Vladimir Putin's Forkiverse

PJ Vogt (0:25)

Hello, fellow moguls.

Casey Newton (0:28)

What's up, legend?

Kevin Roos (0:29)

What's the opposite of moguls? I feel like that's what we are here to talk about.

PJ Vogt (0:35)

Minions?

Kevin Roos (0:39)

Like a mogul who just absolutely fails, like a WeWork situation.

PJ Vogt (0:44)

Look, it's easy to criticize when you're not in the arena.

Kevin Roos (0:49)

I would like to get out of the arena. Please get me out of the arena.

PJ Vogt (0:57)

At the beginning of this year, Search Engine launched with fellow podcasters Casey Newton and Kevin Roos, our own social media network. And now, something fairly unfortunate had happened there. Before we get to that unfortunate thing, which is also pretty funny, I want to refresh your memory about how we got here and all.

In January, in a moment of unmitigated optimism, we'd designed our network, starting with its name.

Casey Newton (1:21)

We could call it the Forkiverse.

Kevin Roos (1:23)

I mean, I tried to do a blended name and came up with Search Fork or Hard Engine.

Casey Newton (1:29)

Hard Engine.

PJ Vogt (1:30)

Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different internet.

Kevin Roos (1:34)

That's a Casey's incognito tab.

PJ Vogt (1:39)

Why did we do that? Well, not so long ago, people were very upset about Elon Musk's takeover of what was once Twitter. Everybody was fed up with billionaires and the way they'd made social media addictive and polarized with their fiendish algorithms. I mean, people are still mad about those things, but a year ago, people were talking about solutions. And one solution that was floated that I found very intriguing was that social media might be better if instead of being concentrated, like just a few platforms owned by moguls, if instead it was really widely distributed. Like you had all these little platforms that were operated by anybody who wanted to run them, but those platforms could be interconnected with each other through something called Federation. A federated Internet, a Fediverse.

This seemed like a long shot but not entirely impossible plan for an actual better Internet. And so Kevin, Casey and I wanted to try it. We wanted to build our own little piece of the Fediverse.

And so on January 9th, we opened the Forkiverse up to any Internet stranger who wanted to join, and then we'd waited. It's kind of cool to see an unfilled universe.

Casey Newton (2:43)

It's so beautiful to just see it without any misinformation, any sort of toxic hate speech or bullying.

Kevin Roos (2:51)

Yeah, many people are saying this is the ideal social network. It really is.

PJ Vogt (2:55)

It's very zen.

All of this was documented in the Search Engine episode called the Fediverse experiment. There's a link to it in our show notes. But what happened was almost 10,000 people joined right away, and they did what people do on social media. Chitter-chattered, shared links, made friends. It was a bigger success than any of us had imagined. But the reason we were meeting last week was to discuss a grave situation that had since transpired in our dear Forkiverse. Kevin was the one bringing the news and also catching us up to speed about the events between launch and now.

Kevin Roos (3:28)

We spent a glorious couple of weeks receiving posts from people, participating in the discussion there, and then a few things happened. One was we ran out of room on our Mastodon hosting plan.

PJ Vogt (3:46)

We were a victim of our own success.

Kevin Roos (3:47)

We're a victim of our own success.

I forget how many gigabytes of storage we had. Got exceeded by people posting their photos of Forks, which is one of the...

Casey Newton (3:58)

It was a classic Forkiverse activity that everyone loved. Yes.

Kevin Roos (4:02)

People would also post photos of just where they were when they were listening to our shows. And that all took up some space. And so we have exceeded the limits of our Mastodon hosting plan.

PJ Vogt (4:13)

Which is good.

Kevin Roos (4:15)

Good problems, but you know, champagne problems, but still problems, especially because I have not yet billed you guys for your portion of this. So I'm just eating this cost on my personal credit card, which does not feel great.

PJ Vogt (4:29)

I thought this was cheap. I was like, this is not killing Search Engine.

Kevin Roos (4:34)

I mean, it's not like, I'm still feeding my family, to be clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PJ Vogt (4:38)

But that is really a problem.

Kevin Roos (4:40)

Yeah, it's not, the juice has not been worth the squeeze for me, in terms of bringing enough joy to my life to justify the expenses I'm laying out for this thing. So that was strike one.