Vladimir Putin's Forkiverse

Search Engine

Search Engine hosts PJ Vogt, Kevin Roos, and Casey Newton reflect on their nine-month experiment building a federated social network called the Forkiverse. Initially successful with nearly

Key takeaways

• PJ Vogt, Kevin Roos, and Casey Newton launched the Forkiverse in January as a Mastodon-based experiment to test the viability of a distributed, pro-social fediverse network.
• The platform quickly attracted nearly 10,000 users but exceeded its hosting plan limits, with Kevin Roos personally spending over $1,000 out of pocket on server costs.

Main topics

• Fediverse and Mastodon social networking
• Russian disinformation and Portal Combat

Notable quotes

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

Conclusion

The episode serves as a candid post-mortem on the practical and psychological challenges of

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:25) Hello, fellow moguls. What's up, legends? Speaker 4 (0:29) What's the opposite of moguls? I feel like that's what we are and are here to talk about. Speaker 2 (0:35) Minions? Speaker 4 (0:38) Like a mogul who just absolutely fails. Like a WeWork situation. Look, it's easy to criticize when you're Speaker 2 (0:46) not in the Speaker 4 (0:46) arena. I would like to get out of the arena. Please get me out of the arena. Speaker 2 (0:57) At the beginning of this year, Search Engine launched with fellow podcasters Casey Newton and Kevin Roos, our own social media network. And now, something fairly unfortunate had happened there. Before we get to that unfortunate thing, which is also pretty funny, I want to refresh your memory about how we got here at all. In January, in a moment of unmitigated optimism, we'd designed our network, starting with its name. Speaker 4 (1:20) We could call it the Forkiverse. I mean, I tried to do a blended name and came up with Search Fork or Hard Engine. Hard Engine. Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different internet. Speaker 4 (1:33) That's on Casey's incognito tab. Speaker 2 (1:39) Why did we do that? Well, not so long ago, people were very upset about Elon Musk's takeover of what was once Twitter. Everybody was fed up with billionaires and the way they'd made social media addictive and polarized with their fiendish algorithms. I mean, people are still mad about those things. But a year ago, people were talking about solutions. And one solution that was floated that I found very intriguing. was that social media might be better if instead of being concentrated, like just a few platforms owned by moguls, if instead it was really widely distributed. Like you had all these little platforms that were operated by anybody who wanted to run them, but those platforms could be interconnected with each other through something called federation, a federated internet, a fediverse. This seemed like a long shot, but not entirely impossible plan for an actual better internet. And so Kevin, Casey, and I wanted to try it. We wanted to build our own little piece of the Fediverse. And so on January 9th, we opened the Forkiverse up to any internet stranger who wanted to join. And then we waited. Speaker 4 (2:39) It's kind of Speaker 3 (2:39) cool to see an unfilled universe. It's so beautiful to just see it, you know, without any misinformation, any sort of toxic hate speech or bullying. Yeah, Speaker 4 (2:51) many people are saying this is the ideal social network. It really is. It's very zen. Speaker 2 (2:57) All of this was documented in the Search Engine episode called The Fediverse Experiment. There's a link to it in our show notes. But what happened was almost 10,000 people joined right away, and they did what people do on social media. Chitter-chattered, shared links, made friends. It was a bigger success than any of us had imagined. But the reason we were meeting last week was to discuss a grave situation that had since transpired in our dear Forkiverse. Kevin was the one bringing the news and also catching us up to speed about the events between launch and now. Speaker 4 (3:28) We spent a glorious couple of weeks receiving posts from people, participating in the discussion there. And then a few things happened. Speaker 2 (3:40) One Speaker 4 (3:41) was we ran out of room on our Mastodon hosting plan. Speaker 2 (3:45) We were a victim of our own success. Speaker 4 (3:47) We're a victim of our own success. I forget how many gigabytes of storage we had got exceeded by people posting their photos of forks, which is one of the... It was a Speaker 3 (3:58) classic fork-averse activity that everyone loved. Speaker 4 (4:01) Yes. People would also post photos of just where they were when they were listening to our shows. And that all took up some space. And so we have exceeded the limits of our Mastodon hosting plan. Speaker 2 (4:13) Which is good. Speaker 4 (4:15) Good problems, but, you know, champagne problems, but still problems, especially because I have not yet billed you guys for your portion of this. So I'm just eating this cost on my personal credit card, which does not feel great. I thought this was cheap. This Speaker 2 (4:32) is not killing Zerbed. I Speaker 4 (4:34) mean, it's not like I'm still feeding my family, to be Speaker 2 (4:37) clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that is really a problem. Speaker 4 (4:40) Yeah, it's not, the juice has not been worth the squeeze for me in terms of bringing enough joy to my life to justify the expenses I'm laying out for this thing. So that was Strike One. Strike two was, I would say, just a sort of decline in engagement on my part, and I think both of your parts too, where I just found myself like, I'm not checking this thing every day or even every week. I have no idea what's going on there. It's just kind of turning into a ghost town. I can sort of see the tumbleweeds from here. Speaker 3 (5:11) And by the way, I would say that Kevin's participation in the Forkverse declined precipitously after the announcement, or rather... after the publication of our episode announcing the Forkiverse. It was sort of like, once it had been created, Speaker 4 (5:24) Kevin said, this feels like the right place to say goodbye. It just felt like another feed to me. You know, it's like I spend my life just juggling between these feeds that I have to sort of maintain a regular posting cadence on. And it was just one more feed. PJ, how did you feel? Speaker 2 (5:40) I, like, I think I may have fought, like, longer than you, but it was a similar feeling where it's kind of like... My complaint about social media is it is addictive. I don't like how I feel when I'm at the end of it. Yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah. But it turns out if you make an unaddictive, pro-social, nicey-nice social media feed, it's kind of hard for it to compete with the other ones. Like, I'd still rather go, like, read Bile on X or a book. But, like, the idea of kind of the more vegetable-y... Social media didn't totally work. I feel bad describing our social media network as vegetable-y, but it felt like something I ought to do rather than something I wanted to do. Speaker 3 (6:22) Well, you know, something that I want to acknowledge that I think was really nice about the Forkaverse, because I do think that I probably contributed more to the actual posting on it than either of you two clowns. And what I noticed when I would be there is that mostly it was just people who are kind enough to listen to our podcast just coming on to be like, hi. I would like to say something nice to you. Here is a picture of where I listened to your podcast. Here is a picture of a fork. You inspired me to create a project that I would now like to share with you. This was lovely. And so I would say for like a nice, you know, three or four weeks, I was getting a lot of value out of just sort of showing up. And it was a little bit of show and tell, and it was a little bit of an ego boost. So that part of it was really lovely. Speaker 2 (7:10) But to the end, Casey, how come you found yourself trailing off from it? Speaker 3 (7:14) Because I can only take so many compliments, PJ, before I say I need to go back to blue sky and have somebody tell me to kill myself. You have to take the bad with the good. It starts to feel a little inauthentic when you're online and people are only saying nice things. It's a bit of a sort of like sycophantic chatbot situation where you're like, I'm not sure where this is leading me. I don't want to start believing my own press. Speaker 2 (7:42) So strike two was that us three founders waned in our excitement and participation in the Forkiverse. A very small strike like strike one. Were the third strike of the same magnitude, the fork-averse would undoubtedly have reigned for a thousand years. But strike three, the one Kevin was about to unveil, was the doozy. A strike so big, I realized, our listeners needed to hear some ads before we revealed it. After the break, Portal Combat. Speaker 2 (8:55) This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Mubi. If you're tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming algorithms designed for passive background noise, you need to check out Mubi. Mubi is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world, curating and elevating visionary filmmaking that's handpicked always. 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