It’s been weeks and our ban from Twitter continues. So, what are Decentralists like us to do? Time to re-evaluate our social media.
Decentralization is no longer the future—it is the present. As discussed in this week’s episode—we are planning a migration to new and thriving decentralized social networks. The Fediverse will soon be our new social media home.
The Fediverse now has 4 million users—is a change to social media brewing? Do new open web standards mean brand new tech innovations? What is the future for decentralized social networks?
Getting banned from Twitter didn’t feel good but as Decentralists, we’re turning lemons into lemonade!
It’s been weeks and our ban from Twitter continues. So, what are Decentralists like us to do? Time to re-evaluate our social media.
Decentralization is no longer the future—it is the present. As discussed in this week’s episode—we are planning a migration to new and thriving decentralized social networks. The Fediverse will soon be our new social media home.
The Fediverse now has 4 million users—is a change to social media brewing? Do new open web standards mean brand new tech innovations? What is the future for decentralized social networks?
Getting banned from Twitter didn’t feel good but as Decentralists, we’re turning lemons into lemonade!
Henry : Hey, everyone. It's Henry, Mike, and Chris of the Decentralists, and it's hot topic time again, but it's almost like we've been there before. We are still banned from Twitter. I thought this would be all looked after, after about a week or so, but it's not. Mike, what's going on?
Mike : Well, Henry, I wish I knew, honestly. We are now in day 11 of a Twitter suspension and we have no idea why. I have no idea why. We can speculate, but it's very cryptic. I think I think I referred to it last week, you know, before when we were literally one day away from a Peer Friday Q&A, and we got banned, the week before. We got an email saying we had violated terms, or sorry, I got an email saying I had violated Terms of Service, and that for spam and or potential misinformation reasons, my account was blocked. And it's not just my personal account. It's the account for the Decentralists, for this podcast, and the account for Peer Social as well.
Henry : Oh boy.
Mike : Chris, you got anything to add?
Chris : Yeah, I have reviewed the Terms of Service vigorously and I can't find any clue as to why we were suspended either. For example, the Peer Social Twitter account maybe sent out a tweet once a week. And it was always related to our open source project that we're developing.
Mike : Right.
Chris : And it was very distinct from our personal accounts. So as to why that was banned, I don't know. Only Twitter knows. Maybe Twitter doesn't know either. Maybe the reason why we were banned is simply because their AI bots just decided to. Who knows?
Henry : Okay, so we can't figure out why we're suspended. But when it comes to the impact on us, Manyone and Peer Social, what does it mean?
Mike : Well, it's funny, we've been talking about this for years, it seems like years, and technically it kind of has been, you know, this idea of building influence on a platform you don't control. And so the risk has always been, you could be suspended or de-platformed, or whatever. And it's quite funny. I had no idea that one of the results of being suspended would be that none of the posts that I had made out of the account, or that have been made out of the Decentralists or out of the Peer Social, the three suspended accounts, they're no longer visible on Twitter.
Henry : You mean like historical stuff?
Mike : Like the historical Q&A. We've done literally, I think 60 of these Peer Friday Q&As that we're replacing right now with this podcast. Right?
Henry : Right.
Mike : And that's 10 questions, 10 responses by me, by Chris, and a bunch of other people in the middle. And now if you go in, and if I go into my Twitter account, I see zero followers, zero following, and none of the information I've ever posted is there.
Henry : Oh, boy.
Mike It's crazy. I didn't expect that.
Henry : Okay, anything else you discovered about it?
Mike : Well, I just discovered that they don't tell you anything about it. I discovered they just basically you wake up one morning and you're suspended. And so it's not like you can prepare, they don't give you any guidelines, they don't give you anything. They just kind of cryptically say you violated the Terms of Service. And that's an 80-page document. Good luck. But one of the things I will say is that another unanticipated effect is it literally leaves you completely powerless.
Henry : Yeah.
Mike : It's this stuff for people who use social media as a channel to communicate with their audience or to create an audience, which is what--
Henry : Or to make money.
Mike : Right. All of these things, which is the reason why we went there. Everybody's told, “Well, you want to engage with an audience, you want to build an audience, you want to build influence, you want to do this, you want to do that, go to social media, use it.” Well, now all of a sudden, when they turn it off, [snaps] like that, and you've built a mission-critical organization in this thing, what do you do? You can't even really communicate with them because half of these people you-- Now, for example, I could not even go in and DM these folks that are followers in Twitter, because I can't access it. So literally, they cut you off in the time when it is-- These platforms are being used to spread neo-Nazi stuff and racism and misinformation and political hassling and all this other kind of stuff. A couple of entrepreneurs…
Henry : We're trying to improve the world.
Mike : …From Vancouver, trying to improve the world with our lofty 350 followers or something that we have, and we get banned.
Henry : Okay, hold on. So, Chris, what's going to happen to all the relationships that you guys developed on Twitter?
Chris : The good news is, I backed everything up in a spreadsheet. I know who was following us. It was very labor-intensive. It took me weeks to include every single one of our followers from all our different accounts and put them up in a spreadsheet, but I'm very glad I did.
Henry : And that was just by chance?
Chris : I wouldn’t say by chance, I always tried to back up data. But it's very time-consuming, because I have to literally copy and paste everything about everyone that we've created relationships with. And my account became unbanned, my personal account. So we can still develop those relationships. Many of those people who we've become friends with on Twitter, they joined our mailing list and we continue to exchange emails with.
Henry : Good.
Chris : But if I had not done that, Henry, you got to understand, all those relationships that we spent two years building, that would have gone up in smoke.
Henry : Wow. Okay, so what's next? What do you think? Mike, Chris, whoever. Both.
Chris : What we discovered about all this is that data on social media is very fragile. And we knew this theoretically, but to actually experience it for yourself firsthand, it's a tough pill to swallow.
Mike : Right.
Chris : So it was a real wake-up call. And basically, I had to look at this and go, “Well, how do I rebuild our community? But instead of repeating the same things, and perhaps have the same thing happen again? How do we do it so that we own our own data, host our own data as well, and make it so that there's multiple redundancies?”
Mike : Right.
Chris : And I just want to say, at this point, I had to do some hardcore research, see what alternatives are out there.
Henry : Yeah. Are there any?
Chris : Yes, there are, in fact. So Mastodon is one such alternative, it's got 4 million users. Mastodon is not an old service by any means, it's actually quite young. But it's experiencing the same rate of growth that Twitter had in its early stages as well.
Henry : Well, how does it differ from Twitter?
Chris : Well, unlike Twitter, you get 500 characters instead of 240 characters to type with, it's federated, meaning that there's no one central authority, you can create your own node, your own server yourself tomorrow, and get going, be completely sovereign with your data. And if somebody decides to censor you, for whichever reason, you can always go to another node or create a new node or, you know. What I'm getting at here is there's redundancies. So if somebody decides to ban you, it doesn't mean you're banned from the Fediverse. It just means that one person doesn't like you, so they decided to mute you from their servers.
Mike : Okay, so guys, I think we got to back up a sec here. It's not just a question of the platform. And I remember this very distinctly from the very first conversation that Chris and I had, where Chris said it's very important to remember that when you're talking about messaging, especially with things like social media and things like this, you have to build your community around the message and the content, not around the platform.
Henry : Right.
Mike : Which is very important because you're there to accomplish a strategic mission. For us, it was to see if out in the wild world of people that we didn't know, we could find people that felt the same way we did about decentralization and social media and self-sovereign identity and all this stuff that we're doing. And then what you're forced to do in these centralized type platforms and kind of, let's say non-federated things like a Twitter and a Snapchat, the mainline, Facebook, stuff like this, is you're forced to take your message and adapt it to their platform.
Henry : Right.
Mike : So one of the traps you get into is you build sets of content, like we did, for different platforms. You know, you blog, and you post that in one place, and because it has bigger characters and displays it better. And you do things like these 10 Question Q&As on a Twitter, for example, because they give you these-- It's meant to be quicker and more interactive, and you know what I mean, less reading and things like this, and you could do videos on things and stuff. But the problem is you could go down this path with all these things, and then two things happen. First, it gets really complicated. It gets really complicated to reformat your content for Reddit, for Twitter, for LinkedIn, for Facebook, for Instagram. Because if you want to have consumers or people in your business that, say, cross all boundaries, Henry, Facebook is the old folks’ social media. So if you want people who are kind of Gen-X’ers to kind of Baby Boomers, you go Facebook. If you want people who are next generation, you want Instagram, then you want Snapchat. You basically have to go on all of these platforms because it's a splinter fest. And so I would say that one of the biggest things that's come out of this is a complete rethink over what we need to do in order to maintain an audience and in order to develop influence on social media.
Henry : Okay, so really, what you're saying is, what has happened is we have spent a heck of a lot of time and energy tailoring our message for different platforms when we could have spent more time focused on the message.
Mike : Absolutely.
Henry : Okay. All right.
Mike : And so I think, at the end of the day, from my personal perspective, this is something where we've gone to great lengths to build, I think, a good community with good content. And so that piece is what we stick to. And now it's more about, let's get the message out in a healthier way, where we have more control over that content, and the audience that receives it, which is kind of what we're all about.
Chris : So I want to echo a lot about what Mike is saying here. So what is our core message? It's decentralization. And to really make this message work, we got to eat our own dog food. And that means participating on decentralized platforms.
Henry : Absolutely. That's the future and we know it.
Chris : Yeah, well, I used to think it was the future, Henry, but now I'm realizing that it's the present.
Mike : Bingo.
Chris : Decentralization is here and now.
Henry : Okay.
Mike : And it is. It is. Right, Chris? Right, Henry? I mean, come on. They've been talking about it nonstop for-- Remember when we went through about a month to six weeks over these contact tracing apps? Geez, it seems like it was years ago.
Henry : Yeah.
Mike : But Apple and Google went to great lengths to tell everyone, all these countries that were scrambling to build these contact tracing apps to stop the spread of COVID, “Don't use a centralized service where the data is stored with some big server somewhere, like the NHS did in the UK, use our APIs that are decentralized and leave all the data on the phone.” It's getting into the common vernacular; decentralization is right now.
Henry : Okay, so that's what's happening with decentralization now. It's brilliant. You guys are saying, “It's happening now. Let's continue it.” That's our entire mantra.
Mike : Exactly.
Chris : Yeah. I mean, here's the truth, Henry, if I was Twitter and I was Facebook, I'd be scared, especially if I was Twitter though.
Mike : Yeah, totally.
Chris : Because Twitter cannot right now suddenly just decentralize. They kind of want to. They say that they're creating a project called Bluesky that's a decentralization project.
Henry : I remember we spoke about that.
Mike : Yes, we did.
Chris : That's true. The truth is that if I were to create a new social network right now, I would decentralize it just because it's plain easier to do it. If the W3C has already created the protocols for something, why not just build on what the W3 has already done? Why build from scratch anymore?
Henry : Okay, what are you talking about, the W3?
Chris : The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, and they are responsible for all of the world's web standards.
Henry : Ah, of course.
Chris : HTML, XML, CSS, so on and so forth. Recently, they decentralized ActivityPub. Sorry, I shouldn't say decentralized, they standardized ActivityPub.
Mike : Correct.
Henry : And what is that?
Chris : It's a protocol that is open and it's decentralized. It's a networking protocol that provides an API for creating, updating, and deleting content.
Henry : Cool.
Chris : As well as for federating server to server APIs, for delivering notifications and content. What I'm getting at here is, ever since HTTP and TCP were invented, you don't see companies nowadays trying to recreate or reinvent the wheel. And you don't see people trying to recreate networking from scratch. Everybody builds nowadays on TCP/IP and HTTP.
Mike : Right, which are the protocols for just transmitting data.
Chris : Exactly. So if I’m a new social network, why would I create my own private, customized API, when there's an open decentralized protocol that does all of it, the work is out there, it's open, it's free to use, and I can just go ahead and piggyback on that to create my own social network?
Henry : And that's available now and people are starting to use it?
Chris : Yes, it's been available for a year and a half, it already has 3 million users.
Mike : And it's called the Fediverse.
Henry : Fediverse?
Mike : I love that.
Henry : As in federated universe?
Chris : Well, yeah. So hey, actually I just want to be clear with something, the Fediverse and ActivityPub are not the same things, but ActivityPub is three-fourths of the Fediverse. The Fediverse has 4 million users, users of ActivityPub have 3 million users. So this is very exciting stuff right now.
Mike : So okay, question. I'm going to ask a question. Chris, what exactly is the Fediverse?
Chris : Great question. So the Fediverse is an ensemble of federated servers that are used for web publishing.
Mike : And so federated, again, means that individual people who create and host content, have a server that they create and host their content on, and they potentially host other people's content as well.
Chris : Mm-hmm. So it's all independently hosted, all that stuff, but what makes the Fediverse different from let's say, WordPress, or something like that, is each of these servers can communicate with each other.
Mike : Ah, right. So rather than it just being a host, it's like it's got its own DNS or something, like domain name, or whatever it is type of thing.
Chris : Yeah. So each of these servers, they have their own domain. For instance, there's one domain for Mastodon, one domain for Pixelfed, so on and so forth. Actually, there's multiple domains for all these services, and they can talk to each other. And it can all be done through server-side APIs.
Mike : Right.
Henry : Okay. Now, hold on a second. It still sounds as if you've got, to me, in this universe that exists, there are still centralized servers that still talk to each other. Is that what's going on?
Chris : So the best way to kind of think about this, Henry is, for me, the Fediverse is not the solution, it's a step towards the solution.
Henry : Right. That’s what I always thought. Yes.
Chris : Okay. So Twitter is centralized. If you want to use Twitter, you have to go through Twitterʼs servers. With the Fediverse, that's not the case. So at the server level, things are decentralized. But the problem with the Fediverse is that it still works in kind of a server-client basis. There are still servers, and if you don't have a server, well your only option to participate is to be a client.
Mike : Right.
Chris : Eventually, where Peer and Manyone would like to go is we would like everybody to work through peer-to-peer communication. And we would like to separate identity from content hosts.
Mike : Correct.
Henry : Right.
Chris : That's not where the Fediverse is yet. But the Fediverse is substantially better than what's currently popular. What's currently popular doesn't allow individuals like you and me to own our own servers and our own data. So in that regard, the Fediverse is better.
Mike : Correct.
Henry : Yeah. Okay. What else makes it exciting?
Mike : Well, from my perspective, I think the primary difference, I think the thing that the Fediverse will do and does very well, just at a conceptual level, is it provides a basis where all of us need, and I'm talking, when I say all of us, okay, I'm using the royal us, that can be me as a person, or me as a representative of my company, or whatever it is. All of us need to get used to this idea that we need to take ownership and control of the data that we create, that we share, and that we host. If we don't take control of our data, then we will always be victim to some kind of manipulation of the platform, as a la, we've just seen with Twitter.
Henry : Of course.
Mike : Whereas what the Fediverse would say to us is, “Okay, we've just been suspended from Twitter. So the smart thing for us to do as kind of where are we going to go now, is we go to, as Chris was talking about, Mastodon, which is a federated version of Twitter, where we would set up our own little ‘server.ʼ” And it could be a location on somebody else's box.
Henry : Right.
Mike : And we would have all of our Q&A, and all of our answers and back and forth, all the stuff that we've done over the last 60 weeks with Peer Friday. And then we would basically share that and build the same community. And the idea is, it's our server, we can't be kicked off.
Henry : You own it.
Mike : We can't be suspended. We own it. Now, the thing that we give up, technically, right now, and this is why I think, like Chris is saying, this is kind of a half measure, is what you give up by going to the Fediverse, is you give up this all the ads, basically. Because the Fediverse is not at this point, at least I'm not certain, maybe some of them have chosen it, but it's being federated, and being independently controlled, generally means that you're not subject to the whims of advertisers.
Henry : Right.
Mike : Because it's your content, it's your server, as long as you can afford to keep the server running and maintain it, why do you need to deal with a kind of advertising and things like this? So, to me, the Fediverse is a great kind of indicator of where all of our minds need to shift and where everybody should be, and I’m betting will start to look, when they get kicked off these platforms. Because it was just announced today in the endless saga of TikTok-- In the last week, the CEO quit, the fancy guy from Disney. And it was just announced today that the Chinese government has just instituted two export controls on technologies, specifically algorithmic technology used to host and curate a user social experience. So they basically have now said, “If you're going to force ByteDance, the Chinese company, to sell TikTok, then the Chinese government is not going to allow you to take the algorithm, which is what makes TikTok TikTok. All of this stuff happening and there's a billion people who are completely screwed if this thing gets shut down.
Henry : So are you saying that what they are claiming is they will not allow someone to buy the intellectual property?
Mike : Yes. What they're saying is, it's exactly the same thing that Donald Trump did. Donald Trump basically signed an executive order under the auspices of TikTok being a threat to national security of the United States. And the Chinese have returned, saying, “It's a threat to our national security to allow any kind of technology like the technology behind TikTok to be sold or exported without a proper license. And the only way you get that license is from the Chinese government.”
Henry : There you go. Weaponization again. It's like every week.
Mike : Totally.
Chris : I want to highlight once again, the dangers of centralized social media here. Because by no means is TikTok the only situation or company in which this is happening.
Mike : For sure.
Chris : Remember Google Plus?
Henry : Vaguely.
Chris : They're gone. Okay. Yeah, vaguely. But some people really loved Google Plus, and it's gone forever. All the data on Google Plus is gone forever.
Henry; Right, yeah.
Chris : Remember Vine?
Mike : Yep.
Chris : Vine is gone forever. Nobody can get that data back.
Mike : MySpace?
Chris : MySpace is still around, thankfully.
Mike : Right.
Chris : But Friendster is gone.
Mike : Right.
Chris : If these services were federated, they might still survive.
Mike : Yeah. Even if it was just some guy with a dusty old server in the back. You know what I mean?
Chris : That's right. So we have all these folks who've made their living off TikTok, Vine once upon a time, Friendster, perhaps 20 years ago. And now they're living is no more.
Mike : Right.
Henry : All right. Gentlemen, last question. Back to Twitter. Will we ever go back or get back to Twitter?
Mike : Well, I think Chris and I have different opinions on this, but I personally-- Well, A, the first simple answer that both of us have to agree with, and all of us have to agree with is it's not up to us, which I think is the most dangerous part. It's not up to us. So we spent two years on Twitter, trying to build a community and trying to be honest with people and trying to educate folks and trying to kind of draw attention to an important problem, and we got banned for it. And we may never get back. So from my perspective, I kind of feel like, you know what, if they don't want us, then we'll go somewhere else. And we'll take our message and our people with us.
Henry : Fine.
Mike : Chris?
Chris : Well, I'm already back on Twitter because Twitter unbanned me.
Mike : You lucky devil, you?
Chris : Yeah, lucky devil, me. So I believe, to a certain extent, we kind of have to be on Twitter, just because unfortunately, the audience is still there and a lot of folks on Twitter don't know that the Fediverse or decentralization exists.
Mike : Correct.
Chris : But my relationship with Twitter has irrevocably changed.
Mike : For sure.
Chris : I'm no longer going to invest time and effort into facilitating relationships there. If I'm going to use Twitter, I'm going to use it purely as a broadcast medium, just as a pipe to send messages out. Am I going to spend time messaging people there, having back and forth conversations? Probably not.
Mike : Correct. That's very interesting.
Chris : Yeah. The other truth with the Fediverse is we have more people who are amenable to our core message. 4 million people have said, “Decentralization is so important to me that I'm going to migrate over to the Fediverse.” And they have. That's 4 million people who know where the winds of change are blowing.
Henry : Good point. That's fascinating. It looks like decentralization indeed is moving forward and moving forward quickly. We have to make sure that we're out front and continuing and even pushing the boundaries, getting to peer-to-peer.
Mike : And thanks to Jack Dorsey and Twitter for forcing us.
Henry : Yeah, exactly.
Mike : Right? I know. But seriously, we may have gotten a bit complacent with Twitter. And I think this is part of the ruse is even us, who've been against these guys and the centralized social media kind of got lulled into a false sense of security with this thing.
Henry : Yeah, and we became a victim.
Mike : And we became a victim of our own kind of success, if you want. Right?
Henry : Yeah.
Mike : And so the truth of the matter is there is literally no value anymore to influence on these platforms, like literally.
Henry : Or it's limited, it times out.
Mike : Totally. But you know what I mean, Henry? If you think about it, it's not value. It can be money; it can be revenue. But if you had a vault full of gold bars that could magically one day, without any input from you, turn into, I don't know, marshmallows, then basically, there is no value in those gold bars. If you have no control, if they can be turned into marshmallows at any point in time, there's no longer any monetary value to those things. That is what's happened with influence. And that's what's happened with Twitter and with us. And so I the Fediverse is a great step, but the future is decentralized.
Henry : Perfect. Thank you very much, Mike. Thank you, Chris. Obviously, we're going to be chatting a lot more about the Fediverse and related technologies. Gentlemen, let's hope we get back, or not.
Mike : Or not. Thank you, Henry.
Henry : Thank you.
Chris : Thank you, Henry.