Dot Social

Dot Social’s Mike McCue talks to PJ Vogt, host of the Search Engine podcast. PJ is also a co-founder of the Forkiverse, a Mastodon instance launched with the Hard Fork team as an experiment in community and a concrete way to show how a decentralized social network can work.  The conversation is a timely reminder that the internet is still something we can — and should — build together.  Highlights...

As Mastodon celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2026, the open source platform’s new Executive Director, Felix Hlatky, is focused on what it’ll take to make the next 10 years even more impactful.  That vision includes an overhaul in version 5.0, a new feature called Collections, and continuing its critical role at the heart of the fediverse.  Highlights of the conversation include: 00:56 What Fe...

What do TikTok, Mark Cuban and Bluesky have in common? Skylight . When the future of TikTok was thrown into question in January 19, 2025, Skylight CEO Tori White and her co-founder/CTO Reed Harmeyer saw a moment and seized on it.  But they took a new approach, one that puts creators in charge of their content, their audience relationships, and their reach. Giving creators all of the control and fu...

AltStore co-founders Riley Testut and Shane Gill are the perfect example of necessity being the mother of invention. When Apple denied the launch of their retro video game app, Delta, in 2016, they realized that indie app developers needed another solution — one that could bring apps to communities without Apple dictating the rules and taking a cut.  Founded in 2019, AltStore is that solution. The...

Social networks were built on short posts designed for speed and scale. But what if the next era of the web was built for something deeper? Two of the social web’s “longformers” are working on this. John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, and Matthias Pfefferle, the developer behind the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, are at the forefront of integrating social features with blogs, newsletter...

Thanks to the rise of the open social web, it’s more viable than ever for creators to take back ownership and control of the distribution of their work, their connection to their audiences, and their livelihoods overall. Real alternatives to walled-garden platforms aren’t just theoretical ideas — they’re here, and getting stronger every day. No one knows this better than Molly White , the research...

What if your social media experience weren’t controlled by an algorithm or a corporation, but by your community? That’s the idea behind Blacksky, a decentralized project built on the AT Protocol — the same infrastructure powering Bluesky.  Though their names contain the same suffix, it’s important to know that Blacksky is not hitching its wagon to the Bluesky app, team or platform. The community,...

Blogger, journalist, author and activist Cory Doctorow can embark on a 10-minute monologue about what’s wrong with tech and still leave you hungering for more of his rapid-fire analysis and biting humor. It’s stunning to be presented with the big picture of the mess we’re in — and how to potentially get out of it. In this episode of Dot Social, recorded live at the Fediverse House at SXSW 2025, Do...

From the outside, Bluesky may seem like a Twitter clone. But anyone who’s close to the technology — and the team — knows that they’re building something much deeper: they’re rethinking the internet’s architecture to create a more flexible, user-centric web. Bluesky’s CTO Paul Frazee is the perfect person to explain all this, as he’s fantastic at tying technical concepts to their practical applicat...

n 2007, the hashtag was a simple, yet revolutionary, idea that changed the way we organize and amplify content. Today, it is either endangered or more useful than ever, depending on whom you talk to. On the open social web, hashtags are an important unifying mechanism — not just for content but for people too.  Why is that? How did we get here? What’s next for this small but mighty feature and for...

When you’re building an open source community you’re a part of a collective effort with a common goal. In the fediverse, there are early adopters doing a lot of the heavy lifting now. They’re the voices you want to follow to make sense of the place.  One such person is Chris Trottier. Chris describes himself as a “fediverse enthusiast” (he’s also passionate about video games). He’s a sage presence...

Unlike traditional social media, the fediverse operates without a central authority. This creates a unique set of challenges and opportunities for how it’s governed.  Luckily, there are thoughtful stewards who want to see decentralized social media succeed in the most human — and humane — fashion. Two of the most prominent are Erin Kissane, a writer and researcher working on new networks, and Dari...

It’s tough being a media outlet these days. Audiences are fractured, referrals from search engines are dropping, and publishers are at the mercy of algorithms they don’t control. Savvy journalists at forward-thinking newsrooms are not letting this happen to them. Instead, they’re doing the work that arguably has been most critical all along: building direct connections with their audiences. It’s c...

There’s a reason journalist and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick calls the platform “the most interesting experiment going in social media.” Originally launched as a project within Twitter in 2019, Bluesky has since become an independent company intent on making social more like the web.  What does that mean, exactly, and why does it matter? Bluesky founder and CEO Jay Graber says social media is...

The fediverse offers an opportunity to rethink how trust and safety works in social media. In a decentralized environment, creating safe and welcoming places relies on community moderation, transparent governance, and innovation in tooling. No longer is one company making — and enforcing — its own rules. It’s a collective responsibility. Samantha Lai, senior research analyst at the Carnegie Endowm...

John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, calls himself “the inverse Peter Thiel.” That’s because he wants to build a tech company that bucks the usual narratives, with as few monopolies as possible. His open-source publishing platform is structured as a nonprofit and is integrating with the ActivityPub protocol, giving creators digital sovereignty. No longer do writers have to perform for an al...

Molly White is a leading cryptocurrency critic, but get to know her and you’ll see she’s anything but cynical. In fact, this researcher, writer and software engineer cares so deeply about free and open access to high-quality information that she’s been a Wikipedia editor since she was a teenager.  Now Molly is the force behind the Citation Needed newsletter and the Web3IsGoingGreat site, and frequ...

The beauty of an open system is that anyone can build on top of it and try to make it a better place. In the Fediverse, software engineer Ryan Barrett is one such developer. Ryan’s been building social network bridges and related tools for over 12 years, including Bridgy, which connects personal websites and blogs to centralized social networks, and Bridgy Fed, which connects them to the Fediverse...

On March 21, Meta’s Threads entered the fediverse . This means that people on other ActivityPub-powered platforms, like Mastodon, can follow federated Threads profiles and see, like, reply to, and repost posts from the fediverse. (Eventually, you’ll be able to follow other fediverse accounts from Threads, too.) It’s still early days, but Threads’ entry shows the ecosystem coming together at a larg...

For stewards of the fediverse (they sound like superheroes, right?), FediForum is a key date on the calendar. The third edition of the “unconference” is happening soon, on March 19-20, 2024. With Threads saying it will federate later this year, FediForum comes at a time of growing curiosity and promises juicy topics and demos. What are the issues that are top of mind for the developers and leaders...

Something happened when the internet turned into an ad-driven business. Incentives became oriented around grabbing attention over valuing substance and connection.  What’s happening now in the Fediverse gives us a chance to reverse that. To pivot out of the attention economy into something more meaningful.  Tony Stubblebine has already emphasized a focus on quality at Medium. As the publisher of B...

The Fediverse is not a monolithic place. It’s constantly evolving and being shaped by smart, passionate people who want to make sure that the open social web is better than the social media we’ve had before.  One steward everyone should know is Tim Chambers, the co-founder of Dewey Digital out of the Dewey Square Group, a public affairs firm in Washington D.C. Tim is the author of the quarterly Tw...

It’s been a momentous time for the Fediverse. New versions of Mammoth and Ivory launched. WordPress and Tumblr reaffirmed their commitment to integrating ActivityPub. And then both Threads and Flipboard rolled out their plans to federate. What does this all mean for the Fediverse? How will moderation work as the Fediverse grows in leaps and bounds? Who will be next to federate? Mastodon’s founder...

The Internet as we know it is now over 30 years old, and author John Battelle says we must get over the ‘extraordinary inertia’ of the system we’ve built. He would know: As a founder of WIRED Magazine and as an entrepreneur himself, John’s been tracking and writing about the evolution of technology and its impact on society for a long time.  What exactly is the difference between what he calls “th...

We’re on the precipice of a new wave of innovation in the Fediverse, and it’s important that even established organizations listen up and see what’s unfolding. One person watching closely is the BBC’s Ian Forrester. As the Senior Firestarter in the broadcaster’s R&D Lab, Ian susses out new technologies and opportunities so that the public service broadcaster can stay current and true to its values...