moderation services who I wanna report this to. what has ended up happening more than being used to actually filter out like subjective stuff is more kind of like either algorithmic systems or what you might call informational. [00:48:21] So the algorithmic ones are like, one of the more popular ones is a thing that's looking for, posts from other social networks. Like this screenshot of a Reddit post or a Twitter post or a Facebook post. Because, which you're kinda like, why, you know, but the thing is some folks just get really tired of seeing screenshots from the other networks. [00:48:40] 'cause often it's like, look what this person said. Can you believe it? You know, it's like, ah. Okay, I've had enough. So one of our users aendra made a moderate service that just runs an ML that detects it, labels it, and then folks that are tired of it, they subscribe to it and they're just hide it, you know? [00:48:57] And so it's like a smart filter kind of thing that they're doing. you know, hypothetically you could do that for things like spiders, you know, like you've got arachniphobia, things like that. that's like a pretty straightforward, kind of automated way of doing it. Which takes a lot of the spice, you know, outta out of running moderation. [00:49:15] So that users have been like, yeah, yeah, okay, we can do that. [00:49:20] Those are user facing ways that we tried to surface the. Decentralized principle, right? And make take advantage of how this whole architecture can have this kind of a pluggability into it. Users can self host now [00:49:33] Paul: But then really at the end of the day, kind of the important core part of it is those pieces we were talking about before, the hosting, the relay and the, the applications themselves, having those be swappable in completely. so we tend to think of those as kind of ranges of infrastructure into application and then into particular client side stuff. [00:49:56] So a lot of folks right now, for instance, they're making their own clients to the application and those clients are able to do customizations, add features, things like that, as you might expect, [00:50:05] but most of them are not running their own backend. They're just using our backend. But at any point, it's right there for you. You know, you can go ahead and, and clone that software and start running the backend. If you wanted to run your own relay, you could go ahead and go all the way to that point. [00:50:19] You know, if you wanna do your own hosting, you can go ahead and do that. Um, it's all there. It's really just kind of a how much effort your project really wants to take. That's the kind of systemically important part. That's the part that makes sure that the overall mission of de monopolizing, social media online, that's where that really gets enforced. [00:50:40] Jeremy: And so someone has their own data repository with their own users and their own relay. they can request that your relay collect the information from their own data repositories. And that's, that's how these connections get made. [00:50:58] Paul: Yeah. And, and we have a fair number of those already. Fair number of, we call those the self hosters right? And we got I wanna say 75 self hoster going right now, which is, you know, love to see that be more, but it's, really the folks that if you're running a service, you probably would end up doing that. [00:51:20] But the folks that are just doing it for themselves, it's kind of the, the nerdiest of the nerds over there doing that. 'cause it doesn't end up showing itself in the, in the application at all. Right? It's totally abstracted away. So it, that, that one's really about like, uh, measure your paranoia kind of thing. [00:51:36] Or if you're just proud of the self-hosting or, or curious, you know, that that's kind of where that sits at the moment. AT Protocol beyond bluesky [00:51:42] Jeremy: We haven't really touched on the fact that there's this underlying protocol and everything we've been discussing has been centered around the bluesky social network where you run your own, instance of the relay and the data repositories with the purpose of talking to bluesky, but the protocol itself is also intended to be used for other uses, right? [00:52:06] Paul: Yeah. It's generic. The data types are set up in a way that anybody can build new data types in the system. there's a couple that have already begun, uh, front page, which is kind of a hacker news clone. There's Smoke Signals, which is a events app. There's Blue Cast, which is like a Twitter spaces, clubhouse kind of thing. [00:52:29] Those are the folks that are kind of willing to trudge into the bleeding edge and deal with some of the rough edges there for pretty I think, obvious reasons. A lot of our work gets focused in on making sure that the bluesky app and that use case is working correctly. [00:52:43] But we are starting to round the corner on getting to a full kind of how to make alternative applications state. If you go to the atproto.com, there's a kind of a introductory tutorial where that actually shows that whole stack and how it's done. So it's getting pretty close. There's a couple of still things that we wanna finish up. [00:53:04] jeremy so in a way you can almost think of it as having an eventually consistent data store on the network, You can make a traditional web application with a relational database, and the source of truth can actually be wherever that data repository is stored on the network. [00:53:24] paul Yeah, that's exactly, it is an eventually consistent system. That's exactly right. The source of truth is there, is their data repo. And that relational database that you might be using, I think the best way to think about it is like secondary indexes or computed indexes, right? They, reflect the source of truth. [00:53:43] Paul: This is getting kind of grandiose. I don't tend to poses in these terms, but it is almost like we're trying to have an OS layer at a protocol level. It's like having your own [00:53:54] Network wide database or network-wide file system, you know, these are the kind of facilities you expect out of a platform like an os And so the hope would be that this ends up getting that usage outside of just the initial social, uh, app, like what we're doing here. [00:54:12] If it doesn't end up working out that way, if this ends up, you know, good for the Twitter style use case, the other one's not so much, and that's fine too. You know, that's, that's our initial goal, but we, we wanted to make sure to build it in a way that like, yeah, there's evolve ability to, it keeps, it, keeps it, make sure that you're getting kinda the most utility you can out of it. Peer-to-peer and the difficulty of federated queries [00:54:30] Jeremy: Yeah, I can see some of the parallels to some of the decentralized stuff that I, I suppose people are still working on, but more on the peer-to-peer side, where the idea was that I can have a network host this data. but, and in this case it's a network of maybe larger providers where they could host a bunch of people's data versus just straight peer to peer where everybody has to have a piece of it. [00:54:57] And it seems like your angle there was really the scalability part. [00:55:02] Paul: It was the scalability part. And there's great work happening in peer-to-peer. There's a lot of advances on it that are still happening. I think really the limiter that you run into is running queries against aggregations of data. Because you can get the network, you know, BitTorrent sort of proved that you can do distributed open horizontal scaling of hosting. [00:55:29] You know, that basic idea of, hey, everybody's got a piece and you sync it from all these different places. We know you can do things like that. What nobody's been able to really get into a good place is running, queries across large data sets. In the model like that, there's been some research in what is, what's called federated queries, which is where you're sending a query to multiple different nodes and asking them to fulfill as much of it as they can and then collating the results back. But it didn't work that well. That's still kind of an open question and until that is in a place where it can like reliably work and at very large scales, you're just gonna need a big database somewhere that does give the properties that you need. You need these big indexes. And once we were pretty sure of that requirement, then from there you start asking, all right, what else about the system [00:56:29] Could we make easier if we just apply some more traditional techniques and merge that in with the peer-to-peer ideas? And so key hosting, that's an obvious one. You know, availability, let's just have a server. It's no big deal. But you're trying to, you're trying to make as much of them dumb as possible. [00:56:47] So that they have that easy replaceability. Moderation challenges [00:56:51] Jeremy: Earlier you were talking a a little bit about the moderation tools that people could build themselves. There was some process where people could label posts and then build their own software to determine what a feed should show per a person. [00:57:07] Paul: Mm-Hmm [00:57:07] Jeremy: But, but I think before that layer for the platform itself, there's a base level of moderation that has to happen. [00:57:19] Paul: yeah. [00:57:20] Jeremy: And I wonder if you could speak to, as the app has grown, how that's handled. [00:57:26] Paul: Yeah. the, you gotta take some requirements in moderation pretty seriously to start. And with decentralization. It sometimes that gets a little bit dropped. You need to have systems that can deal with questions about CSAM. So you got those big questions you gotta answer and then you got stuff that's more in the line of like, alright, what makes a good platform? [00:57:54] What kind of guarantees are we trying to give there? So just not legal concerns, but you know, good product experience concerns. That's something we're in the realm of like spam and and abusive behavior and things like that. And then you get into even more fine grain of like what is a person's subjective preference and how can they kind of make their thing better? [00:58:15] And so you get a kind of a telescoping level of concerns from the really big, the legal sort of concerns. And then the really small subjective preference kind of concerns. And that actually that telescoping maps really closely to the design of the system as well. Where the further you get up in the kind of the, in that legal concern territory, you're now in core infrastructure. [00:58:39] And then you go from infrastructure, which is the relay down into the application, which is kind of a platform and then down into the client. And that's where we're having those labelers apply. And each of them, as you kind of move closer to infrastructure, the importance of the decision gets bigger too. [00:58:56] So you're trying to do just legal concerns with the relay right? Stuff that you objectively can, everybody's in agreement like Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, no bigs don't include that. The reason is that at the relay level, you're anybody that's using your relay, they depend on the decisions you're making, that sort of selection you're doing, any filtering you're doing, they don't get a choice after that. [00:59:19] So you wanna try to keep that focus really on legal concerns and doing that well. so that applications that are downstream of it can, can make their choices. The applications themselves, you know, somebody can run a parallel I guess you could call it like a parallel platform, so we got bluesky doing the microblogging use case, other people can make an application doing the microblogging use case. So there's, there's choice that users can easily switch, easily enough switch between, it's still a big choice. [00:59:50] So we're operating that in many ways. Like any other app nowadays might do it. You've got policies, you know, for what's acceptable on the network. you're still trying to keep that to be as, you know, objective as possible, make it fair, things like that. You want folks to trust your T&S team. Uh, but from the kind of systemic decentralization question, you get to be a little bit more opinionated. [01:00:13] Down all the way into the client with that labeling system where you can, you know, this is individuals turning on and off preferences. You can be as opinionated as you want on that letter. And that's how we have basically approached this. And in a lot of ways, it really just comes down to, in the day to day, you're the moderation, the volume of moderation tasks is huge. [01:00:40] You don't actually have high stakes moderation decisions most of the time. Most of 'em are you know pretty straightforward. Shouldn't have done that. That's gotta go. You get a couple every once in a while that are a little spicier or a policy that's a little spicier. And it probably feels pretty common to end users, but that just speaks to how much moderation challenges how the volume of reports and problems that come through. [01:01:12] And we don't wanna make it so that the system is seized up, trying to decentralize itself. You know, it needs to be able to operate day to day. What you wanna make is, you know, back pressure, you know, uh, checks on that power so that if an application or a platform does really start to go down the wrong direction on moderation, then people can have this credible exit. [01:01:36] This way of saying, you know what, that's a problem. We're moving from here. And somebody else can come in with different policies that better fit people's people's expectations about what should be done at, at these levels. So yeah, it's not about taking away authority, it's about checking authority, you know, kind of a checks and balances mentality. [01:01:56] Jeremy: And high level, 'cause you saying how there's such a high volume of, of things that you know what it is, you'd know you wanna remove it, but there's just so much of it. So is there, do you have automated tools to label these things? Do you have a team of moderators? Do they have to understand all the different languages that are coming through your network? [01:02:20] Yes, yes, yes and yes. Yeah. You use every tool at your disposal to, to stay on top of it. cause you're trying to move as fast as you can, folks. The problems showing up, you know, the slower you are to respond to it, the, the more irritating it is to folks. Likewise, if you make a, a missed call, if somebody misunderstands what's happening, which believe me, is sometimes just figuring out what the heck is going on is hard. [01:02:52] Paul: People's beefs definitely surface up to the moderation misunderstanding or wrong application. Moderators make mistakes so you're trying to maintain a pretty quick turnaround on this stuff. That's tough. And you, especially when to move fast on some really upsetting content that can make its way through, again, illegal stuff, for instance, but more videos, stuff like that, you know, it's a real problem. [01:03:20] So yeah, you're gotta be using some automated systems as well. Clamping down on bot rings and spam. You know, you can imagine that's gotten a lot harder thanks to LLMs just doing text analysis by dumb statistics of what they're talking about that doesn't even work anymore. [01:03:41] 'cause the, the LLMs are capable of producing consistently varied responses while still achieving the same goal of plugging a online betting site of some kind, you know? So we do use kind of dumb heuristic systems for when it works, but boy, that won't work for much longer. [01:04:03] And we've already got cases where it's, oh boy, so the moderation's in a dynamic place to say the least right now with, with LLMs coming in, it was tough before and
Capítulo 2681 en el que te cuento el reciente cambio de Mastodon hacia una estructura sin fines de lucro europea y lo que esto significa para el futuro de las redes sociales descentralizadas. Analizamos cómo la plataforma busca ofrecer una alternativa a las grandes redes sociales y qué papel juega el protocolo ActivityPub en la creación de un internet más autónomo y centrado en la comunidad.Apoya a este podcast suscribiéndote a Emilcar Daily Premium, con acceso anticipado, sonido HD, sin publicidad todos sus capítulos, de lunes a viernes. Haz clic en este enlace. ¿Tienes dudas sobre cómo se hace? Mira este tutorial.
Quels mots incarneront 2025 ? Pour anticiper cette nouvelle année, nous avons sélectionné 10 termes qui, selon nous, seront au cœur de l'actualité. Tendances, enjeux globaux ou concepts émergents : découvrez les mots qui façonneront nos discussions en 2025. Contraction de “fédération” et “univers”, le Fediverse est un réseau de serveurs indépendants connectés entre eux. Il est composé de plusieurs plateformes, appelées “instances” qui communiquent par un “protocole”, un langage commun appelé ActivityPub. C'est comme si tous vos réseaux sociaux étaient regroupés au même endroit. On a par exemple des plateformes de micro-blogging comme X-twitter, la plus connue est Mastodon, mais il y a aussi Firefish ou Pleroma. Si vous êtes fan de blogging visuel comme Instagram, il y a Pixelfeld. Pour la vidéo, c'est Peer Tube qui remplace youtube et Friendica remplace Facebook. Comment fonctionne le Fediverse ? Quel intérêt pour l'utilisateur ? Le Fediverse peut-il remplacer nos réseaux sociaux ? Écoutez la suite de cet épisode de Maintenant vous savez ! Un podcast Bababam Originals, écrit et réalisé par Hugo de l'Estrac. À écouter ensuite : [RETOUR SUR 2024] Qu'est-ce que le nouveau secrétariat d'Etat à l'Intelligence Artificielle ? Nos mots de passe sont-ils assez sécurisés ? Instagram : qu'est-ce que le compte adolescent, cette nouvelle fonctionnalité ? Retrouvez tous les épisodes de "Maintenant vous savez". Suivez Bababam sur Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we talk about Mastodon, Threads, and twttr.We also discuss social platform clones, user exoduses, and communication fractures.Recommended Book: Invisible Rulers by Renée DiRestaTranscriptIn 2006, a prototype of a software project called twttr, t-w-t-t-r, was developed by Jack Dorsey and Florian Weber, that name used because the full twitter.com domain, the word with all its vowels, was already owned and in use, and because the vowel-less version of the word only had five letters, which aligned with SMS short codes for the US, which were basically shorthand versions of telephone numbers that were used in lieu of such numbers by mobile network operators at the time.Going without vowels was also super trendy in Silicon Valley back then, due to the flourishing of online success stories like Flickr.Twitter, in that early incarnation, was meant to be a one-to-many SMS service, which means sending text messages from one phone to multiple phones, rather than one to one, which was the default.This early prototype was used internally at Odeo, which was an early-2000s web-based media directory, founded by some of the same people who eventually founded Twitter as a company, and random fun fact, Kevin Systrom who eventually cofounded Instagram, was an intern at Odeo one summer, back in 2005, before the company was sold in 2007.Twitter was spun out as its own company the same year Odeo was sold, and by 2009 it had become the hot new thing in the burgeoning world of the web—folks were sending tens of thousands of tweets, messages that were shared one-to-many, though online, on the web, instead of via SMS, by the end of 2007, and that was up to 50 million a day by early 2010.The whole concept of Twitter, then, from its name, which was initially predicated on SMS short codes, to its famous 140-character limit, was based on earlier technology, that of text messages, and that sort of limitation—which has in the years since been messed with a bit, the company slowly adding more capabilities, including the sharing of images and videos and other media types—but those limitations have in part helped define this platform from its peers, as while Facebook expanded and expanded and expanded to gobble up all of its general-purpose social networking competitors, Instagram dominated the photo-posting space, and YouTube has locked down the long-form video world for more than a decade, twitter held its own as a less-sprawling, less successful by most metrics, but arguably more influential network because it was a place that was optimized for concision and up-to-the-minute conversation, as opposed to every other possible thing it could be.This meant that while it didn't have the same billion-plus user base, and it didn't have the ever-growing ad-revenue that Meta's platforms could claim, it was almost always the more culturally relevant network, its users sharing more up-to-date information, its communities generating more memes, which were then spread to other networks days or weeks later, and it became a hotbed of debate and exclusive information from journalists, politicians, and business owners.A lot changed when Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk bought the network in October of 2022, changing the name to X in mid-2023, and pivoting the company dramatically in basically every way: removing a lot of those earlier limitations, cutting the number of employees by something like 80%, and losing a lot of advertisers because of his many ideological statements and political stances—including his backing of former president and now president-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election.What I'd like to talk about today are the twitter clones that have popped up in recent years, and one in particular that, despite its still-small size and arguable underdog status, is being heralded as the possible successor of Twitter—in that original, influential and scrappy sense—and what makes this network, Bluesky, different from other would-be successors in this space.—The leadership at X, including owner Musk, recently promoted a new feature on the app that refocuses attention away from buttons like likes and shares in favor of views—a metric of engagement that some analysts have claimed is meant to conceal the fact that the network is seeing a lot less actual, human engagement, and because it feeds people posts it wants them to see, this change allows them to artificially inflate the seeming activity on these posts for advertising purposes: they can say, hey look how much attention these posts are getting, please buy some ads, and that allows them to charge a higher price than if they were using those more conventional engagement metrics, which are apparently collapsing.As a company, X has been hemorrhaging money since Musk took over, its ad revenue, which makes up the majority of its income, dropping by nearly half from 2022 to 2023, and it lost another 24% from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024.One estimate released in November of 2024 suggests that X may have missed out on nearly $6 billion in lost ad revenue since Musk took over in 2022, mostly because of all the decisions he's made—including basically going to war with many of the company's top advertisers, publicly criticizing and threatening them for not paying more and buying more ads—but also his many foot-in-mouth statements and, at times, support of extremist causes and characters.He's attempted to bring some of those advertisers back, with mixed success, as the ones that have returned after boycotts have usually invested far less than in the past, and most of the ad-buyers that have filled the gaps are paying a lot less per ad unit than before, and are generally of a lower quality: a lot of cheaply products from low-grade Chinese factories, scams of various sorts, and/or products sold by companies that are politically conservative culture-warriors, aimed at the network's increasingly right-leaning and far-right audience; a bit like what we've seen on Fox News over the past decade or so, following waves of sexual assault and other scandals on that network, which led to similar advertiser exoduses.It's also been estimated that the network lost a substantial portion of its total user-base following Musk's takeover, including something like a third of all users in the UK and around a fifth in the United States, all just in 2024, up till the month of September.That loss of revenue and users was enough to cause Fidelity, which owns a multi-million-dollar stake in X, to write down the value of its investment by more than 75%; in July of 2024, it estimated the company, which was purchased for about $44 billion by Musk was only worth about $9.4 billion; a substantial loss for them and their investment, but also for all other shareholders.All of which leads up to what happened in the wake of the US's most recent presidential election, during which Musk shelled out more than $100 million to support Trump's campaign, while also pulling out all the stops to promote the former president on X—something that many users weren't too keen on, as the owners of other social networks have been criticized and threatened in the past for showing any hint of political bias in their business decisions or personal life, and this was incredibly overt.This heavy-handed biasing of the network toward Trump, and that very public support of the candidate by X's owner, sparked a new exodus from the platform, some people simply quitting social media entirely, at least for a while, but others looking for something of the same, and thus checking out the twitter-clones that have popped up over the past handful of years; the majority of which only actually gained real momentum in the wake of Musk's takeover and rebranding of the network a few years ago.One of those twitter-alternatives, Mastodon, attracted a lot of early attention because of what it offered that twitter, and other mainstream social networks, did not: an open source platform based on the ActivityPub protocol, which means it can connected to other ActivityPub-capable social networks.So in theory at least, you can have a profile on a Mastodon instance—which a self-hosted Mastodon network, a social platform island of sorts that is connected to other such islands, the totality of the social network made up of a huge number of such instances, all interconnected in various ways, and each offering different rules and focuses—you can have that profile on that island function on other networks beyond Mastodon, as well.And that's interesting because it means your work, your posts and conversations, are all more portable, allowing you to move to different networks if you choose, without losing your history and connections and credibility, because it's all compatible with other networks.So it's almost like having a Facebook profile that you can also use on Twitter and Instagram and YouTube, if all those networks played well together and shared information and post types between each other; that's the promise of a protocol like ActivityPub and a network like Mastodon.Mastodon was made public in 2016 as a nonprofit, has basically the same feature-set as pre-Musk twitter, and while it had already gained a steady stream of users from previous upsets at networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, among other more mainstream networks, it attained a huge number of new users in 2022 on the news that Musk would be taking over Twitter, hitting around 2.5 million monthly active users by the end of that year.That number has since dropped to just under a million as of September 2024, suggesting that the initial wave of enthusiasm has crested; though the platform continues to see a lot of support within some online communities, and its interactivity with other networks, including Meta's Threads, which has also added ActivityPub functionality, means that its numbers will always be a little weird, as folks can read Mastodon content and interact with Mastodon users from other, connected networks.Speaking of which, Threads is a twitter-clone that was released by Facebook and Instagram parent-company Meta in July of 2023, and it attained more than 100 million users in just five days, which set a new record for the rate of user-attainment.It took a little while for the network to be released beyond the US, especially in the EU, due to regulatory concerns, and an earlier version of the app was more of a Snapchat-clone, but that one did badly enough with users that the company pulled it from app stores and reused the brand for this new app a few years after that failed experiment.Threads was able to achieve that high adoption rate in part because it promoted the app heavily on Instagram and Facebook, and in part because of Musk's takeover of, and changes to Twitter. Folks looking for a Twitter-alternative, but who didn't want to deal with the comparable complexity of something like Mastodon flooded into this new network, and Meta's decision to push politics and other serious discussions to the algorithmic back-burner made it a friendly space for brands and influencers who didn't want to be associated with the chaotic forces that were swirling around the newly rebranded X.So Threads is similar to Twitter, but it supports ActivityPub, like Mastodon, and has similar community guidelines to other Meta products—which means there's a lot less nudity, and fewer references to illegal things, like drugs.It was recently announced that Threads has surpassed 275 million monthly active users, which puts it within spitting distance of independent assessments of X's monthly active user figure, which Musk recently said was around 600 million, but Sensor Tower says is closer to 318 million, as of October of 2024.There's been some hubbub about the possibility that Threads might be seeing losses in activity on the network, though, including a drop in how much time users spend on it. This is potentially the result of that decision to keep controversial stuff more or less hidden, and to heavy handedly, compared to other networks, at least, curate the feeds of users, who have very limited power over what they see in their feeds.The company announced they would be adjusting the algorithm significantly in the near-future, in order to allow more breaking news and other such posts to rise to the forefront, and it's thought that this might be a response to the recent success of another twitter-clone called Bluesky.Bluesky was founded in 2021, and it was originally, back in 2019, an initiative by Twitter to see if decentralizing the network might be possible—making Twitter just one network in a fediverse of networks, basically. As a result, it's perched atop an open communication protocol it developed called the AT Protocol, which is distinct from, but similar in utility to ActivityPub, in that it allows social platforms to link up and interact with each other, despite being different networks.Bluesky is superficially similar to pre-Musk twitter, but one of its killer apps, one of the things that distinguishes it from most other options in this space right now, alongside the AT Protocol, is the ability to choose your own algorithm, so that rather than having Meta decide what you see in your feed, and rather than just seeing a chronological list of posts from people you follow, you can also choose to follow curated lists of people, to tweak the word and content filters you use, the way posts are arranged, and an abundance of other options; it's pretty versatile, and you can easily flip between different filters to peruse different sorts of content filtered in different ways.The network launched on an invite-only basis in 2023, and was fully opened to the public in February of 2024, at which point it had already attracted more than 3 million users.Shortly after that launch, Jack Dorsey—the co-founder of Twitter and Bluesky—left Bluesky's board, saying that the company was making all the mistakes Twitter made and that he was stepping aside to focus on another decentralized social network he founded, Nostr, instead.Bluesky continued to gain users though, relatively slowly most of the time, though whenever Musk did something controversial they would typically see a larger influx, as was the case for all twitter-clones.In October of 2024, several changes to Twitter, including one that basically rendered its block feature useless, and another that said the company could use all posted content for AI training purposes, led to a surge in Bluesky adoption, bringing in more than 1.2 million users in just two days.That paled in comparison to what happened in November, following the election, though, when Bluesky started to grow by about a million users a day, catapulting its user base to more than 20 people million as of November 20—a surge that rocketed the app to the top of the app charts. And for context, the company only has about 20 employees, as of late-November, so that's a huge employee-to-user ratio.Bluesky is not without controversy, as the company's leadership has already been criticized for taking investment money from Blockchain Capitol, which could change its incentives, and though it's approaching 25 million users as of the day I'm recording this, up from a small fraction of that just a month ago, that's less than 10% of what Threads and X have, and that growth is almost certain to slow sometime soon, once the post-election flight from X has subsided; so it's possible this surge could be similar to what Mastodon saw not too long ago—a big surge in users, followed by a ebb in activity as people stop using the network for various reasons.The company has also been experiencing growing pains, in terms of tech, because of that sudden, much larger scale, but also in terms of culture.All those newbies joining the network all at once are changing the platform's makeup, accidentally trampling Bluesky's traditions and folkways, while also changing the conversational mores and topics and trends from how they were, pre-user-flood.Bluesky is currently the one the beat in terms of growth rate, in other words, and it seems to have achieved significant cultural resonance following the election, especially for people on the left of the political spectrum who no longer feel welcome or comfortable on X.But both Mastodon and Threads have represented the same in recent years, too, though their growth largely the consequence of X's failure, not necessarily the result of their own accolades and advantages.It's possible what we're seeing here, then, is not a struggle to become the next Twitter, but rather the emergence of a fractured text-based social media ecosystem, each platform offering something the others don't, or favoring some groups and their needs over those of others, and that, in turn, leading to a more fractured communication ecosystem, and maybe reinforced filter bubbles, as well.Show Noteshttps://www.fastcompany.com/91230935/the-website-tracks-how-fast-bluesky-is-growing-in-near-real-timehttps://techcrunch.com/2024/10/18/bluesky-surges-into-the-top-5-as-x-changes-blocks-permits-ai-training-on-its-data/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(social_network)https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-exodus-could-bluesky-spike-spark-end-of-elon-musks-social-media-platform-13254722https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-hides-x-engagement-figures-user-exodus-1990065https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/31/metas-threads-app-now-has-275-million-users-zuckerberg-says.htmlhttps://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/21747/2024-08-27/ad-revenue-freefall-continues-at-x.htmlhttps://www.warc.com/content/paywall/article/warc-curated-datapoints/counting-the-cost-xs-59bn-in-lost-ad-revenue-since-its-2022-takeover/en-gb/157583https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/21/are-users-leaving-elon-musks-x-en-masse-and-where-are-they-headinghttps://www.euronews.com/next/2024/10/01/x-has-lost-75-of-its-value-since-elon-musk-took-overhttps://www.cnn.com/2024/11/06/business/elon-musk-election-bet/index.htmlhttps://anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-bluesky-has-wonhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/technology/bluesky-growing-pains.htmlhttps://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/07/15/5-years-ago-today-twitter-launched-to-the-public/https://www.businessinsider.com/how-twitter-was-founded-2011-4?op=1https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/technology/31ev.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe
O que o Threads, concorrente do Twitter/X lançado pela toda-poderosa Meta, tem em comum com o pequeno e independente Mastodon? Numa palavra: o Fediverso. O termo designa um conjunto de plataformas descentralizadas que se comunicam entre si através de um protocolo compartilhado. A ideia é que várias plataformas falem a mesma língua, de modo que o usuário não precise criar uma conta em cada uma delas. E, aos poucos, o Threads vem abraçando essa proposta.Ele não é o único: o Bluesky, através de seu protocolo próprio, também opera nessa lógica. Será que esses novos players tornarão essa visão da web mais disseminada entre os usuários de redes sociais? Como seria a internet se não estivéssemos presos pelas fronteiras de cada plataforma? É o que especulamos no episódio de hoje. Dá o play e vem com a gente! Participantes Thiago MobilonLucas BragaJosué de Oliveira Emerson AlecrimConheça os robôs aspiradores da Kärcher (com DESCONTO!)Hoje em dia, todo mundo tem uma rotina super apertada, e sobra pouco tempo pra dar conta da limpeza da casa. Por isso, a gente traz hoje um recado do pessoal da Kärcher.A Kärcher é líder em soluções de limpeza. Com a linha de robôs aspiradores RCV Kärcher, você ganha um parceiro na hora da faxina. São vários modelos disponíveis, entre eles o RCV 1, ideal pra quem quer uma opção simples e eficiente.O modelo é bastante prático, sem configuração nem aplicativo: basta usar o controle remoto e escolher o modo de limpeza. O RCV 1 varre, aspira e passa pano seco, e cabe tranquilamente embaixo dos seus móveis. Além disso, ele consegue subir em tapetes e pequenos degraus, contando com 90 minutos de autonomia. E se acabar a bateria, ele retorna sozinho à base pra recarregar.Se interessou? Então entra lá em loja.karcher.com.br e confira esse e outros robôs aspiradores da Kärcher. Aproveite que os ouvintes do Tecnocast tem um cupom especial: usando o código TECNOCAST10, você ganha 10% de desconto, que pode ser tomado ao desconto de 5% se o pagamento for no Pix. Aproveita lá! Prêmio MPB – Melhores Podcasts do Brasil: vote no TecnocastGosta do nosso programa? Então acesse o site do prêmio (www.premiompb.com.br), faça o seu cadastro e escolha o Tecnocast na categoria "Tecnologia e telecomunicações". Você pode votar uma vez por dia até 22 de novembro.Mande seu recadoGrupos da Caixa Postal do Tecnocast: Telegram: t.me/caixapostaltecnocast WhatsApp: tbnet.me/caixapostaltecnocast Você pode mandar comentários (inclusive em áudio, vai que você aparece no Tecnocast?), dúvidas, críticas e sugestões. Participe!Se preferir, você pode se comunicar conosco pela Comunidade e através do e-mail tecnocast@tecnoblog.net.Entre também nos Canais do TB no WhatsApp Canal do Tecnoblog Canal do Achados do TB CréditosProdução: Josué de OliveiraEdição e sonorização: Ariel LiborioArte da capa: Vitor Pádua
Loops a vu le jour au sein du Fediverse, un écosystème de plateformes sociales décentralisées qui communiquent entre elles via le protocole ActivityPub. L'ambition de cette nouvelle plateforme est claire : offrir aux créateurs de contenu un contrôle total sur leurs données tout en se libérant des contraintes publicitaires. Une initiative audacieuse portée par Daniel Supernault, également à l'origine de Pixelfed, une alternative à Instagram axée sur le partage de photos. La question se pose alors : Loops a-t-elle le potentiel de rivaliser avec le géant TikTok ? L'idée séduit en tout cas : redonner du pouvoir aux créateurs en les libérant des algorithmes opaques et des impératifs commerciaux qui façonnent aujourd'hui les réseaux sociaux.La plateforme se lance avec une offre initiale de partage de vidéos limitées à 60 secondes. Sur Mastodon, Daniel Supernault a déjà évoqué les futures évolutions : intégration d'une bibliothèque sonore, fonctionnalités de remix pour réinterpréter les créations d'autres utilisateurs, et possibilité d'épingler des vidéos sur les profils. Bien que les hashtags et mentions ne soient pas encore pris en charge, un système de catégorisation est d'ores et déjà opérationnel. Les créateurs bénéficieront par ailleurs d'outils de curation pour gérer leurs sections commentaires. L'accès à Loops se fait sur invitation, avec un délai d'attente jusqu'à la réception d'un e-mail de confirmation. Les utilisateurs iOS pourront accéder à l'application via TestFlight, tandis que la version Android sera proposée en téléchargement direct.Loops innove également avec un système de modération basé sur un score de confiance attribué à chaque utilisateur. Les contenus des membres jugés fiables sont publiés instantanément, tandis que ceux des nouveaux arrivants ou des utilisateurs moins établis sont soumis à une validation préalable par des modérateurs humains. Cette méthode vise à maintenir un espace de partage respectueux, mais des interrogations demeurent : quels critères définissent ce score de confiance ? Et comment évoluera-t-il ? Des réponses viendront peut-être avec le temps.Sur le plan économique, Loops adopte un modèle transparent reposant sur les dons, subventions et parrainages. Les utilisateurs restent pleinement propriétaires de leurs contenus, qui ne sont ni exploités commercialement ni utilisés pour entraîner des intelligences artificielles. La promesse est séduisante, mais la plateforme devra réussir à convaincre les amateurs de TikTok de migrer. Pour rivaliser avec le mastodonte chinois, Loops devra non seulement créer une dynamique similaire, mais aussi attirer rapidement un grand nombre d'utilisateurs. Un défi titanesque, certes, mais l'intérêt croissant pour les réseaux sociaux décentralisés pourrait bien jouer en sa faveur. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
Debunking Common Myths About FreeBSD - Part 2, FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE Announcement, OpenBSD -current has moved to version 7.6, acpidumping,Install snac2 on FreeBSD – An ActivityPub Instance for the Fediverse, Managing dotfiles with chezmoi, Podman testing on FreeBSD, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Debunking Common Myths About FreeBSD - Part 2 (https://klarasystems.com/articles/debunking-common-myths-about-freebsd-2/) FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE Announcement (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.4R/announce/) FreeBSD 14.0 end-of-life (https://bsdsec.net/articles/freebsd-14-0-end-of-life) - You should have upgraded to 14.1 by now OpenBSD -current has moved to version 7.6 (https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240918052239) News Roundup acpidumping (https://adventurist.me/posts/00325) Install snac2 on FreeBSD – An ActivityPub Instance for the Fediverse (https://gyptazy.com/install-snac2-on-freebsd-an-activitypub-instance-for-the-fediverse/) Installing Uptime-Kuma on a FreeBSD Jail (https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/07/22/install-uptime-kuma-freebsd-jail/) Managing dotfiles with chezmoi (https://stoddart.github.io/2024/09/08/managing-dotfiles-with-chezmoi.html) Podman testing on FreeBSD (https://github.com/oci-playground/freebsd-podman-testing) Undeadly Bits OpenSSH 9.9 released! (https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240921181110) OpenBSD now enforcing no invalid NUL characters in shell scripts (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240924105732) EuroBSDCon 2024 presentations are now up (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240924092154) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions rel4x - Secure by default (https://github.com/BSDNow/bsdnow.tv/blob/master/episodes/581/feedback/rel4x%20-%20Secure%20by%20default.md) Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)
Today on the podcast Matthias Pfefferle joins me to discuss the integration of WordPress with the Fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol. Mathias talks about the differences between traditional social media and decentralised networks like Mastodon, focusing on the benefits of ActivityPub for bloggers. He explains how the plugin allows WordPress posts to function as social media posts, enabling direct interactions from various federated platforms without cross-posting. The conversation covers the evolution, technical challenges, and future roadmap of the plugin, including new features like supporting podcasting (yay!) and improving profile editing. Matthias also touches on the broader adoption of Fediverse platforms and their potential for growth. Check it out!
Use Code: WPMINUTE20 20% off (or 4 months free) on Startup, Professional, Growth, or Scale plans.In this episode of WP Minute+, I sat down with Derek Hanson, a Technical Account Manager at Automattic and emerging WordPress content creator. We explored his role within Automattic's Special Projects team, the current state of WordPress, and his personal journey into content creation.Our conversation started with insights into Automattic's approach to content creation. Derek clarified that while there's no official internal initiative, there's a general ethos of sharing work openly and contributing to WordPress. This led us to discuss the unique position Automattic holds in the WordPress ecosystem and the challenges of balancing open-source ideals with commercial interests.Derek provided fascinating insights into his work with Automattic's Special Projects team, detailing how they partner with "Friends of Automattic" to build and launch websites. Derek highlighted his content creation journey, his background in teaching, and his vision for creating content that focuses on website strategy rather than just technical how-tos. This led to a broader conversation about the essence of WordPress as a publishing platform and the potential for it to combat the challenges posed by social media and proprietary platforms.Key Takeaways for WordPress Professionals:Automattic employees are encouraged to share their work openly, contributing to WordPress improvement.The Special Projects team at Automattic works on custom solutions, providing valuable feedback to product teams.There's an ongoing effort to balance WordPress core functionality with opportunities for third-party innovation.The future of WordPress themes may lie in offering unique patterns and designs rather than complete site structures.There's a growing need for a streamlined, purpose-specific admin experience in WordPress.ActivityPub integration is seen as a potential game-changer for content ownership and distribution.The WordPress community continues to grapple with the balance between frequent updates and user stability.Important URLs mentioned:DerekHanson.blogAutomattic Special Projectsthewpminute.com/subscribeChapter Titles with Timestamps:[00:00:00] Introduction and Automattic's Approach to Content Creation[00:05:30] Inside the Special Projects Team at Automattic[00:12:45] The Data Liberation Project and Migration Challenges[00:18:20] WordPress Philosophy and Community Perceptions[00:25:00] Derek's Vision for Content Creation[00:32:15] WordPress as a Publishing Platform vs. Website Builder[00:40:30] The Future of WordPress Themes and Admin Experience[00:48:00] Closing Thoughts and Derek's Upcoming Projects ★ Support this podcast ★
[Rediffusion] Jean Cattan, Secrétaire Général du Conseil National du Numérique (CNNum), estime que l'on pourrait régler les problèmes des réseaux sociaux en transformant leur architecture.Pour lutter contre les dérives des réseaux sociaux, il faut revoir leur architecture technique, estime Jean Cattan, secrétaire général du Conseil National du Numérique (CNNum). Selon lui, la solution passe par des protocoles ouverts plutôt que par des plateformes propriétaires qui enferment dans des bulles pour des raisons de modèle économique. Selon lui, les réseaux sociaux décentralisés, comme Reddit, TrustCafe ou Mastodon, offrent de meilleures garanties en termes de régulation. Il évoque le réseau Bluesky, qui va dans ce sens, ou encore l'adoption récente par le groupe Meta du protocole ouvert ActivityPub.-----------♥️ Soutenez Monde Numérique : https://donorbox.org/monde-numerique
The battle for code forges is heating up. We chat about HexOS' big promises and get excited about Meshtastic.
Say thanks and learn more about our podcast sponsor Omnisend. In this episode of WP Minute+, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Doc Pop, a veteran content creator and WordPress enthusiast. Our conversation spanned Doc's impressive 16-year journey in digital content creation, from his early days making zines to becoming a prominent figure in the WordPress community.We dove deep into the world of open-source technologies, focusing on WordPress and its impact on the internet. Doc's insights on the challenges and opportunities in open-source projects were enlightening, especially his thoughts on balancing user experience with advanced features.The highlight of our conversation was Doc's excitement about the Fediverse and ActivityPub. His recent project, the Fediverse Files for WordPress.com, aims to educate people about the potential of a more interconnected and open web. We also touched on the importance of RSS and other open protocols, with Doc sharing his views on the cyclical nature of web technologies. His optimism for new open standards, balanced with concerns about big tech dominance, provided a nuanced perspective on the future of the internet.Overall, Doc's passion for open-source technologies and content creation are two areas aspiring content creators should consider in their own work. His unique insights into the past, present, and future of the web left me inspired and eager to see how these technologies will shape our digital landscape.Key Takeaways for WordPress Professionals:The evolution of content creation from zines to blogs to modern social mediaThe importance of creating content for passion rather than solely for metrics or monetizationThe challenges and opportunities of open-source projects like WordPress and the FediverseThe potential of ActivityPub and the Fediverse to create a more interconnected and open webThe role of RSS and open protocols in shaping the internetThe production process behind Doc's Fediverse Files series for WordPress.comThe future possibilities of the Fediverse beyond just social media alternatives⠀Important URLs mentioned:wordpress.com/fediverse - Doc's Fediverse Files projectdocpop.org/about - Doc's personal website and linkFollow Doc Pop on Mastodon⠀Chapter Titles with Timestamps:1 [00:00:00] Introduction and Doc's Content Creation History2 [00:03:00] Evolution of Content Creation and Social Media3 [00:09:00] WordPress, Open Source, and User Experience4 [00:15:00] The Importance of Open Web and RSS5 [00:24:22] The Fediverse Project for WordPress.com6 [00:31:24] ActivityPub Plugin and WordPress Integration7 [00:37:34] Behind the Scenes of Fediverse Files Production8 [00:41:25] Closing Thoughts and Contact Information ★ Support this podcast ★
In the early days, the internet was a decentralized space created by enthusiasts. However, it has since transformed into a centralized, commerce-driven entity dominated by a few major players. The promise of the fediverse, a decentralized social networking concept, offers a refreshing alternative.Evan Prodromou, OpenEarth Foundation's director of open technology, has been advocating for decentralized social networks since 2008, starting with his creation, Identi.ca. Unlike Twitter, Identi.ca was open source and federated, allowing independent networks to interconnect.Prodromou, a co-author of ActivityPub—the W3C standard for decentralized networking used by platforms like Mastodon—discusses the evolution of the fediverse on The New Stack Makers podcast. He notes that small social networks dwindled to a few giants, such as Twitter and Facebook, which rarely interconnected. The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk disrupted the established norms, prompting users to reconsider their dependence on centralized platforms.The fediverse aims to address these issues by allowing users to maintain relationships across different instances, ensuring a smoother transition between networks. This decentralization fosters community management and better control over social interactions.Check out the full podcast episode to explore how tech giants like Meta are engaging with the fediverse and how to join decentralized social networks.Learn more from The New Stack about fediverse:FediForum Showcases New Fediverse Apps and Developer NetworkOne Login: Towards a Single Fediverse Identity on ActivityPubWeb Dev 2024: Fediverse Ramps Up, More AI, Less JavaScriptJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. https://thenewstack.io/newsletter/
Marcus Buffett writes his younger self programming advice, Swyx asks and answers whether or not DevRel is dead, the Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server, Pongo is like MongoDB but on Postgres, Jack Kelly is funding Ladybird because he can't fund Firefox & Hyrum's Law.
Marcus Buffett writes his younger self programming advice, Swyx asks and answers whether or not DevRel is dead, the Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server, Pongo is like MongoDB but on Postgres, Jack Kelly is funding Ladybird because he can't fund Firefox & Hyrum's Law.
Marcus Buffett writes his younger self programming advice, Swyx asks and answers whether or not DevRel is dead, the Ghost team opens up their ActivityPub server, Pongo is like MongoDB but on Postgres, Jack Kelly is funding Ladybird because he can't fund Firefox & Hyrum's Law.
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 ActivityPubGhost's ActivityPub integrationParallels with the early internetBeing at a grassroots stageDecentralizing human connectionImpact of catering to algorithms Micropayments and other models
'Thunder Run': Behind Lawmakers' Secretive Push to Pass the TikTok Bill TikTok ban would be a gift from Congress to Meta and Google How the TikTok ban could survive a court challenge The Chilling of TikTok FTC Bans Noncompete Agreements That Restrict Job Switching Sam Altman-backed crypto project Worldcoin faces an orb shortage Paris' nuts Rabbit R1 brilliant.xyz More wearable AI: IYO One The Man Who Killed Google Search Google search boss Raghavan warns employees of 'new operating reality' The solution to scary Boston Dynamics bots? Make robots hairy Meta shares plummet 10% after second quarter outlook disappoints Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to 'bring back the open web' Beware of The Fake Podcast Invite Scam Bravely Exploring the Squalor of a 'Boy Room' This fun little web game: Equinox.Space magCulture No one buys books Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: YahooFinance.com bitwarden.com/twit
'Thunder Run': Behind Lawmakers' Secretive Push to Pass the TikTok Bill TikTok ban would be a gift from Congress to Meta and Google How the TikTok ban could survive a court challenge The Chilling of TikTok FTC Bans Noncompete Agreements That Restrict Job Switching Sam Altman-backed crypto project Worldcoin faces an orb shortage Paris' nuts Rabbit R1 brilliant.xyz More wearable AI: IYO One The Man Who Killed Google Search Google search boss Raghavan warns employees of 'new operating reality' The solution to scary Boston Dynamics bots? Make robots hairy Meta shares plummet 10% after second quarter outlook disappoints Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to 'bring back the open web' Beware of The Fake Podcast Invite Scam Bravely Exploring the Squalor of a 'Boy Room' This fun little web game: Equinox.Space magCulture No one buys books Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: YahooFinance.com bitwarden.com/twit
'Thunder Run': Behind Lawmakers' Secretive Push to Pass the TikTok Bill TikTok ban would be a gift from Congress to Meta and Google How the TikTok ban could survive a court challenge The Chilling of TikTok FTC Bans Noncompete Agreements That Restrict Job Switching Sam Altman-backed crypto project Worldcoin faces an orb shortage Paris' nuts Rabbit R1 brilliant.xyz More wearable AI: IYO One The Man Who Killed Google Search Google search boss Raghavan warns employees of 'new operating reality' The solution to scary Boston Dynamics bots? Make robots hairy Meta shares plummet 10% after second quarter outlook disappoints Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to 'bring back the open web' Beware of The Fake Podcast Invite Scam Bravely Exploring the Squalor of a 'Boy Room' This fun little web game: Equinox.Space magCulture No one buys books Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: YahooFinance.com bitwarden.com/twit
'Thunder Run': Behind Lawmakers' Secretive Push to Pass the TikTok Bill TikTok ban would be a gift from Congress to Meta and Google How the TikTok ban could survive a court challenge The Chilling of TikTok FTC Bans Noncompete Agreements That Restrict Job Switching Sam Altman-backed crypto project Worldcoin faces an orb shortage Paris' nuts Rabbit R1 brilliant.xyz More wearable AI: IYO One The Man Who Killed Google Search Google search boss Raghavan warns employees of 'new operating reality' The solution to scary Boston Dynamics bots? Make robots hairy Meta shares plummet 10% after second quarter outlook disappoints Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to 'bring back the open web' Beware of The Fake Podcast Invite Scam Bravely Exploring the Squalor of a 'Boy Room' This fun little web game: Equinox.Space magCulture No one buys books Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: YahooFinance.com bitwarden.com/twit
'Thunder Run': Behind Lawmakers' Secretive Push to Pass the TikTok Bill TikTok ban would be a gift from Congress to Meta and Google How the TikTok ban could survive a court challenge The Chilling of TikTok FTC Bans Noncompete Agreements That Restrict Job Switching Sam Altman-backed crypto project Worldcoin faces an orb shortage Paris' nuts Rabbit R1 brilliant.xyz More wearable AI: IYO One The Man Who Killed Google Search Google search boss Raghavan warns employees of 'new operating reality' The solution to scary Boston Dynamics bots? Make robots hairy Meta shares plummet 10% after second quarter outlook disappoints Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to 'bring back the open web' Beware of The Fake Podcast Invite Scam Bravely Exploring the Squalor of a 'Boy Room' This fun little web game: Equinox.Space magCulture No one buys books Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: YahooFinance.com bitwarden.com/twit
Amazon halts drone deliveries in California, but kicks off tests in Phoenix … Newsletter service Ghost will support the fediverse protocol ActivityPub … and a Russian court sentences a Meta spokesperson in absentia to six years in prison. It's Tuesday, April 23rd and this is Engadget News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Forrest Brazeal is concerned about the open source threat from within, Vicki Boykis explains why Redis is forked, John O'Nolan and the Ghost team plan to federate over ActivityPub, Llama 3 is now available for “businesses of all sizes” & nolen writes up questions to ask when you don't want to work.
Forrest Brazeal is concerned about the open source threat from within, Vicki Boykis explains why Redis is forked, John O'Nolan and the Ghost team plan to federate over ActivityPub, Llama 3 is now available for “businesses of all sizes” & nolen writes up questions to ask when you don't want to work.
This week, we finally talk about Apple getting sued by the Department of Justice in the United States, but only after talking about Threads finally federating (kinda). We also discuss the upcoming developer conferences that were announced by both Google and Apple and talk about what we expect to see. Lastly, we talk about Full Self Driving and break down what exactly you get with each tier of Teslas autopilot. Of course, we wrap it all up with a little trivia. Enjoy! Links: Threads on ActivityPub: https://bit.ly/3TYoCeV Verge Threads Fediverse Beta: https://bit.ly/3x8AW32 PixelFed: https://bit.ly/3TT6xie Google I/O: https://bit.ly/4aCcshf Apple WWDC: https://apple.co/3TFuI2a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Galaxy AI Fine Print: https://bit.ly/3vyqtxC Galaxy AI Story: https://bit.ly/4aa8k8r DOJ Sues Apple: https://bit.ly/3TD4vl5 DOJ Court Document: https://bit.ly/3xdnM4R Electrek Elon Musk FSD: https://bit.ly/3TBH1wC Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Geoffrey Litt thinks browser extensions are underrated, Adolfo Ochagavía on being a generalist in a specialist's world, Jack Garbus praises the Arch Wiki, Terence Eden tries to rebuild FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap & Sebastien Dubois teaches us how to connect ideas together.
This week, Marques, Andrew, and David were hoping for a nice, easy week of news. But they were wrong! A lot is happening, including Apple not being allowed to sell certain Apple Watches anymore, Google paying $700 million after being sued by all 50 states, Threads joining the Fediverse, and a ton of EV news as well! Plus, they talk about the 2023 smartphone awards video that just dropped over on the main MKBHD YouTube channel! Links to stories: Apple stops selling Apple Watches: https://bit.ly/4auPtVU History of Apple Watch lawsuit: https://bit.ly/3THh4NA Google to Pay $700 Million: https://bit.ly/474g5ud 30% of Google's Profits stat: https://bit.ly/3Rsw8fs User choice Billing: https://bit.ly/3GSgHs1 Threads & ActivityPub: https://bit.ly/3GR83Ke Flipboard Federates: https://bit.ly/4aJyL5B Tesla Inductive Charging: https://bit.ly/3NEKc4l MKBHD Smartphone Awards: https://bit.ly/3TA4Vdh New EV Companies Sign On to NACS: https://bit.ly/3TA4u2D NACS Certification: https://bit.ly/3RBde6l Mercedes Self-Driving Blue Light: https://bit.ly/3Hd5O4t Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Shop products mentioned: Samsung S23 Ultra at https://geni.us/JiXWof ASUS Zenfone 10 at https://geni.us/AUTNv Samsung Z Flip 5 at https://geni.us/4V6L Apple iPhone 15 Pro at https://geni.us/FJ6qT6X Google Pixel 8 Pro at https://geni.us/QZDJa Google Pixel 7a at https://geni.us/4MAxB Samsung Galaxy A54 at https://geni.us/RQxUT Apple iPhone 15 Plus at https://geni.us/QPrD Honor Magic V2 at https://geni.us/ShB9j4 OnePlus Open at https://geni.us/i8eq5 Nothing Phone 2 at https://geni.us/CTUnyq Google Pixel 8 at https://geni.us/qLeWM7 Instagram/Threads/Twitter: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Apple responding to Beeper's iMessage for Android and the various other text-based platform news from this week. Sean Hollister joins the show to discuss his time covering the Epic v Google trial, and what we learned from it all. Further reading: The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge Beeper vs. iMessage is a fight about how tech works — and who's really in charge Apple responds to Beeper's iMessage for Android: ‘We took steps to protect our users' Beeper says Apple is blocking some iMessages, but there's a fix Google Messages might let you edit texts after they're sent Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration Threads launches for nearly half a billion more users in Europe Adam Mosseri's Threads account is rocketing up the Mastodon followed lists. An X outage broke all outgoing links, again Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight Epic CEO Tim Sweeney: the post-trial interview 20 things we learned from the Epic v. Google trial The Apple TV app now looks more like an all-purpose streaming hub E3 is officially over forever Opera's gamer browser now has a ‘panic button' for when you're caught in the act Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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