Welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of overthinking thermometers. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am currently sitting here cleaning out space on my desk for our Webby Award. It was just announced that the VergeCast won the Webby's People's Choice Award for Technology Podcasts, which means it is thanks specifically to all of your votes that we won. I'm not going to lie to you, this award makes me much happier than I thought it was going to. And it means even more that you all voted for us. So thank you so much and please excuse me as I let it all go. It just absolutely right to my head and become a total diva monster going forward. It's all over for everybody.
Anyway, we have a great show for you today. First up, Dan Seaford and I are going to talk about weather apps because it turns out we're in the most interesting moment for weather apps in a really long time. And then we're going to spend the rest of the show with Neely and Flipward CEO Mike McQ talking about the future of social media. And why activity pub, which is this little web protocol that most people have never heard of, might be that future. All that's coming right after the break, but I have a little more sprucing up to do.
无论如何,我们今天的节目非常棒。首先,丹·西福德和我将谈论天气应用程序,因为现在正是天气应用程序方案最有意思的时刻。然后,我们将和Neely以及Flipward CEO Mike McQ一起讨论社交媒体的未来。并且介绍一个大多数人从未听说过的小型网络协议——activity pub, 它有可能成为社交媒体的未来。在短暂的休息后,我们会接着播出,但我还需要梳理一下细节。
I can remove pictures of my family to make room for my awards, right? That's totally cool and fine. This is the VergeCast. We'll see you in a second. Support for this podcast comes from RoboRock. You might not realize this, but automatic vacuum cleaners are driving the future of cleaning. And the S8 Pro Ultra from RoboRock is among the best in its class. It's built to detect and avoid objects, vacuum, mop, and more. Plus, with its upgrading UltraDoc, the S8 Pro Ultra can empty, wash, refill, and even dry itself fast. The high-tech dock allows the cleaner to get back to work 30% faster than before. Make cleaning effortless, simple, and elegant with the S8 Pro Ultra, the S8 Pro Ultra. We'll now at RoboRock.com. A New York Presbyterian are data scientists and doctors are combining decades of medical experience caring for diverse communities with the power of data science. To one day get ahead of a health issue before it becomes one, stay amazing, today and tomorrow, New York Presbyterian.
我可以把家庭照片删除,以便为我的奖励腾出空间,对吧?这完全可以,很好。这是VergeCast。我们马上见。本次播客的支持来自RoboRock。你可能没有意识到,但自动吸尘器正在引领清洁的未来。而RoboRock的S8 Pro Ultra是其类别中最好的之一。它设计用于检测和避免物体、吸尘、擦拭等等。此外,凭借其升级版本的UltraDoc,S8 Pro Ultra可以快速地清空、洗涤、填充,甚至自我干燥。这种高科技的充电底座使得清洁器比以前快30%回到工作状态。用S8 Pro Ultra让清洁变得轻松、简单、优雅。S8 Pro Ultra现在就在RoboRock.com上有售。纽约长老会医院的数据科学家和医生正在结合几十年来为不同社区提供医疗服务的经验和数据科学的力量。他们希望能够在健康问题出现之前就提前预警。保持出色,今天和明天,纽约长老会医院。
Welcome back. A few weeks ago, something totally catastrophic happened. The Apple Weather app went down multiple times, for many hours at a time. This is the kind of thing that doesn't sound like a big deal, but for so many people, checking the weather is part of their daily routine. And obviously, knowing the weather matters. So people freaked out. It was a huge deal. And there's a larger story underpinning all of this, too.
Apple Weather exists in its current state, in part because Apple bought an app called Dark Sky a couple of years ago. Dark Sky was this beloved, beautiful weather app, but it was also a really popular data provider that other apps could use to display weather info their own way. People were mad when Apple bought Dark Sky. They were really mad when Apple said it was going to shut it down, and they were furious when it seemed like Apple couldn't even build a serviceable replacement.
Apple Weather现在的形态部分原因是几年前苹果购买了一个名叫Dark Sky的应用。Dark Sky是一个备受喜爱、美丽的天气应用,同时也是一个其他应用可用来以自己的方式显示天气信息的流行数据提供者。当苹果购买Dark Sky时,人们感到不满。当苹果表示将关闭它时,他们非常生气。当似乎苹果甚至无法建立一个可用的替代服务时,他们愤怒不已。
Since that outage happened a few weeks ago, I've been asking around the weather app industry to see what's new in this space. In some sense, it seems like not much. Most of the weather apps you see now, especially the popular ones, are a number of years old. But with all the changes with Dark Sky and Apple weather and all the chaos of just a few weeks ago, it turns out there's a lot brewing in this weather world. So I grabbed the Verge's Dan Seafort, who might be the only person I know with more weather apps installed than me to talk it all through and figure out what's next.
Well, I think like 10, 12 years ago, it was a very different landscape for apps in general, and I think weather apps were kind of like a nice little encapsulation of all the things that were really interesting in app design 10 to 12 years ago.
The mobile platforms, whether it was like iOS or Android or whatever, they were relatively new. Developers were getting their fingers into all the different tools they could do, and they were like trying out a bunch of different things and a bunch of different experiments.
You could see this in weather apps pretty clearly. There was a bunch of different design ideas. There was different notification ideas. There were things that you wouldn't have seen before, done in these small independent third party apps.
They were in response to the fact that the built-in weather apps weren't that great on their phones, and there was a bunch of new tools available to them to develop these kind of things.
I think weather apps are an interesting category in that it's a useful utility that everyone can pretty much benefit from. There's also a really challenging data display presentation problem to solve. You have to display a lot of data in a very quick and easy to digest way.
Has to be accurate data, of course, and it kind of like has to be reliable. Obviously, everyone remembers Dark Sky. That one kind of like had the unique thing of these hyperlocal notifications that you didn't get from watching the weather channel on TV or listening to the weather forecast during the morning radio or whatever.
This can now tell you like it's going to rain in 10 minutes on your city block, and it's going to last for 12 minutes. When that is right once, your head is blown away. You're like, oh my God, this is like the future that I'm living in now. Yeah, it's very right.
I think what happened over time was, in this story, parallel's Dark Sky, pretty one-to-one, people learned that weather data is really expensive. After a while, these apps couldn't really sustain because they were pulling in this data that they had to pay for.
At the time, most apps were either a single purchase, one time purchase, which was what Dark Sky was. I believe it was like three or four dollars when it came out, or they used advertising. Later on, the subscription model came out, and now pretty much all of the weather apps that you can buy now that are reputable are based off of subscription models.
But a lot of them died away. They weren't sustainable. They couldn't afford the data. They couldn't really make a sustainable business on it. So, progressively, the platform weather app's got better, whether it was Samsung's or Apple's or whatever Google uses now.
They got progressively better. They started incorporating these features. Apple went ahead and just absorbed Dark Sky entirely. So now a lot of the features that people relied on in Dark Sky are somewhat available in the Apple weather app on their iPhone.
So, they became less of a need for these boutique, designed third party independent weather apps. And I think that's kind of where we're sitting today. And that's not to say that there aren't other weather apps out there.
There definitely are. And there's some that have really strong followings. But there isn't anything that people are super excited about when Dark Sky came out or when all these other ones were coming out and all the experimentation was happening.
Yeah, you know, I looked out the window. You know, it's like, part of this is like a personal story, right? I don't travel nearly as much as I did. Ten years ago, I was younger, I was more mobile, I wasn't like at home watching kids all the time. Like, we didn't go through a pandemic that locked us down.
Like, how much weather reporting did I really need in the three years of the pandemic? So like, you know, part of that is personal. I don't really rely on it or need it as much as I used to. But it's also because the built in weather apps have gotten better. And the third party weather apps had just gotten more expensive.
And then it's like, I don't really get $30 a year of value out of a weather app. And I can get basically the same forecast for free.
然后就像是,我不太觉得一个天气应用每年值得我花30美元。而且我可以免费获取基本相同的天气预报。
That is totally fair. So I'm so glad that you feel because it's actually like that exact feeling is one of the things I just spent a bunch of time reporting on because my sense was, and I tried to sort of prove out that this is true.
And I think I was right. But the distinct vibe that I got was basically like, there was like you said, this massive explosion in really interesting weather apps, call it like seven to 10 years ago, somewhere in the kind of like 2012 to 2015 range was like full of really interesting stuff.
And then nothing after that. And like if you look even all the most popular weather apps now are the ones that were popular back then and very little has changed. But then Apple bought Dark Sky, which a lot of people cared about and had really strong feelings about Apple released weather kit, which I mean, I don't know how to put this more delicately like ship the bed aggressively in its early launch. And so I went out and just asked a bunch of other people like, okay, what is going on in this space right now and kind of rebound? And I learned a bunch.
So one of the things I found really fascinating was I kept asking developers why it was such a big deal when dark sky went away. And like why dark sky was so special. And one of the things that I heard, have you ever used the app Hello Weather? I have, I've got on my list of like weather apps that like I'm aware of and I know about. Hello weather is like my go to just because it has this really great widget that is just basically just a bar graph of temperatures. Yeah. And it's such a like straightforward thing, but it's like hourly temperature bar graphs. I get a sense of the day. It's very useful.
But I asked basically like, why was this such a big deal when dark sky went away? And this is what Trevor Turk, one of the co-founder said about basically why dark sky's API was important to begin with. I don't think that we would have made a weather app if it hadn't been for dark sky. The weather data industry is very annoying. Like having to make enterprise contracts with each one of these data. So some of them have, you know, self-service sign up. There's like a cold start problem, like dark sky, it was what like a thousand hits a day for free and then you pay as you go. And you should see the history of our bill. It was like $3, $8, $12. And at the end, it was like $800 a month or something, right?
Okay. So he goes on like this for a while, but he told me two things. One is that the thing dark sky did that was magical. Was it was one API call for all of its data? And right now if you want to go to AccuWeather, you have to hit AccuWeather's API every single time you want any particular kind of data. And all the rest of them are like this, dark sky you would just be like, what's the weather and dark sky would tell you? And so if you're an app developer, especially if you're like one person, that makes your life a thousand times easier. Also you could just put down your credit card and it would just charge you instead of having to make like business development deals.
But the other thing he told me that I thought was so interesting was that dark sky did minute-to-minute weather data before anybody else. And that since Apple has shut down dark sky or has said it was going to a lot of these other providers have it. But the reason dark sky was doing those like, it's going to rain in 10 minute things is because it could. And nobody else was even like using that data to say, here's what the weather is going to be like in 12 minutes. So we owe all of that, which is now everywhere to your point. Like you can figure out what the weather is going to be in 10 minutes across all these apps. And all of that is because of dark sky, which I thought was really fascinating.
And dark sky I also learned is famously not that accurate. Well, I think it's like a perception thing, right? It's like it could be wrong a bunch of times. But that one time it's right where it said it's going to rain in 11 minutes and you look at your watch and 11 minutes later starts raining and then it says it's going to last for eight minutes and it stops eight minutes later. Like it's just so like one of those things that sticks with you more often than the times that said like, oh, it's going to be partly cloudy. Yes.
Oh, 100%. And actually one more clip from the the Hello weather guys. I asked Jonas, their other co-founder, why he thought weather apps were important. And like that thing you're describing is exactly what he talked about. Let me just play this for you. I really liked this.
There's something like psychological about this particular thing that's unique, which is that like the weather happens to you and you don't have control over it. And a weather app sort of like gives you the feeling of having control and they all have like different degrees of accuracy and different like information that they surface in different ways. So you can like if you're into this in some like basic level, you can just completely nerd out because there's so many options and there's like so many different ways to like read the same data.
In the end, like the outcome is always like, well, it might rain and you might not know. Like it's like, they're never going to be perfect. But I think like customers seem like they're striving for like, I want this perfect thing. It's like going to work in my area. And it's going to tell me everything I need to know when it's going to work for my very specific sort of like life situation.
I don't know. There's like some kind of like motivation there that's like beyond just like using an app, I think. Like I feel that deep in my soul, right? That it's like, it's just just the thing where I can I can know what's going on. It's a it's a crazy world out there. But I know it's going to rain in 10 minutes. And I've got my umbrella and I'm ready for it. Yeah, exactly.
So okay, my other question for you is as a as a weather app guy, are you also a weather data source guy? Like are you in the settings of all your weather apps mucking around with where the data comes from?
Not too much. I know there's some apps that like allow you to control that. I think Kara is famously one of them that allows you to choose different data sources depending on whenever you prefer. I think the one that I use on Android, which is slipping my mind right now, also allows you to do that. And it's like if one of them has gone down, I've changed it so that like I actually get a forecast or I kind of compare them very casually. But most of the time I would just probably leave it on the default. I think care whether defaults to apples, whether service now at this point.
So I don't really spend too much. I think the thing that like really I liked about the weather apps for many years ago was just really their UI and presentation. They were using these like unique designs and unique UI designs and all of the tools that were coming with the new platforms to be able to like present all of this dense information in aesthetically pleasing and helpful ways.
And I think that's really what I liked about the weather apps back then. And then of course being able to know that it's going to rain in 10 minutes or not was a beneficial. But like getting into like even things like radar and stuff like that never really mattered to me. Didn't really make a difference where I live. I know in some areas of the country, radar is hugely important to be like your day today. And some people really rely on it. But for me, it's like whatever. It's just a perk on top of it. But it's really the design of the app that really grabbed me.
Yeah. And I think one of the things I noticed, like I also have a folder of weather apps because I'm a monster. And the thing that I realized in going through all of my weather apps is that it's exactly what you described that that first screen where I can just open it up and get a sense of what's going on without having to like do a lot of work or math or tapping. It's like it's a super hard design problem and a lot of apps get really wrong, especially all the ones like I hate the weather channel app and the weather underground app and the acu weather app because they just they just throw data at you. There's a bunch of like news stories and stuff going on.
I'm like, I don't care about any of that. I just need to know if it's going to rain while I'm walking my kid to daycare. Like that's literally all I need to know. And so many of these smaller apps do that really well and like none of the bigger apps do it well. And it drives me totally nuts. And Apple seems to have hit a good middle ground there, I think. It's a hard balance, right? There's a lot of information that you have to present and you have to identify what is going to be the most important thing to the user and what they're going to want to know the most.
And I think like the ones that you mentioned, like I think the weather channel is pretty egregious with it. They're like making the decisions that they think is most important as opposed to like what you might think is most important. So a lot of the third party apps that are still available today, I think again, Kara is a really good example of this. They give you a lot of customizability over the UI and you can say like, I want this piece up higher on the screen and I want you to tell me, you know, this summary and stuff like that. Or I don't want to see this. I don't want to see the radar map and I don't want to see all this other stuff. And you can just like really customize it to your own personal preferences.
And you mentioned widgets with hello, weather is very similar that you can choose which widget you want to show on your home screen because it's the thing that's most important to you as the user. Yeah, I actually talked to Brian Mueller, the who makes care weather. He was telling me about a feature I had never even noticed before, which is that you can have different looking home screens for different kinds of weather. So you can have like in the morning, you can customize it to show you one set of information, whereas at night, like you don't care when sunset is or whatever, right? So you can you can actually have it change based on the weather to show you different stuff or based on the time of day to show you different kind of stuff.
你提到了小部件,就像你可以选择在主屏幕上显示的小部件一样,天气也是非常相似的,因为它对你作为用户最重要的事情是你想要显示哪一个小部件。是的,我实际上和制作 Care Weather 的 Brian Mueller 谈过。他告诉我一个我从未注意过的功能,就是你可以为不同种类的天气设置不同的主屏幕。所以你可以在早上自定义它以显示一个信息集合,而在晚上,你可能不会在意日落时间之类的信息,对吧?所以你可以根据天气显示不同的东西,或者根据时间显示不同的东西。
And that to me is kind of mind blowing because it's it really is like a totally context dependent thing. And one of the things a couple of people said to me was like the dumb thing about a lot of weather apps is that they show you so much information you just don't need or means nothing to you. Like when it's 10 p.m. showing me the UV index is like not useful because it's zero and there's no sun out. And what are we doing here? But most apps it's just sitting there like it just exists on the page. And Brian from care also said an interesting thing to me about like that simplicity versus he is a guy who has spent a lot of time on radars. He gave me like a 10 minute speech about radars.
But he did say an interesting thing about like simplicity versus the complexity of it all. Let me just play this for you. I spent a lot of time thinking out of way to make the app really easy to use for people who are just brand new to it, but also layering in all the powerful features in a way that isn't overwhelming and doesn't make the app like super clunky. It's there if you want to dive in and find that data and it gets out of your way. If you just want something really simple.
And he used this idea of what he called it progressive disclosure to talk about especially with the radar things. Let me just play that too. The ways that I did that for example was building it into the legend. So when you scroll across the legend, it would tell you this is the range of colors that you'd be looking for for hail. And this is the range of colors that you'd be looking for when that's coming towards a station and when that's blowing away from the station. And so building that all into the UI and like progressively disclosing it to people and finding ways to use the UI to teach users what different stuff is so that they don't have to just like go into a guide and read a wall text in order to figure out what's going on.
I like that idea very much and he like revealing itself to you over time is what I want. Like I don't care about most of that stuff. And I frankly never get to those menus. Exactly. I think even the examples that he gave of like how much do I care whether the wind is blowing towards the other station or away from the weather station? I don't really care. I just want to know if it's going to be super windy out and blow my hat off. Like that's all I care about as the level of user that I'm at.
Some people really want to drill into that data and but like throwing all of that data at me initially is just going to turn me off to the app because I'm going to be like where is the thing that I actually care about? And so like being able to like layer that on or allow customization where the user can say like yes, tell me that data. I want to know it. Totally.
I just learned about this a few days ago. So there's this company called forecast advisor and basically what it does is match historical data against various forecasts from various different providers to tell you for where you are in I think it's only in the US, which weather service is going to give the most accurate data.
And the thing I've heard a bunch like the thing that came up over and over which I was really surprised by is all of these weather providers are trying to figure out exactly what you were saying, which is like how to use these different providers to give people more accurate data, right? And so a bunch of them have a bunch of different ones. A bunch of them couldn't afford to have a bunch of different weather providers and that became really complicated, which is why all this stuff is subscription.
And it got more expensive because you have to pay acu weather and you have to pay tomorrow.io and you have to pay IBM and all this different stuff.
这个变得更贵是因为你必须付 AcuWeather、Tomorrow.io 和 IBM 等许多不同的费用。
But the ones that did it are now trying to figure out how do we put this information in front of people, right? Because the weather app that's the best where I am may not be the best weather service for where you are and it's totally different in other countries.
Like the hello weather guys are telling me that they for a while use dark sky. And then when they first got a big uptick, it was because somebody in Amsterdam tweeted about the app and a bunch of people found it. And so they get to, I think he said like 2000 users like all at once from like, you know, friends and family to 2000 users and they start getting emails from people in Amsterdam saying this weather is crap. It's all wrong.
And it turned out acu weather was more accurate where they were. So they had to sign up for a different one and now they're using more and more providers. And especially now that like when weather kit was a mess, people were like, okay, well, we can't even necessarily rely on that yet. So we have to have more providers.
And so over and over people were like, we want forecast advisor to just have an API. So we can just put in our app for, you know, your longitude latitude. Here's where you are. This is the one you should use.
So I actually have not done this for my own yet. But we go to forecast advisor.com. All right. I'm doing it. Put in your zip code. To scroll down, there's a thing that says weather forecast accuracy last month.
Yeah. And then ares weather, which is a service I'm not familiar with at 81.72%. Interesting. Okay. So mine are completely different. So I have acu weather at 85.06%.
So like the weather channel, not in the top three, a bunch of the other like big name ones, ares, not in my top three. This is super interesting. And just like playing around with this entering zip codes, the numbers are different everywhere.
And a lot of these, like I have five of these over 80%. But like the difference between my whatever six place one, which is 75% and my acu weather, which is 85% is like that's one in 10 forecasts. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a big difference in whether or not I get rained on while I'm walking my child's take care. Oh, man. This is a real heart breaker.
So if I scroll down a little bit further to the 2022 last year, which does have dark sky in the list and dark sky is only 72.21% accurate for me. That's 77 for me.
What's your number one for last year? It's the weather channel again. 81.27. Interesting. Weather channel is IBM's data, right?
去年你最喜欢的是什么?是天气频道,得分是81.27。有趣。天气频道是IBM的数据,对吧?
Yes. Well, this makes sense because I basically live in IBM country. So that's true. It's like how Apple's Apple Maps was really good in Cupertino and terrible everywhere. else. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
So the thing that I have learned, my big takeaway was like, do this check on forecast advisor and then whatever app you use, go in and put it on the most accurate one. And then from there, it's just interfaces, right?
If you want to pay more money for a really nice interface, fine. Otherwise, take the cheapest, built in the east one you can and move on with your life. But this kind of made me interested in the future of weather apps.
I also got a bunch of data from the folks at sensor tower who track all the app downloads that said weather app downloads in like the week after the Apple weather disaster went like through the roof like 10x in some cases.
And so all of a sudden, there's like zest in this space again. And I'm sort of hopeful that for the first time in a decade, there's going to be like actually interesting weather stuff going on.
突然之间,这个空间又充满了活力。我对未来十年的天气预测充满了希望,相信将会出现很多有趣的天气现象。
Yeah. I hope so too, because it's like it's fun to get excited about them and try different ideas and different things about. I think it's definitely challenging now that, you know, when the weather apps are working, they've gotten a lot better.
So like the default ones are not as stripped down as they used to be. And then of course, the price challenge that we mentioned earlier, like I think, hello weather is actually one of the more affordable options.
I did a little bit of research before coming on and like, care is 20 to $30 a year depending on the features that you want. Hello weather is about $13 a year.
What's key about both of those is that there's no real tracking of you. Like you're just paying the developer money and like that's how they're making money. Everything else, whether it's acu weather, weather channel, weather underground tomorrow IO, they charge you money and they track you. So like, they're like, like your data is like going out there. So, but even acu weather is $20 a year and the weather channels 10 to $30 a year. So like these aren't really free anymore. And if they are free, it's probably not a great experience.
You're definitely right that there are some people who like really, really need lots of information about the weather or just people who sort of care about it, right? Like it is, it is, weather is a lot of people's hobbies. It's a perfectly valid thing to like spend a lot of time interested in. Totally cool. But I think the question is for like the sort of average every day, like do I need to wear a coat today, a person? The question of what is there that I would pay for is a really complicated one, especially because I think Apple weather has gotten a lot better over the last couple of years. I still think it's not as good as like, hello weather and carrot and some of these other ones, but it's like, it's gotten a lot better. It's much closer to those than it was.
And so I kind of feel like for you as a now Apple weather user, like do you have a sense of what it would take to make you actually like, photo bill for a weather app at this point? Yeah, I don't know. I guess you would have to be like a really, a design that really grabs me and is like really enjoyable to use. I know I've played around with carrot weather before and I can like recreate the dark sky interface in it, which is pretty cool. It's not $30 a year cool to me. So like fair.
You know, it's cool, but not that cool. And like ultimately the thing that I liked the most about dark sky was the local notifications, which Apple weather kind of does now. Again, I haven't like scientifically tested them out though. So like I can't say like whether they're right all the time or not. But did they feel right? I feel like the vibes are really important. Yeah, the vibes are important. Like, you know, I get the notifications say like rain will be this weekend was really good example because it was like super rainy here. And so it kept going on and off. And so I was going to notifications all day long like rain will start in your area in 20 minutes. You know, rain will be stopping in 15 minutes and stuff like that. And it seemed like pretty accurate. But there were times where I will open the app and it'll say it's raining outside and I look outside and it's not raining outside. So like, you know, it's not definitely not perfect. But yeah, it's tough because it's like, if you can't sell me like how are you going to sell the average user? Right. Really doesn't care. Yeah. If you've lost Dan on your premium app, it's safe to say you've lost everybody.
I want to try something though like now that I've done the forecast advisor thing because I really hate the weather channel app. Like no offense to anybody that makes that app. Oh, it's not really. I don't like it. Yeah. But apparently that's the best data. So like, I need to go find a third party app that has that data because the Apple weather app doesn't use that data. And I got to go find one that then maybe taps into the weather channel app without having to use the weather channel app. That's for the best. Well, luckily, I have acu weather in all of my many apps now except for the built-in one. So I'm good to go there. Well, if you find a cool one, let me know.
And the other thing I heard from lots of developers is that every WWDC is like total chaos time because a weird quirk of being a weather app developer is that everybody demands that you support all of Apple's weird new stuff. Like when widgets came out, they were like, we have to have the best widgets and when live activities came out, it was like, you got to make it work. And so it's like every time, I think it was the hello weather guys who told me basically like they get nervous right before every WWDC because it's like what weird thing are you going to force us to work on this summer? Every single Apple event includes a huge amount of work for us. We're watching WWDC and we're like, that's some work.
Exactly. I mean, that was the assignment of weather apps is like they would be using the tools that were available and experimenting and trying things out. And you could reliably like live activities is a really good one that really hasn't propagated to a lot of apps yet. But there's probably a weather app out there that uses it or widgets is a really good example or whatever it was 10 years ago. That was like the new feature, whether it's flat design or gesture-based UI or something like that. You could experience that first in a weather app before it went to all the other apps that you were relying all day long.
Totally. All right. Well, when Apple launches the AR headset and blows up the weather ecosystem again, we'll come back into the scene. That sounds like fun. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to spend the whole rest of the show talking about the future of social media and why that future doesn't look anything like Twitter and Facebook. We'll be right back.
This is Advertiser Content brought to you by Too Good. Too Good cares about making great tasting, lower sugar products that you can find in the ogre dial. They also care about combating food waste and food insecurity, which are bigger problems than you might realize. The U.S. averages around 130 billion pounds of food waste per year. That's 30 to 40 percent of the total food supply that we produce in the country. My name is Caroline Hissong and I am the Communications and Marketing Manager with We Don't Waste in Denver. We recover good, nutritious food from local businesses and we distribute it to nonprofits who have free food programs. Too Good supports organizations like We Don't Waste to help keep healthy, edible food out of landfills and reduce food insecurity. We don't waste relationship with Too Good began back in 2020 and since then they've actually become the largest supporter in our organization's history. With Too Good support we've been able to grow up to 20 million servings a year consistently. So every time you buy Too Good, you're not only doing good by you but you're also helping to do good by others. To learn more, visit TooGoodYogurt.com slash One Cup Less Hunger.
本文是由 Too Good 提供的广告内容。Too Good 关注制作可口且低糖的产品,方便您在商店中购买。他们也关注解决食品浪费和食品不安全等问题,这些问题比人们想象的要严重得多。美国每年浪费约 1300 亿磅的食物。这个数字占美国总产量的 30% 到 40%。我叫 Caroline Hissong,是位于丹佛的 We Don't Waste 组织的通信和营销经理。我们从当地企业回收好的、营养丰富的食品,并将其分发给有免费食品计划的非营利组织。Too Good 支持像 We Don't Waste 这样的组织,帮助减少食品浪费,降低食品不安全的风险。我们与 Too Good 的关系始于 2020 年,自那以后,他们实际上已经成为我们组织历史上最大的支持者。在 Too Good 的支持下,我们每年可以保持20,000,000份食品服务。因此,每当您购买 Too Good,您不仅为自己做出了贡献,还帮助其他人做出了贡献。欲了解更多信息,请访问 TooGoodYogurt.com/OneCupLessHunger。
First, sweet tarts dare to combine sweet and tart but they didn't stop there. Now they've combined soft and bouncy to bring you new sweet tarts, gummies, fruity splits. A uniquely delicious dual-sided gummy with one side that's sweet and the other side that's tart but entirely smooth and squishy. A powerfully perfect combo sweet tarts dare to combine.
Here's the theory for you. I think when we look back on the overall story of the internet Elon Musk buying Twitter is going to turn out to be an inflection point for the internet. Not because he saves Twitter because that sure doesn't seem like it's happening but because Musk's acquisition seems to mark the end of an era in social. For so many years we've had these big platforms. Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and now TikTok and YouTube and they became our portals to our friends and in many ways to the internet as a whole. But that structure seems to be going out of style. In its place, at least according to a lot of people in the tech industry, might come a whole new way of thinking about social and even the internet as a whole.
And now this is where I have to use the term that I hate which is the word fediverse. I hate the word fediverse. It's this awful term that describes a really important concept, a decentralized version of these platforms in which your content and followers and friends don't all belong to a single company but can be created, shared and interact with across platforms and servers. It's more like email really where you can use your Gmail account to message someone on Outlook or AOL than it is the current state of social. It's a huge change.
Underpinning a lot of what makes the fediverse, again that word work is this protocol called activity pub. It's a simple web standard finalized five years ago that basically creates a structure for moving content around so that in theory any app could create content that any other app could understand and read. There are lots of ideas about decentralized protocols right now. You might have heard of Blue Sky, the decentralized Twitter or things like Nooster and Farcaster and there are even a handful of other ones, but activity pub is the clear leader right now. Not because activity pub is the thing that makes Macedon work and Macedon is so far the biggest thing in the fediverse by a long shot.
The idea underpinning all of this of decentralized social media is old, almost as old as the web itself and it's been tried and failed several times over. But some really smart people think it's going to happen now in a really big way. One of those people is Mike McQ, the CEO of Flipboard which is a newsreader app that is now all in on the fediverse.
Before he founded Flipboard, Mike also worked at IBM, he was an executive in the early days of Netscape and in general he has been thinking about and building the future of the web since basically the beginning of the web. The guy knows his stuff and he thinks the fediverse is what's next. I've been reporting on the fediverse for months and Mike has been one of my favorite people to talk to on the subject.
As is my co-host, Neil Ipetel, who is kind of obsessed with the possibilities for activity pub. So I grabbed them both and we're going to try and figure out where all of this is going. Any of you, I am. How's it going? Hanging in there.
Mike McQ, the Flipboard CEO is here. Hi Mike. Hi guys. We have a lot to talk about. But Mike, I want to start by reading you a quote back that you said to me because that's super fun when people throw words that you said to them back in your own face. Because I've been thinking about it a lot, we talked a while ago for this big activity pub story I wrote and you said the following.
You said I was there in the early days of the web and this whole thing with activity pub is as big a deal as HTML was back then. This is the single biggest opportunity I've seen for the web since the dawn of the web. And I want you either right now, this you can say, you know, I'd had too much coffee, I was too excited. This is I went too far, everybody calm down or you can double down and then we can go from there. So I'm going to give you the chance, confirm or deny. This is as big as you said it was.
你说我曾经在互联网早期参与过,而这个 Activity Pub 的整件事情就像当初的 HTML 一样重要。这是自互联网刚刚出现以来,我见过最大的机会。我想要你现在就告诉我,你是要承认还是否认,你可以说你喝了太多咖啡太兴奋了,我说飞了,大家别慌,或者你可以继续坚持观点,然后我们再从这里开始。所以我给你一个机会,要么确认要么否认,这个事情跟你说的一样重要。
Yeah, I'll double down. In fact, I think as we talk about this more, you'll see why this is probably the most exciting opportunity I've seen since the 90s as a founder, as an entrepreneur. So this is a very big deal.
All right, I think we should probably just start at the beginning here. One of the things Neal and I have been debating for months is like how to talk about activity pub because there's like, we live in this world where mass is very powerful and a lot of people are talking about it, but it's also like not merely sort of in the stratosphere of the other social networks.
But then there's this thing underpinning it, which is this activity protocol that feels like a very big deal. What's the case that you make to people like as you're as you're doing what Neal is doing and just like running around yelling the word activity pub to anyone who will listen? That's the story you tell them.
Like why is this a thing that you're convincing people you work with who have lots of things to do that this is a thing worth thinking about? Well, it is the future, not just of social media, but of the web activity pub. You know, when I think about it, I think there are two things that it does.
And one of them is to create an open social graph that becomes a part of the web, which in and of itself is a very big deal. The other thing it does is it creates a common two-way streaming platform or architecture that allows services to be interoperable. So what this means is that all as we've seen all these social media platforms basically just become other versions of themselves.
They all have vertical video now. They're all copying each other. They all build everything into this vertical stack that's totally proprietary. And if you leave and you try to do a new one, you've got to rebuild your social graph as a creator. That's a big issue, as a brand, as a publisher. That's a big problem.
So what this reminds me of is the days of AOL before the web really happened. Everything is built vertically. If you want to do it, you know, put something up online, you have to go do a business development deal with AOL. And all of the innovation is locked in by one company. So they're only doing as much as they that one company can do.
And with this activity pub breakthrough, what it really allows is the web to flourish again and to reopen up all of that innovation that currently is really controlled by just a handful of social media platforms today. When you say interoperable, that means I post something to Macedon. It comes into Flipboard. I hit like in Flipboard and that like shows up on someone else's Macedon that's following me.
So there's that level and then it goes deeper. I'll give you an example. Let's say Barack Obama, who's not on Macedon, he's not on Flipboard, but he is on medium. So as medium integrates activity pub, you will be able to follow Barack Obama on medium. When he posts something, you'll see it. When you comment on it and you'll see it from Macedon or from Flipboard.
When you comment on it, those comments will flow back into medium. That's one level of interoperability. But then it goes further, who's Barack Obama? What about verification and identity? Right now we rely on these individual wall gardens to provide that service. But there's an opportunity for a new company, a new third party, maybe some even a company, maybe it's a nonprofit that gets created that their whole focus is to do verification.
You could have a whole other set of companies, multiple companies or multiple entities or developers that do moderation. What you have is you're not just decentralizing the user experience, you're decentralizing the innovation. You're allowing all sorts of new ideas and new opportunities to do verification incredibly well or moderation incredibly well and have a lot of choice in how that happens.
What you just described intellectually makes total sense to me is how the internet should work. That these things should not be all in one place controlled by one company, especially for things like the creator economy. It's crazy that you have to have essentially 12 different businesses or 12 different platforms. That's nuts. Definitely this is how the internet should have been built 25 years ago. I think the open web would be a better place with this stuff built in.
We've had versions of this conversation about security and about identity. We got a lot of things wrong about the web in the 90s and before that that wouldn't be great if we had gotten them right then life would be a lot easier. What you just described, even that thing with Barack Obama being on medium is such a break in how we think about the web and the internet that it almost feels like the hill that all this stuff has to climb even in just how people understand the vocabulary of it is so big that I almost wonder if that hill to climb back to yes, of course this is how it should work is so great that it might not even have a chance that if we had done it back then it would have been awesome and it would have been different but we've just veered so far from that now.
It's like trying to reinvent the Quarty keyboard. Maybe you can do better but nobody cares because this is what we've been doing for all this time. Well, I think it'll happen in stages. You're already seeing the beginnings of it because of what's happening at Twitter, right? That is one moment for people to say, well, actually there's a better way. There will be more of those moments that will come and I think that over time is more people that you care about that you want to follow who are posting interesting things that will ultimately drive a gradual increase and then at some point there'll be a tipping point. I don't think we're at that tipping point just yet. I think we're in a phase but that tipping point I think will come when you have a critical mass of creators, publishers, interesting people to follow who are on activity pub.
Let me ask you about that critical mass. Twitter, whatever's happening in Twitter is happening in Twitter. But Twitter is the smallest of the social networks. In fact, the reason that it is in the position it is right now is because it was so small and so mismanaged and made so little money compared to Facebook, compared to Instagram, compared to YouTube. Isn't that critical mass of people you need to attract from those platforms? Don't you need to get the YouTube community on an activity pub based YouTube or the Instagram community onto something like PixelFed which is an activity pub based Instagram clone? Yes. 100%. You've got to get people like you guys, people like Marquez Brownlee, people like Barack Obama. You need a collection of interesting people to make this whole thing work.
Remember back in the early days of the web where an AOL used to be able to go to AOL and you'd see all these little boxes. If you go back and look at some screenshots of AOL which I did the other day, it's mind blowing. There's all these little boxes in the home screen and every one of those boxes represents like a multi-billion dollar industry right now. There's booking travel online and then they have one box like called the internet. You can go to the internet.
What happened was people didn't just automatically one day decide to switch off of AOL and switch on to the web. It was much more of a gradual change. On the web, I remember when San Jose Mercury news came online. Like newspaper, really digital forward and they had a fantastic web experience. It was way better than anything you could get on AOL. More and more and more publications came to the web and that started to get the ball rolling. If you remember when Jim Clark started Netscape with Mark and Dreson, they also announced, I think it was five major publishers that were coming along to the web that were going to be actually backing Netscape. That's one of the things that has to happen as well.
The case that I heard from a couple of people in reporting this that I thought was really interesting was that one way to get to that critical mass is kind of the sum of a lot of smaller parts. And I think this is where something like flipboard comes in for you.
Like, flip board is not the size of Facebook. But if you add flip board and medium and Tumblr and this other sort of growing mass of things, like the Metcalfs Law thing, right, where the value of the network increases exponentially by the number of people on the network is that seems to be the bet, right?
And that you don't have to have one three billion person platform. You can have 10, 300 million people platforms or 103 million people. That's bad math. Whatever you know what I mean. You can win this game sort of a piece at a time rather than having to beat Facebook with Facebook, right? That's kind of that's a big part of the whole activity, but pitch.
Absolutely. And you know, if you are a creator, okay? One of the parts of your job is to adopt new social media platforms as they happen, right? We've seen this, this movie. Everyone's on a tick dock now. You know, snap was the number one thing. And before that, it was Facebook and so on.
So what I'll tell you is that a creator wants to build an audience and wants to have that audience be an audience that they can continually reach without interference from someone else. And when Facebook changes their algorithm or Elon changes the 4U algorithm or takes away your verification check mark and all of that time and energy you put into building that audience in a Walt Garden starts to go to waste.
That's terrible. Plus as a creator, you know, when I talk to when I talk to creators, they tell me all the time that like having to spend time on all these different social platforms is really hard, right? They've got all these fragmented audiences, you know, YouTube is now, you know, prioritizing vertical video, of course.
So now you got to go and make vertical video to, you know, in order to be in the recommendation algorithm. So this is a real challenge. What I think is going to happen is that creators are going to start to realize if I invest in the open social web and I start building an audience there, I don't have to leave all these other platforms, but I can start building an audience there and over time linking back to my content, maybe even starting to host some of that content in the open social web in the fediverse, over time more and more people are going to go there because they know that that audience that they create, they'll be able to keep that audience for as long as they want to and nobody can interfere with that. Speaking of NELIS language now.
And that is my language. But what's actually worth that is the reason the big platforms have succeeded is that the thing that they centralized most of all was monetization. So you are a YouTube creator, you go to YouTube, you hit whatever threshold to turn on YouTube, that sense, you hit the button.
Now YouTube is out there in the market selling ads and allowing people to buy ads in a platform. They're serving you to answer content and you're just getting a check. There's no analog for that in the fediverse yet, right, where some other big platform has figured out monetization on the scale of a YouTube or a TikTok or whatever and it's providing to creators. Do you think that is, you know, you say moderation might be one of those functions that an ecosystem of companies arises for is monetization going to be one of those functions too or one of these platforms figured out?
I think so, Niela. I think, well, let's take a look at Patreon. Patreon is actually a pretty effective way for creators to monetize. And right now, you kind of have to go to Patreon to see like the special posts from those creators and Patreon's not really set up that way as a discovery vehicle or as a consumption experience, right?
You imagine something like Patreon or maybe Patreon itself integrated with activity pub so that when you subscribe to a creator and that creator posts something interesting just for their patrons, you'll see it. You'll see it in whatever experience you're using, whether that's the ivory client on Macedon, whether it's Flipboard, you'll see it. And that is, I think, an example of a kind of centralized monetization applied in a decentralized way, if you will. It sounds like kind of like a super RSS, right?
In many ways, you're going to, you have a bunch of feeds and you got a feed reader and those things aren't connected and then you open your feed reader and here's all the stuff from all your people. And it occurs to me that Flipboard is a kind of super feed reader. So I understand why you are in particular interested in this.
The problem for us with RSS historically is that our business model doesn't go with it, right? So for the verge, we give it away for free. We put ads on the page. That's why it's free, that's make us enough money to pay the staff.
When we are giving at full text RSS or when we are posting all of our stories on Twitter, which is something that we did for some reason for a decade, our monetization, we were just given a stuff away for free.
Do you see a world in which the advertising or the other kinds of business models travel with the content and activity pub? This is something that I think is very different than how monetization works today on the internet.
Advertising is very primitive when you think about it. What we have digital advertising now, advertising tracking you and all of the privacy violations and their surveillance economy, you know, that happens because of advertising today online is terrible.
In a lot of ways, Macedon is a reaction to that, right? They don't want any algorithms at all in Macedon because of that. Algorithms, there's nothing wrong with algorithms. algorithms can be very helpful for content discovery and personalization and all sorts of things, right? But when they're used to monetize in ways that are not transparent, that violate users' privacy, obviously, you're going to lose trust. That's what's happened.
Now, I do believe that there will be an opportunity for brands who want to promote themselves, who want to be recognized, who want to be discovered, to participate in a much more genuine transparent way that's much more respectful of users.
When we started Flipward, it was about, we were inspired by print advertising, right? You would never got by Mountain Biking Magazine and rip out all the ads, right? The ads are part of the experience, right? It's actually something I like to have, right? That world can exist.
I think there's a lot of thinking, a lot of collaboration that has to happen across the Fediverse. I think what you'll find most, though, aside from advertising, will be this more Patreon.
I was like, think of it as like a decentralized Patreon-type of model, where people are paying for content, or paying for access to communities, or paying to be able to interact with a creator. I think those payments can take the form of micro-payments. They can be subscriptions. They can, it might even be tokenized. There is a lot of opportunity here to rethink the business model in a way that's much healthier.
Does that exist in activity hub now? I subscribe to you on whatever Fediverse Patreon, and then I have access to feeds that I can pump into any Fediverse product. Is that in the standard yet, or is that to be built?
No, it's not in the standard per se in terms of monetization, but the subscription. The RSS thing you mentioned earlier is dead on it. I think of activity hub as two-way RSS, right? It's a dual RSS. Yes, you can subscribe to multiple feeds, right? Those could be for multiple services, and some of those might be behind a paywall of sorts.
This is my favorite thing about activity hub, by the way. The thing I think is the most interesting tension of it is like, boil it all the way down, and activity hub doesn't do very much. What you just described, like that two-way RSS thing, that is the entirety of activity hub. That's all it does.
It has no thoughts about how we think about identity. It has no ideas about algorithms. It has no ideas about monetization. It's a push and pull of content in a relatively structured way, such that you can say, here is how I understand content, and you can say, here is how I send content. Those two things could talk to each other. That's it.
That's what brings up, I think, to me, this big challenge, and I just keep coming back to this idea that there is a chicken and egg problem, which is that the Patreon example to me is a really interesting one, that it would require everybody to decide to support federated Patreon, right? If you want this big ecosystem to exist, they kind of, everybody has to play along.
All the readers would have to support it. All the creators would have to play into it. Then there's this big giant centralized platform that controls all the monetization of the greater economy, and I'm not sure that's good either. The flip side is you have a hundred different ones that everybody has to support, and that I'm not sure just works from a UI perspective.
I feel like I just have a hard time breaking down the big platforms actually have some real user experience wins that we've never really seen this huge decentralized things pull off in such a way that actually makes sense.
Is there a middle ground there that works? What does that look like?
那里是否有一个适合的折中点?那是什么样子的?
Yeah, I can tell you guys have been spending a lot of time talking about activity pub. This is all we talk about. It's all we talk about.
嗯,我可以告诉你们,你们一直在讨论活动公共事业。这是我们所有的谈话内容,我们只谈这个。
Yeah, man, this is awesome. Because, by the way, I was out at South by Southwest, and I felt like I was like that weird guy on the street like the end of Walt Gardens is here, holding up the sign and was like, what are you talking about? It's a dream.
But look, I think that the point around activity pub being this very simple protocol that all it does, it's two way RSS is a good way to think about it. It's the connection points that create the social graph. RSS wasn't really thought about as like, oh, this is something where you have a person who's actually publishing RSS. It was more publisher to individual.
What activity pub does is it's like, well, it's an individual to another individual or it could be an organization. That very simple protocol, basically when you look at the effect of it, it creates a graph. It creates a social graph that is open. That's huge. The byproduct of activity pub gets you that.
Now, when you come to monetization, you have to ask yourself, what's the core protocol level thing you need to produce the friction for monetization? Not to say, and try not to bake into that protocol, some predefined way that it's going to work with a centralized company or whatever, but really create it in a way that's flexible so that it could be used in all sorts of different models.
I think probably one of the most important protocol things would be some kind of tokenization, some sort of point system to give it like miles for the Fediverse, right? Some way where it was kind of built in and then it could be monetized. It could not be, it might be monetized in a subscription model or maybe on a micropayments model, but that's the kind of thinking that I think you need to do now. So it is a middle ground.
And I do think that there's this incredible opportunity to collaborate with people right now who are building this Fediverse to do something like that and create something that's fundamentally healthier, leads to a healthier business models.
The reason I keep asking about money, which is kind of like the most boring part of this all, is because that's how you're going to get creators to start to use this stuff, right? You offer them a better deal than the big platforms.
My joke about YouTube is that the life cycle of every YouTuber is marked by the video that they make about how mad they are at YouTube. And if you just are a YouTuber long enough, you end up making that video and that changes your relationship to YouTube permanently once you've made that video. How do you go capture those people? And then how do you prevent them from being as frustrated with the decentralized platform and then have the worst problem of there being no one to yell at?
Yep. Right. At least YouTube, like you can go yell at people at YouTube and then decentralized platform. You're just yelling at sort of a loose conglomerate of incentive structures. Yeah, that's a great point.
Well, I think that it's a gradual process. So one of the things I think would be good to adjust in terms of how people are thinking about activity pub and the Fediverse is that you have to leave one platform to join Fediverse. And that's just not the case. So I think it's important to be pragmatic.
Initially, if you build an account on the Fediverse, right, as a creator, your main point there is to start to collect more audience and start to build an audience that ultimately you will have control over and use that as a way to post a link to your YouTube video, post a link to your newsletter. That is a gradual way to start getting the ball rolling.
And also, by the way, when you're on every YouTube video you make say, hey, follow me on Macedon, like follow me in the Fediverse, I have this account here and if you follow me, you'll see other things that I'm posting that you can't see here on YouTube. And what you'll have is over time, more and more people will start to follow that creator in the Fediverse.
And then as these monetization capabilities start to come online in the Fediverse, say there's a Patreon type of model or maybe they even just use Patreon and Patreon Adopt's activity pub, which would be a great idea. And over time, more and more of their monetization will come from the Fediverse. So I think that's probably what you're going to see.
And the cool thing here is like it's a no-brainer. It doesn't take that much work to create an account on Macedon today. It's a totally new social platform. There's fantastic people on there now. You get very high engagement. I see 10X or 100X the engagement on Macedon that I do on Twitter. And you don't have to just leave Twitter. You can still tell your Twitter audience to start following you on Macedon. And over time, you'll have a critical mass of creators there.
OK, we need to take a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about how this all actually appears in the apps that people use every day. We'll be right back.
As vice chair and president of Microsoft, Brad Smith not only has a front-row seat to some of the most important developments in technology today, he also has a well-honed perspective on the role of governments, businesses, and innovators play in shaping its future.
That's why, on season two of his podcast, Tools and Weapons, Smith will ask guests to share lessons from their past to reframe some of society's toughest challenges and seek new solutions. Discussions will include topics from environmental sustainability and cybersecurity to developing AI programs in a principled and ethical way.
This includes businessmen strive, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, and journalist Cara Swisher. Season two of Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith is now streaming wherever you get your podcasts.
这涉及到商人努力、微软公司首席执行官Satya Nadella和记者Cara Swisher。第二季的Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith现在在您获取播客的任何位置都可以播放。
意思:本文在介绍一档名为“Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith”的播客节目第二季,介绍了多名重量级人物参与其中。
Support for the show comes from the Genesis GV70 Performance SUV. Genesis designs cars that inspire drivers to keep growing, keep hustling, keep beginning, and the first step into the unknown is usually the most exciting moment of any journey.
At Genesis, they've harnessed all that anticipation and energy into the GV70, their performance SUV. It's stunning design, both inside and out, is certain to turn heads.
The GV70 features the sleek silhouette of a coupe with the do-it-all capability of an SUV. The GV70 comes with an entire suite of intuitive tech, like its 14.5-inch infotainment system, effortless fingerprint recognition, and an available Lexicon premium audio system.
The excitement doesn't end there. Genesis also designed an exhilarating driving experience, outfitting the GV70 with standard all-wheel drive, an available electronically controlled suspension, and exceptional handling and agility. More Genesis GV70 is waiting for you. What will you begin? Learn more at Genesis.com. Genesis, keep beginning.
Alright, we're back with Neely and Flipboard CEO Mike McQ. We should talk about Flipboard because I think to Neely's point, this is still so much just like a word you say in rooms and no one knows what you're talking about.
好的,我们和尼利以及Flipboard的CEO Mike McQ一同回来了。我们应该谈一下Flipboard,因为我认为尼利所说的是,这仍然只是一个在房间里提到时没有人知道它是什么的词汇。
But you're in the process of trying to actually make this real for people. And I think the stuff that you're doing in Flipboard mirror is a lot of what I'm seeing other companies start to do in the Fediverse. And so my first question is it seems like rather than reinvent the wheel and try to make Flipboard a gigantic on its own activity pub thing from the very beginning, your first move is really centered on Macedon.
That seems to be what's happening everywhere. Everybody is saying like, this is a big long road, but the first kind of killer app for all of this seems to be Macedon. Is that right? Do you see it that way? Like, why bet there before sort of building out your own thing?
Well, yes, you're right. Macedon is by far the number one implementation on activity pub. And it looks and feels kind of like Twitter. And there is a need for a Twitter alternative now, which didn't really exist a year ago, but now there is. And so I think that that's a good place to start.
Now that said, there is going to be other experiences that embrace activity pub, right? WordPress, Tumblr and Flipboard. And so really when I zoom out here, I guess the thing I'm trying to make sure we do it, Flipboard is not create just another Twitter clone, you know, just another thing that looks like Macedon, but it does things a little differently, right?
I think, you know, it's really important to think about how these pieces fit together. What would you use something like Macedon for and what would you use something like Flipboard for? What are the different kinds of audiences that will use one or the other to the extent that they're going to make a choice? It's very much focused on the kind of mainstream audience.
So my mom and my 16 year old daughter, right? Those are the two people. If I can get them to use the Fediverse, I know we're making progress. And that is what we're focusing Flipboard on is to win people like that over.
And is the idea that all the publishers you work with are going to sort of back into adopting activity pub because they're going to publish to Flipboard and then Flipboard will support it?
Yeah, I, you know, so I think that this is a conversation we're talking about with publishers now. And we can help be a helpful on ramp for publishers to the extent that they need that. I think other publishers are able to, you know, stand up an instance and, you know, actually get going here. And I hope that they do.
Again, same argument we were just talking about for creators applies to publishers, right? Why wouldn't you do this? It's like, this is your audience. It's like building a website right now, right? This is like a no brainer. So I think that like, you know, I'm not, when I say stand up an instance, I don't mean hey, you know, now the verge is a social network and everybody can join it, you know, unless you want to do that, which you would want to do.
I absolutely want to do that. That's where my hat is at completely. Exactly. Welcome to hell. But you know, the FT, they opened it up so anybody could join, right? And they're like, ah, you know, this is hell. So we're out, right? But you don't have to open it up, right?
You can say, okay, well, this is an instance where our journalists are going to have an account. They're going to be able to communicate with users. People can follow them here. They know this is the actual author or writer, you know, or journalist.
So I think that yes, the publishers increasingly will come. And again, it's like a no brainer. Why wouldn't you? Right? I mean, this is, it's just, it's more audience. It's more of an opportunity to get in early, you know, people in the Fed of Us are extremely welcoming to new entrance right now. And you can build a really fantastic following now. So I think that's going to be happening more and more.
我认为出版商会越来越多地来加入我们。这是显而易见的,为什么不呢?对吧?这将拥有更多的观众和更多的机会提前进入市场。目前,Fed of Us社区对于新的参与者非常开放友好,你可以建立一个非常棒的追随者群体。因此,我认为这种情况会越来越普遍。
Well, and I think even just in the like structure of Flipboard, this didn't click to me the first time we talked, but it just made sense to me out like what you're describing is the original pitch you made for Flipboard about web articles, right? You just said like, look, worst case what we are is a way is a new way to see and sort through stuff that lives on the web.
If you want to like make a deal with us and ingest your content and have it look beautiful and we can do all this stuff, we can sell your ads for you, terrific, or we will just essentially set up a rich link to your page and people can flip through it and sort through it in new ways. And that's essentially the same structure you're describing, right? Like if you want to just use this distributed, this new system for sending rich links, terrific, or if you want to drill like six or seven levels down deeper, there's even cooler stuff you can do.
And you know, this reminds me by the way of back when I joined Deathscape, I used to be the guy that would go out and convince publishers to like build a website. So it's like, hey, the web is a really cool thing and you should build on it. And one of the things that I tried to do back then was to help people help publishers not just take what they're doing in print and just pick it up and drop it down on the web. It's a different world. The same thing is true here.
So you don't want to just take like an RSS feed and drop it onto the Fediverse. Really what this is about is the journalists who work at a publisher to actually start to curate and post content, by the way, not just from that publisher, but content that they're reading content that's inspiring them, that's informing them to audiences. And the publisher instance becomes a collection of those thoughtful journalists who are building audiences on their own. And that is a very different approach to how most publishers, you know, they just have a bot in RSS feed and put it out on Twitter.
That doesn't build community, right? You need a genuine way for people to interact with other people, have conversations. So that's a different modality. And I think there's an opportunity to actually do that here.
We're having this conversation in a really interesting, larger context. Twitter is whatever is happening. It's hard to even describe what is happening in Twitter. It's imploding, it's exploding. Something is forever changed with Twitter. At the same time, BuzzFeed just shut down BuzzFeed news that has prompted a wave of articles and limitations about the end of what you might call the social platform era where Facebook would send lots of traffic to it, something like BuzzFeed news or Twitter would send lots of traffic to something like BuzzFeed news. That's over, right?
These platforms are not sending lots of traffic to pages on the web anymore. They're trying to keep it all for themselves in vertical video. Do you see this as a response to that? As we got to build a new way to send traffic around the open web? Or do you see this as something different and new? A bit of both.
And I'll add to the challenges that the web is facing, the whole realization that advertising is violating people's privacy, that's an extinction level event. What we're seeing now are profoundly damaged monetization streams for publishers that are making it so that they cannot support their journalists and building out on the web.
And if you go to a web page, it's a disaster, right? There's pop-ups, there's ads everywhere. You can barely even find the content, right? And you've got belly fat ads and outbrain and tapula and it's a disgusting, horrible place and a lot of what used to be great content.
So as GDPR and CCPA and other kind of well-meaning privacy things come online, it's only serving to make it even harder to sustain quality journalism, right? So with advertising. So the whole ad model is changing and we'll have to change drastically because it just doesn't work anymore.
So this is another thing to add into that. So I think what you're seeing with the Fediverse, and this is coming back to why I see this is one of the most interesting and most powerful opportunities since I really started building companies, is that this gets at everything that we know about online, about the internet, right? And it's discovering, connecting to people, but it also gets at content presentation, it gets at monetization, it gets at moderation, it gets at the impact on our societies, the impact on our own mental health. This is a big moment.
David's going to kill me because this is my other obsession and I'm going to work it into the activity of public conversation. If you start talking about copyright law, I'm kicking you. I'm not going to talk about that. Although I can't. No, I want to talk about search.
The last thing that distributes traffic to web pages is Google Search. We see what is happening with AI. We see a company that needs to change how search works to just answer the question, maybe have a robot somewhat accurately answer the question for you instead of sending you to some SEO optimized web page. When you talk about how bad web pages are, it's pop-ups, yep, it's the sign up for our newsletter interstitial that shows up, but it's also how structured every web page is to serve the Google robot instead of a human being. And that's changing too.
Does that play into this for you? If Google is about to break on top of everything else and a generation of internet consumers might create new habits? Yeah, that is a great point. The whole generative AI revolution is setting it up so that browsing the web from Google isn't going to be increasingly a thing. You'll just stay on Google or on Bing. Why would you go click over to a link? Yeah, that's a big part of this.
What I think is going to require what's going to start to happen here is the very nature of what a website is, what content is, and how journalists are adding value to the conversation is going to have to evolve. So anybody can write an article about Macedon. There's a whole bunch of them out there. They tend to say the same things. You guys have been spending time actually digging down into the depths of the technical protocol that powers it and all of the different implications of that. So you're adding real value to this conversation.
And that value can be captured by directly interacting with your audiences, which you've had to do through third parties. You've had to do that through a publisher, which then had to do that through Google, interfered with a business model around advertising so that came back to what content you would even be asked to write or would be able to write. So what's happening now is true value, true thoughtful content is prized. There's generic stuff that you can get from chat GPT. I can type in what is activity pop and I'll get a good answer. But this conversation here, for example, this is the kind of stuff people are really looking for. So it makes this exciting.
You know, there's one or two huge lies buried in the context of this. That's how I'm going to start competing with chat GPT is. We're just going to insert some definite falsehoods along the way and you just have to sus him out. It's a good strategy.
Excellent. Before we let you go here, Mike, the two things I want to talk about are kind of the rest of this space a little bit because I think we conflate like there's activity pub and there's the fediverse and there's Mastodon and everybody talks about these all is the same thing. It's like blue sky is out here with the AT protocol and no sir is the thing that Jack Dorsey talks a lot about.
很好。在你离开之前,Mike,我想要谈论的两件事是关于这个领域的其他一些内容,因为我认为我们将activity pub、fediverse和Mastodon混为一谈,就像蓝天 AT 协议和 Jack Dorsey 经常谈论的 No sir 一样不同。
Where do you think this lands? Are we going to end up like everybody quotes that XKCD comic where it's like, you know, there are too many standards. Let's have one that governs everything and then it's like, oh no, now we have too many plus one standards. Does this land there or we can end up in this really awful place where everybody is trying to do their own flavor of decentralized and things just get worse? Like what do you see when you look around the rest of this space?
I think you're going to see that blue sky ultimately become part of the fediverse. Blue sky is very good. Is it hardcore just exact Twitter cloned? Yeah, it really is. Yeah. And they've advanced the state of the thinking on some things like moderation and portability and things like that.
That said, activity pub is a very simple straightforward protocol reminds me of like HTTP, right? It's a very straightforward simple does one thing does it really well. That doesn't mean that there won't be other protocols that will come in will specialize on things like portability or identity moderation. So I think that you're going to see ultimately there will be bridges built between things like blue sky and things like, you know, Macedon or activity pub.
Think of it this way. Remember how when we had email clients initially they were pop three based, right? Yeah, because that was like most people weren't online all the time. So you downloaded all your email to your laptop. That was how pop three worked. And then IMAP came online and IMAP was a different protocol, a different way of doing email had some extra functionality. Most email clients support both pop three and IMAP, right? Maybe even to this day, I don't really know. I haven't been keeping on top of it. But what you would do is be able to use one email client and it would talk in pop three or talk in IMAP, you know, whatever your server was. So I can see a scenario where there'll be bridges between these protocols where clients will integrate both protocols.
I believe that blue sky work in particular will just become part of the Fediverse. Yeah, blue sky seems to have gotten a lot of things around like user experience. Well, because they just copied Twitter. They had a decade of Twitter as a work to build on. For sure. But it works, right? And it's like the thing for me is just like the user names make more sense. Like the Macedon's things where you have two at symbols and it's an email address, but it's not an email address. It's just it's too much. And blue sky is like, it seems to be well ahead on some of that stuff.
So I kind of hope you're right that everybody learns from each other and we eventually find somewhere that actually makes sense. But then to that point, we're very much in this like rising tide lifts all boats thing in the Fediverse, right? Everybody's welcoming to everybody because there's no real competition because the competition is still Facebook. But like play this out a few years and this stuff gets really huge and you know, flip board is a big player in the in the Fediverse and everybody's on the Fediverse. And then I don't know like smart news shows up and it's like smart news. That social word in the Fediverse now like, can this work without eventually getting competitive? Like are you going to have to try to ruthlessly destroy other Fediverse companies 10 years from now in order to stay successful?
Like how long does this goodwill last? It lasts as long as you're providing genuine value to users to people, right? I want to stop calling them users in fact, because they're just people that are communicating with each other and they're looking for genuine value from others. And that might be an individual, might be a creator, might be a company. If you stop doing that, then yeah, you're going to get swamped by somebody else because Lockin basically is gone, right? Like the price of being bad goes way up because it's going to get so much easier to leave.
Exactly. That idea of decentralizing the innovation is so powerful. Let's just get another example. You could imagine where somebody could just do nothing but make amazing filters for video. Like awesome augmented reality, virtual reality, cool AI filters. That's all they do day in, day out. That doesn't have to be part of a social media platform, right? And I guarantee you that like somebody just totally focused on that, they're going to build really something really cool. And now they can. Now people can actually just say, hey, you know what? I'm using this social experience and I want to integrate these filters in.
So there's going to be a lot of innovation that's going to happen similar to like the AOL to web transition, right? With AOL, there was only certain number of things you could do to like book airline tickets. Like you could you could book an airline ticket. Yes, but it was like going through the saber system and all of that. Now you have like this incredible ability to like find the lowest ticket and the right timeframe with all these other connections to hotels and other travel kinds of experiences. That didn't exist before, right?
So I think what you're going to see rather than everybody just trying to be the same thing, you know, which is what's happening now. Instagram looks like YouTube looks like TikTok looks like snap. It's like they're all just becoming more and more the same thing. That's going to end and you're going to have this blossoming of innovation that yeah, they'll still be competitors, but it'll be much more on a level playing field where the best ideas will win. And the most genuine experiences will be adopted.
How do you think the big platform companies are going to play into this? Well, there's a report that Meta is working on an activity pub Twitter clone. At some point, if this goes the way that you're saying YouTube will have to do something, how do you think the big platforms handle this? Do they do embrace extend extinguish and start and then somehow centralize it again? Or do they play nicely?
Well, you know, hard to say, but you know, if you look at past history, again, come back to AOL, you know, they had that little internet box. And that was what they did and it just like, yeah, now we do internet, right? So it depends on how Facebook really approaches this. Is this just like a rogue team inside a Facebook and like, okay, now we do activity pub. Cool. We're open, but mostly there's the habit changed anything. Or do they go all in? I remember when Bill Gates decided, when day, I was December 7th in 1995, I think, where he was like, you know what? We are all in on the internet. Like everything we do will now be internet, every single thing. That was a big moment, right?
So is Facebook going to react that way? Or will they react more like AOL? I don't know. I have this vision of Mark Zuckerbreding like that whole metaverse thing, like pause activity pub. Yeah, metaverse to Fediverse. Yeah. That's pretty good. That is pretty good.
All right. We need to go here in a minute. But before we do NELI, why aren't you on the Fediverse? I cannot tell you the number of people who are like, is this fake NELI bot on the Fediverse which A is a perfect elucidation of all the problems on the Fediverse, but NELI, what the hell? Yeah.
So I have an account in Mass on social, which people have found and are replying to you to try to get me to use. Then there is a verge reader or a verge has listener who made a bot called the verge.space that reposts our quick posts into the Fediverse. You can just follow that account and get all my quick posts in the Fediverse.
所以我在社交媒体上有一个在 Mass 上的账户,人们发现了它并回复你,试图让我使用它。然后有一个名为 the verge.space 的机器人,由一位阅读者或听众创建,将我们的快速发布重新发布到联邦网络。你只需关注那个账户,就可以在联邦网络中获得我所有的快速发布。
I think that's super cool. But the real reason that I haven't engaged this is I'm just letting my mind heal. I've spent a full decade on Twitter. I've had too many emotional experiences with Twitter good and bad. I've run my brain in 240 characters for too long. And I think it's healthy for me to not think about the rhythms of my day that way for a little bit.
I think I got fundamentally, I am a true believer in what activity public do. I want there to be a more decentralized internet. I really think that everybody who makes media for a living who is a creator should think about their relationship to their audience in a more direct way. And that's what Twitter did for people. It was just the default answer for every question for so long.
And before I dive head first and do it again, I would just like to take myself out of that way of thinking for a little bit and come at it with just like a fresher perspective, a healthier state of mind. I don't know if it's working. My daughter turned five and we had a birthday party and I set a Twitter joke to a group of five rules. That's what I mean.
My brain is broken and I had no idea what I was saying. I just want to just release that tension for a little bit longer before I dive back into posting things that look like tweets all day. I mean, that's an annoyingly good response. That's a great response. It won't work. I expect you to be back very quickly. Oh, yeah, no, I'm poisoned. And I'm just like, it's like, can I get the how much of the toxin can I get out of my sister? It's not going to be all of it. But I think this is the next turn.
So Mike, to go back to just as we go here, to go back to the one of the first things you talked about, Nick Begroponte got up and said, by next year, everyone will have heard of this and be using this. Notice on a timeline here, like not for it takes over the world. And this is the only thing we do. But like, how long is it going to take before like this idea and these concepts get full honest to God, like your mom and your daughter of mainstream?
Well, this year is incredibly meaningful. This will be the year where you have the experiences actually happen, where where the mainstream audiences can come. I think you're also going to see this year a lot of important creators and interesting people join. And then probably next year is where it really goes fully mainstream. That's fast. I think so. I really do.
I, you know, that doesn't mean all the modernization and, you know, moderate everything will be completely fixed or, you know, thought through those things will all be evolving as we go. But I do think that like, well, I mean, I'll tell you this, I think I'm working to get my mom to use this this year, 100% this year, right? She doesn't use Twitter. Good for her. And just, you know, have it be something where she's like, okay, I, this is a, this is I get this. This makes sense to me. For my daughter, I think that'll be more next year thing. And the reason for that is that you just need more creators of that tick tock era to come to the Fed over. So it's going to take longer for that, I think, just pragmatically to happen. Fair enough. I like it.
All right. Well, we need to go. Thank you so much. This was really fun. And I suspect the three of us are going to have to do this a bunch more times over the next two years because this isn't going away. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you guys for having me.
All right. That's enough activity, pub. That's it for the Verge cast today. Thanks so much to Dan, Neely, and Mike for joining the show. There's lots more, as always, on all this stuff that we talked about at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also just hit the homepage. It's a good time. I also wrote a big feature about activity, pub. If you want to get even deeper in the weeds on the future of social, there's lots in there for you.
If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or your own weather setup that you want to tell us about, you could always email us at VergeCast at theverge.com or keep calling the hotline. Like I say every week, it is my favorite thing that we do on this show. 866-411 send us all of your tech thoughts and questions and ideas and feelings. And we're going to do a hotline episode again soon. Please keep everything coming.
如果你有想法、问题、感受或自己的天气设置,想要告诉我们,你随时可以发电子邮件给我们:VergeCast at theverge.com 或者打热线电话。就像我每周说的那样,这是我们节目中最喜欢的事情。请用 866-411 向我们发送你所有的技术想法、问题、创意和感受。我们很快就会再次推出热线专辑,所以请继续支持我们。
This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. We just want to webby. Thank you again so much for all of your votes. It means so much to me and the whole team here. Nilae, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about the chaos at Twitter, Apple headsets, whatever that humane demo was last week and all the biggest news in tech. We'll see you then, rock and roll.
It's late. You're almost home after catching that concert. You and your friend's knack tickets to with MX months ago. You're all speechless from the last hour spent singing your hearts out. And the only thing playing in the car is the last song of the night on full blast in your head. Admit it. You want it stuck there. The live version you can't get anywhere else. Looks like you're getting goosebumps all over again. When the night's a hit, that's when you're with MX. American Express. Don't live life without it.