I’ve opted to keep people’s names out since this isn’t a transient post on the skyline. That said, I hope the references are clear and you know when to insert yourself.

So, with that said, here’s my AtmosphereConf 2026 experience.

Anxiety, then Energy

Online and at short events, I typically present as extrovert. But, over the years, I’ve learned that I have a pretty low social battery, especially when I have to be in big crowds, even when it’s full of folks I know well. So you can imagine the feelings I tend to feel when I’m about to go to a conference that has more than 300 people who I mostly interact with online.

As I walked into the UBC Nest on Friday afternoon, I had this nervous feeling in my gut that people’s first in-person impression of me would end up being awkward or, at least, not what they expected based on my perpetual posting online.

But, the moment I walked in, I saw a couple friends, both of whom I was meeting in person for the very first time after consistently speaking with them online over video calls for the last year and change. They both gave me a tight hug, and I immediately felt the pressure valve release and I knew I’d be okay.

From there, for the next few days, I was in rooms with some of my favorite people I hang out with online every single day, spending time together in-person, and all I felt was the energy of the rooms energize me.

Not Enough Time

If there was one statement made more than “we can just do things”, it was “I wish we had more time.”

At AtmosphereConf 2025, we were a much smaller group of folks, most of whom either knew each other, or at least knew of each other. This time, it was the same, except double in size. This meant I had to pick between friends for sessions and hallway meetups. As the days would draw to a close, I would get this sudden rush of “oh my god, I didn’t meet insert list of 10 people here yet.”

I’m sorry if I cornered you and forced you into a conversation when you were in a rush to get somewhere, I just didn’t know if I’d run into you again. I know those moments weren’t goodbye, but I also wanted that time with you in person even if for a few minutes.

All those laughs and hugs were worth it, I hope!

Breaking Bread

Anyone who knows me understands that I’m highly food-motivated. My love language is sharing meals together, and eating over conversation until we can’t speak anymore.

Turns out, the corner of the Atmosphere I spend time in has at least a few folks who feel the same way.

Every meal would start with a couple people, then double, then double again, and then double on top of that. But, because we were all in the same room with long meals, it gave us the opportunity to connect on a deeper level, 1-on-1, and learn more about each other outside of our work.

Turns out, the Atmosphere has a whole lot of creative, community-minded folks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tech conference with such a high density of well-rounded humans. You’re so incredibly special, and I can’t wait to see what you accomplish in the coming year, whether it’s in this space or whatever your heart desires. I think a lot of you are going to change a part of the world you deeply care about.

It was a pleasure sharing ducks (yes, plural), donairs, and desserts with all of you.

If you ever find yourself near my city in the future, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let me know what kind of food you want to eat. I can’t wait to have another meal with you.

The Future

I actively avoided talking about any tracks or sessions in this piece because I need to go back to the presentations to either digest them further, or watch them for the first time. There’s a lot to unpack, and I want to do so carefully.

One thing that was clear throughout the conference sessions, however, was that the future isn’t stagnation. While this conference had over 300 people, the next one will likely almost double, if not more, just like our dinner groups did. The momentum is steep, the energy is clear, and I’m not really sure if there’s any turning back. That’s exciting.

But with that excitement came a gut punch as I sat there on Monday morning typing away.

We already didn’t get enough time. Will we ever get enough time? Will the friendships that have grown over the last couple of years start to change as this environment expands and coop-etition leads to deeper competition? There were moments of tension in the air already, whether it was toward the Bluesky team or among smaller projects.

There’s this mixed feeling of dread that the success of the work happening today will grow the Atmosphere into something bigger than us. In winning, we may lose the things that made this year’s conference feel human in a way that’s a little hard to explain.

It’s probably a good thing, but I’m not quite ready to be happy about it.

Choosing Joy & Gratitude

Maybe that feeling of dread is misplaced. It’s, at least, a little early to feel this way. But I wouldn’t be who I am if I wasn’t always trying take a peek into the future of the work I’m doing and see if I belong in it or if it even requires me.

But, perhaps getting ahead of myself is taking away from the joy I felt this last week.

So, instead of thinking about the future today, I think I’m going to cherish what I experienced this time around, and choose to lean into the joy, starting with the joy you all brought me.

Thank you to everyone who pulled me aside in the hallway for a chat. You made me feel seen and appreciated.

Thank you to everyone who let me pull them aside in the hallway, even when they were in a rush to get somewhere. I’m so happy we had our chat, brief or not.

Thank you to everyone who took time out of their busy day to have a long conversation with me. Some of us were meeting after a long time, some of us were meeting in person for the first time ever. I’m so glad we got to catch up or get to know each other better.

Thank you to everyone who gave a talk. You taught me so much about how we can build together, be more intentional about the things we do, and take care of the people we build for. I have many talks to catch up on, but from what I hear, there wasn’t a single miss. It’ll take time to get through all of them, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it.

Thank you to everyone who dealt with the chaos of dinners that felt planned when we had no real plans whatsoever. Y’all were troopers while being hungry beyond measure, and I felt your pain in that moment.

Thank you to the people who helped organize dinners regardless of the mess and hanger that came with it. It’s a different kind of bonding when you’re in multiple Ubers trying to coordinate because a restaurant won’t let us in.

Thank you to everyone who told me they appreciate the work Ryan and I do at A New Social. Being two full-time volunteers can sometimes take a toll on my mind, but seeing the impact we made on so many of you makes it all worth it.

Thank you to everyone who showed up to my talk, intently listened, documented it, and cheered me on. It was a blur, and I deeply apologize for taking more time than I was assigned. But, like everything else at this conference: there just wasn’t enough time.

And, finally, thank you to all the organizers and the giant list of volunteers who made this conference what it was. You all made magic happen.

I hope we all convene somewhere the same time next year, wherever that may be.

Until then: see you on the skyline, with overwhelming joy.

You can subscribe and recieve augment in your email inbox, your RSS reader, the Atmosphere, and (soon) the Fediverse.

I’ve always wanted augment to be a space that I could write, but more importantly, I wanted to be a canvas where I could imagine what blogging can look like when it becomes a ==social space==. One where published posts don’t just sit to be seen, but commented on, interacted with directly, and become a portal to spaces where it’s being shared so you can discover more.

I don’t want it to be a place you arrive; I want it to be ==a place that can expand that takes you to other places==.

An Atmospheric Blog

In an essay I wrote recently, I spoke about an “Everything Account” and how it lives in an ecosystem of services called the Atmosphere. While that focused on the end-user experience, one other component of the Atmosphere is that all the data created in it lives in an accessible space that anyone can pull from.

This means I can publish things like blog posts into the Atmosphere, and then I can keep track of different services people are using to interact with them.

• I can look at posts and comments being created on microblogs like Bluesky and Blacksky and have them at the end of blog posts so you can engage with them
• I can peek at collections it’s being added to on services like semble.so and show them here so you can see what else those collections contain, and follow them if you want to
• I can display annotations that are being added to it on margin.at and seams.so and add them alongside this post so you can find insightful readers and follow them for more
• I can link macroblogs on Leaflet, pckt, Offprint, and GreenGale that mention my blog posts or my posts in different reading experiences like Skyreader

Over time, as the Atmosphere grows with more services, I can entangle this blog with them. I can make this a living, breathing website that grows with everyone who interacts with it across the open social web.

To begin this work, I’m starting with having every essay I write here publish to the Atmosphere using standard.site. This makes all of my posts native to the ecosystem, allows readers to subscribe using their Atmosphere account, and lets the them find it on macroblogging services across the Atmosphere. You’ll also see comments below this based on who’s replying to my microblog announcing the post on apps like Bluesky and Blacksky. Right now, you have to go to a platform to reply; eventually, I want readers to be able to reply directly below the blog post using their Atmosphere account. More on that soon.

The exciting part about this is that we’re also adding standard.site into Bridgy Fed. This means they’ll soon show up on ActivityPub-based services like Mastodon, WordPress, Ghost, NodeBB, and so many more, and I can pull bridged comments from that ecosystem onto this site as well.

==augment is an Atmospheric blog that’s tapping into the wider open social web==, and it’s only just the starting point. We can go so much deeper, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with how deep we can go.

An Open Foundation

But this didn’t come from scratch. The new augment lives on the work of multiple projects, and I want to take a moment to call those out.

• The site is forked from Chiri, an Astro theme that I ever-so-slightly customized to my needs
• The newsletter is now distributed via Buttondown, an email service that simply takes my RSS feed updates and sends them to your inbox
• standard.site is a longform standard built by the Atmosphere longform community, kicked off by Offprint, Leaflet, and pckt
• The standard.site integration is setup using Sequoia, a CLI tool that enables subcriptions, sends the blog post and a microblog to the Atmosphere when it’s published, and brings microblog comments back to this page so other readers can see it

None of this could’ve been possible without the hard work of the people behind these projects.

I’m also open sourcing this blog on GitHub and Tangled, a GitHub competitor built on atproto where I’ll eventually host the repo myself. That means that as I add new features and make it more Atmospheric, you’ll be able to see how I’ve done it, and can either use that code or use it as inspiration to do the same.

Wherever You Read Your Blogs

You’ve probably heard the words “wherever you get your podcasts” a lot. It’s a common starting point for folks to understand open standards.

Well, starting today, you can read augment wherever you read your blogs: your email inbox, your RSS reader, the Atmosphere, and (soon) the Fediverse.

Subscribe where you want to read it. And hopefully, over time, I’ll make it worth you while to come here, because it’ll have so much more than just my ramblings.

Welcome to the new Atmospheric home of augment. I’m so excited to show you more.

For those who may not be aware, this blog is currently hosted by Ghost, a popular newsletter tool that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using over the past year and change.

That said, my long-term goal has always been to self-host this blog. So, behind the scenes, I’ve been working on migrating to my own site. I’ll talk more about how it’s all set up once we’re there, but I’ve added some really cool features, and I think it looks a lot cleaner – I’m excited for you to see it soon!

This change may affect my readers in different ways, so I wanted to make sure you’re ready for what’s coming. Here’s the breakdown:

• If you’re subscribed via email, you will still be on my email list, but the new emails will be sent from augment@buttondown.email. You’ll need to update your filters if you have any, sorry! Also, please keep an eye on your junk mail just in case 📧
• If you’ve subscribed to my RSS feed, you’ll continue to get updates ✅
• If you’ve linked to my blog or blog posts in the past, those links will continue to point to a copy of that blog post on the new site 🔄️
• If you’ve subscribed via ActivityPub, that account will unfortunately no longer update; I will, however, have new and exciting ways to follow me on the open social web, so subscribe over email or RSS for when I move over and break down the new site’s features 👀

And that’s about it! I’m planning on handling the move in the next couple of weeks, and the next post should probably be from the blog’s new home. Hopefully, this shouldn’t impact most of you in any big way, but if you do run into issues, please feel free to reach out to me at anuj@augment.ink.

See you on the other side 👋🏼

It’s like second nature at this point: we check out a new service and fill in the usual suspects: first name, last name, email, username, password (better confirm it!), address (wait, why does my to-do list need that?), credit card (you guys are getting paid??), etc. After that, we call them all “my account”: “my Google account”, “my Instagram account”, “my Reddit account”, “my X account”.

But are these your accounts? Who has the power to suspend it, or worse, shut it down? Who has the power to tell you the features you’re allowed to have because the features you want “don’t drive growth”? Who has the power to take the app you have your account on, sell it to the Worst Person You Know, and turn it into something completely different that doesn’t align with your needs and values?

Let that sink in.

Not Your Accounts

The problem with our accounts is that they aren’t our accounts. They’re accounts owned by Google, Instagram, Reddit, and X. And when any of these organizations wants to go rogue, all you can do is say “wow, that sucks,” and keep using it because starting from scratch with another service is hard.

And what makes it hard is simple: they have our data, including our posts, our relationships, and so much more, and we can’t take it all elsewhere. The data you’ve created in an app is directly tied to the app itself, and the companies behind it hoard the data because they know it’s what gives them the power to hold on to you.

This account model that we’re used to looks something like this: Each app is in its own silo, holds our data within it, and if we want a feature from App 1 to use data from App 2, we have to hope that the two companies cooperate. And if you ever want to leave App 3? Well, you have to hope they let you export your data and hope it’s in a format that App 1 and App 2 can handle, or you’re starting from scratch.

That’s a whole lot of hoping for an account you call “yours”.

Separating the Data

But what if we could change that model so the company behind the app didn’t own the data we created in it? What if across all these apps, we could store our data in a separate place of our choosing, and then give other apps permission to use that data without needing the two companies to cooperate?

That would look something more like this: By separating the data from the app, I can suddenly share data between App 1, 2, and 3 without each company’s permission, because I own that data. I get to choose who sees what and how they use it.

So how do we get there?

The Everything App

There’s a common concept known as “The Everything App”: a single app that contains a series of sub-apps, all under a single account. An example is the popular Chinese app WeChat, which offers messaging, payments, a full social network, and mini-apps that other companies can build to live inside it.

This simplifies the model we’re used to by not requiring you to create a new account for every app. The Everything App stores your data in a shared location within it, and other apps can use it as long as you give them permission.

The Everything App model looks like this: While this may look similar to the second model we shared above, since the data is separated from the sub-apps, there’s a major underlying issue: your account still isn’t yours. The account is owned by the company that owns The Everything App.

If the company that owns The Everything App gets bought by the Worst Person You Know, you’re even more trapped because it has so much more than just your data. It owns your whole digital experience from top to bottom.

When I say we need to separate the data, I mean your account needs to be completely separate from any app, including The Everything App. So, this solution isn’t quite what we’re looking for.

The Everything Account

This brings us back to our original ideal model once again: Here, our account and its data are free from the shackles of an Everything App. Instead, the account lives on its own, granting access to apps of our choosing. When App 1 no longer serves its purpose, we simply sign in to App 2 or App 3 and grant them permission to modify our data. Or we can use all three based on our needs because the apps no longer dictate how we use our account.

This account, which can use everything, is what I’ve been calling “The Everything Account”. It’s a future where people have power over their app experience. No single company owns the account or its data, and, more importantly, we get to choose where it lives, can change where it lives when we want, and choose which apps get to use it.

An Everything Account is one that you actually own, no one else, and you bring it wherever you choose to. It doesn’t live inside another app; other apps simply orbit it based on your needs.

The good news is that such an account already exists and is already used by millions of people every day, some of whom may not even know they have one.

Welcome to The Atmosphere

This ecosystem, where a user’s data lives separate from the apps they use, is commonly known as The Atmosphere.

There are many other parts to The Atmosphere, but the core of why I think it’s a better model for our accounts is because it puts the user – their account and their data – at the very center of the ecosystem.

If I were to reorient the above diagrams, The Atmosphere would look something like this: The Atmosphere, as you can see above, already has countless apps you can use. There are Twitter-like apps such as Bluesky and Blacksky; blogging services like Leaflet, Offprint, and pckt; collection and annotation tools like Semble, Margin, and Seams; and I can go on and on because the ecosystem is expanding by the day. And this is just a small portion of the existing Atmosphere - I couldn’t fit all of the different apps because there are just. so. many. Perhaps in a separate post.

In this ecosystem, I can switch between Bluesky and Blacksky, and my profiles on both have all my posts, relationships, and other choices, because they pull them from my Everything Account – that box of data in the center. No one app owns my experience anymore, and I can leave and arrive as I please without missing a beat. And you can do this with any app, not just social media.

The Atmosphere is an ecosystem that respects your agency as a user, and it’s one of many ways we can start taking back control of our online experiences. Whether you’re a user or a builder, you no longer need to hold onto hope that a giant company does the right thing for you. You can take your Everything Account across The Atmosphere without the permission of any other entity.

You can find an entry point to The Atmosphere via any of the above apps, and you never have to make another account for any of the other apps again. You arrive, create your Everything Account, and take it everywhere you go.

Your Everything Account – your account on The Atmosphere – is your account. And it’s about damn time we had an account that actually is.

Further Reading

If you’re interested in learning more about how The Atmosphere works, there are many great posts that explain it in greater depth. Here is a very short list of them if you want a deeper dive:

Non-Technical:

• The Last Social Account You’ll Need by Joe Basser
• Social media’s next evolution by Rudy Fraser
• Publishing on the Atmosphere by Tynan Purdy
• ATproto: The Enshittification Killswitch That Enables Resonant Computing by Mike Masnick
• Beyond Bluesky by Sarah Perez
• What Does It Mean To Be Friends? by Dan Hon
• How To Migrate Your PDS by dapurplesharpie

Somewhat Technical:

• Atmospheric Computing by Paul Frazee
• A Social Filesystem by Dan Abramov
• ATProto explained for a slightly “technical” audience by Kye Fox

Technical

• Introduction to AT Protocol by Kuba Suder
• Where It’s at:// by Dan Abramov

Explanations via Tools

• @me by nate
• waow.tech by nate

I’m sure I’ve forgotten numerous gems, so please reach out if I did, and I’ll be happy to add them!

Thank you for reading! You can follow me on the Atmosphere or the Fediverse. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

Recently, we announced our first in-house project: Bounce. It allows you to move between platforms that run on ActivityPub, such as Mastodon and Threads, and AT Protocol, such as Bluesky, while maintaining as much of your social graph as possible using Bridgy Fed.

While we believe this is a significant development for the open social web, there’s a deeper reason why we wanted to introduce this to the ecosystem in the way we did. Today, I want to discuss the foundations that Bridgy Fed and Bounce are laying for our mission, and what we hope will help others build similarly.

Fragmented

The social web is fragmented.

There’s the silos, the platforms that choose to remain in a closed network, often to create an internal network effect that keeps users within their ecosystem. They don’t interoperate with other platforms and typically don’t allow developers to build on top. These, unfortunately, are the strategies employed by most of the popular platforms we interact with today, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Some of these started with some level of openness or promises of interoperability, but no longer do so. These remain purposefully fragmented from one another and the broader social web.

Some platforms live on the open social web. They enable interoperability through protocols and often also allow developers to build upon them. This can include third-party clients, tools that tap into the platform’s underlying network and firehose, and sometimes even allowing you to host the platform on your own rather than relying on the builders’ infrastructure. Some examples of this are Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, and, to some extent, Threads if you want to stretch the definition. Even among these open social platforms, however, there is fragmentation. Some use ActivityPub, some use ATProto, and others use protocols like Nostr or Farcaster.

The major difference between this fragmentation and the one silos have built is that you can break through and connect them at the protocol level like Bridgy Fed and Bounce have. Some platforms have even taken it upon themselves to use multiple protocols, like Wafrn, a Tumblr-like service that connects to both ActivityPub and ATProto networks.

In other words, the fragmentation of the open social web is a solvable problem, and its solutions can extend beyond our current landscape.

Democratize the Open Social Web

It’s clear that, while the open social web is fragmented from a standards perspective, this doesn’t have to be the case when it comes to how users experience these networks. The openness they provide can be leveraged to make differences virtually invisible and keep the lofty promises we make to users: you can follow anyone from anywhere and leave for another platform at any time.

And by making these differences invisible, we unlock something greater. I think Laurens Hof put it best in his piece about Bounce:

Tools like Bounce suggest the direction of the Open Social Web is less about specific protocols, and more about expanding user agency.

Expanding user agency.

Not protocol dominance. Not decentralization based on specific technologies. Not a standards team deciding what the users need. But, instead, a path toward an open social web that lets users choose the features of platforms they care about without ever having to peek beneath the services they use.

That is the people-first open social web we promise users every day.

Users shouldn’t be locked in because they happened to choose a protocol by accident, simply because a platform met their needs at that moment. We didn’t build Bounce because we expect users to migrate every week; we built it because something like it can and needs to exist.

Adversarial Interoperability

What we need to do right now is to lean into the openness that all these standards provide. Yes, we need a plethora of interconnected Twitters, and Tumblrs, and TikToks, and Instagrams. But we also need things that live in between them, solving the gaps that ultimately reduce user choice.

This isn’t some brand-new idea. This concept of “adversarial interoperability” has been around for a long time. To quote Cory Doctorow’s piece on it:

you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.

This is the kind of building we need to do around protocols, so we provide users with more choice. Build third-party migration tools, alternative profile search engines that connect across networks, or use compatible parts from rival protocols to bridge them together. In fact, do that inside your platforms.

If we want users to find their spaces on the open social web, we cannot make it more complicated than simply letting them sign up while providing interoperability and an exit plan. No talk of decentralization, no conceptual idea of what an interconnected web of platforms could look like in a decade, and certainly no loud arguments about why your platform is better because it supports the forgotten FLiPFLoP standard of the 90s (No, this is not real. Yes, this is how you sound to average users.).

You want more people to use your platform or protocol? Build tools like Bounce that ensure they have a way to transition to without losing their communities when the time is right.

The moment a user asks, “Wait, why can’t I go there? You said these were open,” we’ve failed on our promises. That’s where we are right now. We need to solve that problem first, because if we don’t, we risk users losing their communities when the inevitable next platform exodus happens. But this time, it’s after we’ve told them they never have to worry about it ever again. If we lose that trust, I fear that we’ll, rightfully, never earn it again.

How We Should Build

Make multi-protocol feel native to your platform by building it internally, like Wafrn, or using a third-party solution, such as Bridgy Fed, like Ghost has. Add migration as a core part of your onboarding and offboarding experience, making services like Bounce and ATAirport a backup option. Make it easy to build custom feeds across protocols like Channels.org and Surf. Don’t just build on top of protocols; utilize those protocols to their fullest extent, demonstrating the power of the open social web in a way that silos cannot.

Bridgy Fed and Bounce are awesome, but the best case is an ecosystem where they serve as backup options for services that have yet to build those features natively. We want to be able to Bounce a user from Mastodon and Bluesky into a platform that supports both protocols, dropping the need for Bridgy Fed altogether and making all of this invisible to the user. That, right there, is the dream we’re chasing.

Or, as David Pierce said about Bounce on The Vergecast:

The idea that I can just pick up my stuff on a social network, and put it down on another social network? Like, that’s it, baby. That’s the stuff.

That’s the stuff. That’s what the open social web is for.

There will come a day when we can debate which protocol is the greatest of them all, what the definition of decentralization is, and which company, organization, or developer did it best. We should have that conversation when the open social web is what users have chosen as a default option.

But first, interoperability.

Thank you for reading!

A New Social is a self- and community-funded nonprofit. If you’re excited about the work we’re doing, we’d really appreciate it if you joined our Patreon and/or bought some “People, Not Platforms” merch. Thank you for all your support!

You can follow me on the social web on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment and my newsletter “Human-Generated Content,” you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

Over the past few months, I’ve been focused on setting up the foundations for A New Social. I couldn’t have imagined this is where I’d end up after writing my Bridges & The Last Network Effect post, but here we are! It’s been a wild ride, but I’m energized about the work we’ve set out to do, and we’re ready to share a lot of exciting things over the next few months.

That said, now that the organization is established and we’re in a proper release cadence, I’m looking forward to carving out more time for this space. I have essays sitting in drafts that are nearly done, and I want to get back to sharing what I’m reading, watching, and listening to regularly.

Since we’re back after a while, let’s start with a vibe check

Human Generated Content, Issue Nine

Vibe Check

One thing that’s been preoccupying me lately is the growing trend of “vibe coding”. For the uninitiated, vibe coding is a method of writing software primarily through prompting large language model (LLM) chatbots.

This is a helpful way to quickly build tools for yourself or prototype an idea to see if it’s worth developing further. I’ve attempted to use it in the past, but I’ve slowly been drawn away from it because it often requires heavy re-engineering to extend things beyond an initial concept. It’s also frequently plagued by bugs and security issues, and if I have to rewrite major components, I’d rather do it myself from the get-go.

It’s a helpful tool for curious, hands-on learners who want to jump-start using vibes and then dig deeper to understand the mechanics of how things are built. I also think it’s great if you want to quickly script a tedious task to save yourself a few hours. You know, stuff for yourself.

Where I begin to get nervous is when it’s used for production code that serves real users, especially when sensitive data is involved.

Semafor’s Reed Albergotti reported that apps developed via the vibe coding tool Lovable were found to have, er, significant security issues:

The employee at AI coding assistant company Replit who wrote the report, reviewed by Semafor, says he and a colleague scanned 1,645 Lovable-created web apps that were featured on the company’s site. Of those, 170 allowed anyone to access information about the site’s users, including names, email addresses, financial information and secret API keys for AI services that would allow would-be hackers to run up charges billed to Lovable’s customers.

Yeesh. And these were just the ones featured on the company’s site, something you would expect to be a bit more curated.

I want it to be easier for more folks to write code and understand how the software they use every day works. But software isn’t just writing code. It’s about learning good architecture: how data is accessed, how it flows, and, most importantly, who can access it and when. You can’t just vibe your way through personal information and payment systems, because an issue there isn’t just a bug; it has real-life consequences for average users who are entrusting you with their information.

The tech industry attempted “Move Fast, Break Things,” and it led us down some dark paths, to say the least. Vibe coding instills the idea that we need to move even faster, because shipping means success. But when things break and you don’t understand the software you shipped, things get ugly real fast.

If this trend continues at its current pace, especially with the potential use of vibe coding by governments, we may face a significant national security risk over the next decade.

We don’t need more people writing software; we need more people who understand it. The vibes are insecure.

What I’m Into

• Mandy Brown’s analysis on Artificial “Intelligence” as an ideological construct rather than a technology, and the power structures it enables and entrenches, both in name and function.
• Friend of the blog Erin Kissane and a team of brilliant folks, including Mandy Brown, are building Unbreaking: an online resource to “help orient and ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters.”
• Indie gaming studio TwigBit’s “Sky Museum”, a game where you sign in with your Bluesky account and roam a 3D gallery of art being shared in different feeds on the platform. What a unique way to experience the open social web!
• After gaming news site Polygon got bought out by content slop shop Valnet from Vox Media, some of its former guide writers are launching a new publication called BigFriendly.Guide.
• Nilay Patel of The Verge interviews Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the Decoder podcast, where they discuss a very AI-focused Google I/O.
• Anil Dash explains how we inhabit an “Internet of Creeps”, where our data gets pulled, stored, and accessed in ways the average user could never expect by default. What he says is we need an Internet of Consent. Hell yeah.
• Richard MacManus’s wonderful piece about The Three Gurus of 90s Web Design.
• And I’m currently reading Patrick McGee’s “Apple in China”, a detailed history of the deep-rooted relationship between, you guessed it, Apple and China. I’ve only read through the first part of the book as I write this, but I already have so many thoughts. Perhaps for another post when I’m done.

That’s all for this issue! Now, I’m excited to get back to my giant backlog of drafts so I can finally share them with you.

Oh, and while I have you: A New Social just launched a Patreon and a merch shop that includes various products with our “People, Not Platforms” motto. If you like the work we’re doing, we’d really appreciate your support!

Until next time 👋🏼

Thank you for reading! You can follow me on the social web on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment and my newsletter “Human-Generated Content,” you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

What’s particularly interesting about these three platforms is that while they have different perspectives on the open social web, they align in some fundamental ways. The most important way they align is they all live on top of open, accessible protocols.

This common thread is the key to a user-first open social web that lets people choose a platform based on what they value rather than the one with specific profiles they want to interact with. We must focus on bringing as many users to these platforms as possible while building tools that help them own their content and, most importantly, their relationships.

I’m not going to re-introduce these three platforms here because I think most readers are already well aware of them, but there are a few things I think worth mentioning because I’m sure it’ll come up in responses:

• Threads is not yet fully federated via ActivityPub. Currently, this integration is behind a switch and is mostly one-way. This is obviously not ideal, but it’s a start and I’m hoping we get at least one more update from the team before the end of this year.
• The AT protocol only has one major platform, and Bluesky itself owns it. That said, I believe in the potential of the AT ecosystem (lovingly called the ATmosphere).
• Mastodon is currently, by and large, the most prominent platform using ActivityPub and decentralized across thousands of instances. I don’t like treating Mastodon as a monolith, but for this essay I will do so for simplicity’s sake.

Finally, I want to make it clear that I’m active across all three of these platforms. I have my complaints about each of them, but I do think they all bring important new ideas to the table. I’ve found friends and communities on all three, and I’ve watched as folks went from one platform to another while stating why they felt their new home was serving them better.

At the end of the day, this is not about platforms because a social platform is simply a tool for connection. It’s about people finding their people, not people trying to figure out where their people choose to be. That’s like choosing a piece of furniture based on the kind of screwdriver you own.

This isn’t about the tools. This is about how we make these tools work for us.

People, not platforms. People.

Press Eject

Only one thing is true about all social platforms: they eventually fail the user. The most common reason for this is a platform trying to serve too many users at once, likely due to a financial incentive, and ending up in a place where it’s not serving anyone anymore. It’s called “enshittification,” and you’ve definitely experienced it more than once if you’ve been on any platform.

The most glaring recent example that proves this is Twitter/X. I don’t think I have to dive into that story for anyone. But one significant part of the aftermath is folks who’ve tried to or succeeded in leaving for an alternative while feeling the pain of losing the connections they’ve made over the years. That extra friction slowed down or completely halted full migrations for most users. Even some of the most dedicated migrants still hold a presence there to make sure they maintain the relationships they’ve built.

What’s appealing about these open protocol-based platforms is that they enable movement between different platforms in their ecosystem. Both have their (solvable) quirks, but the bottom line is that if you want to keep your social graph, you can do so. I’ve moved my Mastodon accounts across servers already, and it was quick and painless. When Threads federates, I can move it to Mastodon or merge it into my existing Mastodon account while keeping the connections I made there, as long as they have federated.

I wonder: if Mastodon or Bluesky had a “Migrate Here” button that users could click to leave Twitter while still maintaining their social graph, how many people would be willing to do so overnight? Would X even be a viable platform? Could we have killed Elon’s project within days? Would Elon have to re-adjust his platform and, gasp, actually listen to his user base?

Let that sink in.

The Last Network Effect

During an interview with The Verge about sub.club, I explained what I believe can be The Last Network Effect. It’s a goal where everyone is on the open social web via protocols, interacting with each other across platforms, and can also migrate platforms while taking their content and relationships with them.

“So we all need to be on one protocol?” You ask, presumably.

Well, it’s complicated.

There’s a lot I love and dislike about ActivityPub and AT. But one excruciating truth is that they’re both very much in demo mode and still have yet to prove whether or not they’ll serve average users enough to keep them around long-term.

As I said before, Mastodon is the biggest platform on the ActivityPub network today, and we’ve already learned about some UX issues that keep some users away from it. What will those start looking like as Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, etc., all light up and join the network?

AT has a similar problem, with Bluesky being the only major service on that protocol. Will it scale under one for-profit organization? Will others bother to host their own if it’s too resource-intensive? Is there even a point in doing so if Bluesky holds too much of the network already and clients can augment it enough?

The greater point is that neither network has proven itself at a mass scale, and it’s also far too early to decide if these are the endgames for everyone on the web. I think Mike Masnick does a great job explaining why this exploratory phase is necessary.

As such, locking ourselves down to a single protocol will likely result in a different problem: if the standard fails us, we’ll be back at square one, either stuck in the protocol of our choice or starting from scratch on a different experience. I experienced Google+ and Twitter, and I don’t think my heart is ready for yet another mass start-from-scratch migration.

The Users Have Spoken

One important thing to remember is that these Twitter migrations didn’t happen because ActivityPub or AT proved themselves to be better than Twitter to the users, no matter how much better they may be. Mastodon pre-dated Elon’s Twitter takeover, but it was barely a part of the conversation until it happened. Bluesky was rushed out the door to take advantage of the Elon situation and wasn’t even meant to be its own vertical platform. Threads was also a reaction to Elon, and it’s clearly nowhere near close to being a complete replacement for Twitter yet.

These migrations were not people’s first choice; they were simply the next best thing available at the time, and some folks eventually learned why they might actually be better. Most of them have even tried multiple platforms before landing where they are. We, the folks who believe in open protocols, cannot act like this was an inevitability. This is a lighting-in-a-bottle scenario, and we need to seize the moment.

Yelling in our network bubbles will also not help. I see the same arguments about the other protocol on Mastodon and Bluesky, and I can promise you it’s not moving any needles in either direction. Moreover, they are typically ignoring the issues of the platform they’ve chosen to justify their choices. It’s unproductive and puts normal users off.

If we genuinely want standardization, it can’t be about winning a platform or protocol war because those are driven by organizational incentives, not what the user wants.

And the users have spoken: they don’t believe in one platform or protocol and likely never will. It’s an unwinnable fight, and the quicker we accept it, the faster we can build for users and not let incumbents take back what’s taken so long to get.

All of these platforms are open to integration in numerous ways, and we’re lucky enough that users are actively choosing these spaces. It’s time to stop forcing ideas on people when we can meet them where they already are.

Blurring the Lines

Some tools meet users where they are by helping blur these lines. There are cross-posting apps like Buffer and Croissant. SkyBridge enables Bluesky users to use any Mastodon app. OpenVibe, one of my favorites, is an app that brings your Mastodon and Bluesky feeds into one place and allows you to cross-post between the two and Threads. If the Threads API enabled feeds, this would be a viable social endgame for most.

These new tools don’t force you to worry about where people are coming from; they just let you find and communicate with people without friction. I can have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky and then forget who I follow on either platform. I never have to use either directly and can live just in an app like OpenVibe. That’s what a good tool does: it hides the complexities and lets the user focus on their end goal.

I find these to be the most lightweight way of not worrying about which platform I’m on. They still maintain some separation, but typically, when using them, I completely forget where posts are coming from and focus on the interactions. This is probably the best way to remain platform-agnostic like I am.

But we can take it many steps further.

Building Bridges

To me, the most important cross-platform tool is BridgyFed, a service built by engineer Ryan Barrett. It allows you to bridge your ActivityPub account to AT and your AT account to ActivityPub. I’ve bridged my Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, and folks on the alternate protocol follow and interact with me as if it’s on the platform of their choice.

Tools like this that natively bring platforms and protocols together will finally enable The Last Network Effect, and I don’t think I’m the only one who believes that.

Flipboard, one of the first companies to commit to an ActivityPub migration, used BridgyFed to bridge accounts to Bluesky. Due to domains looking ugly, they decided to roll this back, but BridgyFed recently announced enabling custom domains for ActivityPub accounts bridging to AT, so hopefully, we’ll see them come back to the ATmosphere soon.

Ghost, the newsletter platform this blog runs on, also recently announced that it will use BridgyFed as part of its ActivityPub integration to simultaneously bring everyone on the platform to AT. That means that when I post here, it’ll automatically show up on both networks, and comments from both will appear on this blog. It’s the POSSE dream writers, and other creators have dreamed about for years.

There’s a vision of the future here where I can post something on Ghost, and right below the post, folks from Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and Flipboard are discussing it amongst themselves, not even realizing they’re on separate platforms or protocols.

It’s not just organizations, either. Leaders of both protocols are already bridging their accounts: Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon; Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub spec; Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky; and Mike Masnick, Bluesky board member. There are many other examples, but I think these prove the point.

BridgyFed is a centerpiece of a user-first open social web - not one platform or protocol, but infrastructure enabling innovation and user ownership. It’s not about the platform you choose; it’s about the people you choose. If it’s built out even more, I can see it going further by helping folks migrate between protocols, bringing bridged connections over along the way.

A tool that bridges between platforms and protocols and even helps you own relationships across them. That’s the “Migrate Now” button, and it’s how users can finally hold their social platforms accountable in a way that’s been impossible so far.

That, right there, is the dream of a truly open social web owned by people, not organizations, technology, or hype.

People, not Platforms

The endgame is not Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads. The endgame is finding communities on the web and following them all on the best platform for you.

We don’t have to enclose ourselves in walls of our own making or force users to understand the nuances of every platform and protocol. It’s time to give people tools that empower them to make decisions that fit their needs. That is how we truly make the social web open.

Every platform has a mix of communities, and I can promise from experience that if you spend time on any for long enough, you will likely find your people. Platforms and protocols are transient mediators of your relationships. It has always been and always will be about the people.

Let’s build bridges so you can find yours.

Thank you for reading! You can follow me on the open social web on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. And if you want to be notified of future posts on augment, including my newsletter “Human-Generated Content,” you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

In an earlier update, I said I would use this issue as just a round-up of links related to developments in the human web. Instead, I want to focus today on Bluesky, which is seeing a major uptick in users due to migrations from other platforms. It’s also getting $15M in funding led by a cryptocurrency investor and explained its roadmap to become a sustainable business. It’s a lot, and I think it deserves the space right now. At the end of that discussion, I’ll drop the promised round-up.

Okay, on that note - let’s talk about Bluesky.

Birds Flock, Money Talks

After a brief ban in Brazil and changes to their Block feature where users could continue accessing profiles of folks they were blocked by, large waves of users left X for the various Twitter alternatives. The largest beneficiary of these migrations is, perhaps, Bluesky, which grew to 13M users as of Oct. 24th. For context, the platform reached 10M users about a month earlier. They converted this steady growth into a Series A funding round of $15M led by Blockchain Capital.

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, let’s start with the easy one - with investors come an expectation of returns, and it looks like their route to more revenue will include a subscription service with exclusive features like HQ video and profile customizations. Unlike its competitors, this subscription will not uprank users that pay-to-play, which I think is an important call-out. While I’m not convinced this will be the silver bullet to becoming a viable business, I appreciate the transparency of direction and hope they also use some of these funds to invigorate competition in the AT protocol ecosystem.

Then comes the bigger story: a lead investment group that has heavily (and I mean heavily) placed bets on the cryptocurrency industry. In another swing at transparency, Bluesky assured its users that it “will not hyperfinancialize the social experience.” I think it’s a noble promise to make, but it does sound like they aren’t against some financialization, even if it’s just at the protocol level. I’m also not against folks making a living using social media (in fact, I’m an advisor at a company doing this for ActivityPub), so I don’t see anything wrong with making it easier to attach financial features to AT. Still, I hope this doesn’t mean focusing on crypto for those features rather than an attempt at helping build a Patreon for AT.

That said, if subscriptions don’t pay the bills, promises must change to ensure shareholders get their returns so I think it’s something to keep an eye on. Only time and revenue will tell.

Crackergate

In an odd turn of events, Meta’s Threads scored multiple own goals over the previous few months, including an explicit acknowledgment that both their For You algorithm and moderation system are broken. Anyone who uses these platforms daily (it’s me, hi) could’ve told you this without confirmation.

The straw that broke (cracked?) the camel’s back seemed to be a mixture of posts being removed for no real reason, ranging from replying to something that could be taken as a threat when entirely out of context to just saying the posting the word “cracker.”

According to Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, the tool built for moderators wasn’t giving them enough context. Still, there also seems to be a highly sensitive automated system floating these posts to the moderators in the first place. There are also hints of a significant language barrier regarding how some posts are taken. I don’t think users are being given the whole story, and a lack of comms isn’t helping their case.

All of this came to a head when folks who users consider pivotal to their Threads experience were wrongfully suspended indefinitely. It started with users creating backup accounts on Bluesky in case they were also hit, but then it became a backchannel for Threads users to express their frustrations with the platform.

But this moment allowed these users to see the features that differentiate Bluesky from Threads—custom feeds, configurable moderation, starter packs, lists(!!!) etc. Bluesky also cleverly launched a Threads account to market its features to users who were on the fence about joining, something that the community, which typically backlashes against comparison to another platform, surprisingly enjoyed.

On the other side of what is now being called Crackergate, many users have decided that the sky is indeed bluer elsewhere and have either moved or become more active on Bluesky. Threads still isn’t transparent about the issue or their plans to resolve it, and I’m seeing more of my Threads mutuals migrating daily. Another batch just followed me while writing this piece.

I hope Threads finds a way to fix the platform’s issues soon. Moderation and recommendations are pre-1.0 features that should not be this badly broken more than a year in. Trust in Meta’s focus on Threads has deteriorated much more than it ever needed to. It’s starting to feel like it’s more of a hobby than a product, and the lack of transparency only exacerbates that feeling.

Perhaps not depending on word-of-mouth to resolve suspensions would be a good start.

The Elephant in the Room

A common question during these migrations was, “Why not Mastodon?” While Bluesky is still somewhat centralized, Mastodon is what most would consider a truly decentralized social web platform. In many ways, it should be what users consider the safest route for long-term data and online relationship ownership.

I don’t think the answer to this is quite complicated—Bluesky has built numerous features that make it easy to find, or in this case, re-find, your communities from other platforms. Whether it be their Starter Packs, the algorithmic marketplace, or shareable lists, all of these make it easy for folks leaving these other platforms to find their existing networks quickly. There’s definitely a cultural aspect to it, but the fact that folks quickly found a large cohort of X and Threads mutuals played a significant part in those mutuals sticking by each others’ sides and staying there.

The on-ramp to Mastodon and other ActivityPub-based platforms is still an icy one that takes a lot of manual effort. Apps like Flipboard, Newsmast, and Mammoth have attempted to solve this, but onboardings need to be a core part of the platform, not add-ons by other parties. Those who deeply care about their privacy and data ownership may be willing to make that effort, but most want to be with their people as quickly as possible.

Your platform can do all the right things for users, and I think Mastodon does a lot right. But none of the good things will stick if you can’t show them where the people are.

People, not Platforms. People.

Check These Out

Alright, it’s time for that round-up I promised you. So much has happened:

• In a special episode of MKBHD’s Waveform podcast, co-host David Imel dove dive into the open social web. This is probably the best explainer I’ve seen out there so far.
• Croissant is a new iOS app for cross-posting between Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon—pretty great for migrators!
• Co-author of the ActivityPub spec launched The Social Web Foundation, which includes numerous organizations, including Mastodon, Meta, Flipboard, Ghost, The BLVD, among many others all of whom will work together to push ActivityPub further.
• Ben Werdmuller, Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, broke down The Two Fediverses that currently exist and how we move forward
• After basically no tangible efforts to help it succeed, Mozilla Social was shut down. While I think it’s unfortunate, there are still many organizations diligently running Mastodon instances.
• A search solution in the form of Fediverse Discovery Providers seems to be picking up more and more steam. This will definitely help with some of the on-ramp discovery issues I called out above.
• Dave Winer, founder of RSS, celebrated 30 years of Scripting and spoke to The Guardian about what he’s learned

There’s a lot more that’s worth sharing, but these are just some of the highlights. Others, I’m saving for future editions of the newsletter. Subscribe to keep track of when those drop!

Thank you for reading! You can follow me on the social web Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment and my newsletter “Human-Generated Content,” you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

Phew, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I hope everyone is doing well, and hello to all my new subscribers! The last month has been busy, to say the least, and I wanted to give a few updates on what I’ve been working on.

Hello, sub.club

First off, over the last few months I’ve been advising sub.club, a payments tool built for ActivityPub. I’ve been harping on about how we need a Patreon for the Fediverse, and it turned out the folks behind Mammoth have been thinking about this as well. After a few short chats, I joined the team on a part-time basis.

We officially launched a small-scale developer preview on August 29th, and we ended up getting a whole lot more interest than we thought we would. TechCrunch was the first to share the news, our friends over at WeDistribute went over what we’ve built and why it’s exciting, while The Verge interviewed us for our perspective on the social web.

Here’s a few snippets from The Verge article that go over why I joined sub.club:

Snippets from The Verge’s article about sub.club

The Verge’s Nilay Patel and David Pierce also discussed the importance of something like sub.club on the social web during an episode of The Vergecast.

All in all, it’s been an exciting start to this project, and I look forward to continuing my work with them. There are a few more announcements about sub.club just around the corner and I can’t wait for y’all to see what we’ve been cooking up!

You can also subscribe to my sub.club for some exclusive updates that are coming very soon 😉

FediForum & WeDistribute

FediForum Banner On September 12th, FediForum - an online conference for the Fediverse - took place for three days. I was really excited about it because of how much progress various organizations and developers have made in the last few months.

I played a bit of a double agent this time around, as I live-blogged with WeDistribute while also representing sub.club in some of the sessions. It was a rewarding experience and I already can’t wait for the next one!

Some highlights for me:

• Meeting new folks building in the social web, especially those who I’ve been interacting with online for months now
• Chatting with developers who want to work with sub.club
• Seeing all the updates from Ghost, Threads, Emissary/Bandwagon, IFTAS, and so many more
• Chatting with the WeDistribute folks about all the announcements

We also had many follow-up conversations after the events, which are leading to some interesting development opportunities. The next year is going to be fun.

I also have a long-form piece dropping on WeDistribute in the next couple weeks, so look out for that 👀

A New Social

A New Social logo Building a company from scratch has been an incredible learning experience. I finally have my infrastructure all good to go, and I’ve started consulting with a few folks and organizations about how to approach the open social web. I also did my first presentation on the subject, and the feedback was very positive!

Feels good, man.

It’s been a lot of fun chatting about this with folks, so if you’re interested in learning more, please feel free to reach out to me at anuj@anew.social.

Oh, and Tomasto is almost ready to go. More on that really soon 🍅

Augment & Human-Generated Content

Augment logo I’m finally bringing Human-Generated Content back after a hiatus. The next issue will be released on October 25th. Since it’s been a while, I’ll treat this as more of a round-up of news and updates I wasn’t able to talk about over the last few weeks. So much has developed in the social web recently, and I want to share all of it with you.

Other than that, I’ve been working on a long-form essay about how I see the social web environment changing as more platforms join the Fediverse in the next few months. Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, and so many others seem to be lighting up more Fediverse features really soon, and I think this will have some deeply interesting implications for how users interact with the social web. I’ve been working on this one for a while so I hope you enjoy it!

Based on the other in-progress work I have in my backlog, I’ll likely be moving to an almost weekly cadence with Augment by the end of next month. It’s exciting because it was always my hope to get there, but now that all my other projects are more organized and I’m working on pieces in parallel, it’s finally doable.

Oh, and did I mention we’re at triple-digit subscribers now? I wasn’t expecting to get there until next year! I’m so grateful that all of you have joined me on this journey. It’s been amazing hearing your feedback and many of you have helped me grow so much since I launched this back in March.

Thank you for your amplification, your constructive feedback, and your constant support 🫶🏼

Back To Work

Some folks say I take on too much, but if I’m honest - I wake up every day excited to help build and educate about the future of the social web, and technology in general. It’s such an exciting time to be watching this industry, and I have a feeling that in the future we’ll be fondly looking back at this moment.

I’m not even close to burnt out; I’m fired up 🔥

See you a few weeks!

Thank you for reading! You can follow me on the social web on Threads and Mastodon. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment and my newsletter “Human-Generated Content,” you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

“User-generated content continues to be tremendously undervalued by the platforms that distribute user-generated content” - John Green

The vlogbrothers have entered the conversation about the future of human-generated content, and you already know that I had to talk about it.

Hi there!

In this issue, we’ll be diving into a discussion between Hank and John Green (the vlogbrothers) about how deals being struck between AI companies and platforms that host human creations are leaving behind the humans who made the platforms worth using. After that, I want to explore a success story about a media company aiming to avoid dependence on these platforms by investing in tools that help it own its content and audience.

The human-generated internet can have a bright future if we invest our content and time in the right places. The question is: do we have the collective will do it?

The Rigged Internet

Over the last week, two pioneers of the creator economy, Hank and John Green, discussed an important fork in the road for the internet and the creators who depend on it.

Hank started this discussion by diving into how Google (and all the other AI companies) is training its LLMs on YouTube videos without the creators’ consent. He specifically notes that an odd amount of video content comes from YouTube properties built by them but concludes that the dataset was focused on educational video content.

This makes sense—the educational content referenced is high-quality and fact-checked, which is exactly what AI companies need to output worthwhile answers through their chatbots and search engines. It’s the same reason we’re seeing OpenAI make deals with well-established newsrooms rather than prioritizing random news websites that are more likely to serve as free data.

He outlines his frustrations, one of which is that asking for permission and paying for content isn’t an unprecedented option for AI companies:

I know I’m getting ripped off because a bunch of big companies have signed licensing deals with AI companies so they can train on their data. So they’re getting paid for their data to be in the model, and I’m not getting paid for my data to be in the model […] Why not pay me? Just because you didn’t think you’d get caught?

The “Big Companies” Hank references here include publishers like The Atlantic and Vox Media, among many others that I’ve done a deep dive on many, many, many times. And that’s a fair question - why do only some content sources deserve to get paid?

John answers that in his response video: the popular platforms are rigged against independent creators due to a lack of bargaining power, while larger entities like the music industry, publishers, and platforms like Reddit have enough pull to make deals with OpenAI and Google.

This lack of power has always put creators in a position where they tend to get the short end of the stick, but most YouTubers give this a pass since they have it much better than creators on other platforms. But if even YouTube starts using that data without any benefit to the creators, how long will it feel like they’re being compensated accordingly for the work they put in? As John notes:

I would argue that long-term mutually-beneficial relationship is now at risk, because Google has […] basically admitted to stealing our content to train large language models without our permission. These LLMs will generate literal billions of dollars for Google, and the users who generate the content that made those LLMs possible will get nothing.

And John isn’t alone in this thinking. We’ve seen other YouTubers like MKBHD frustrated with the situation since he pays for human-written captions for accuracy that AI companies take for free.

John also raises one of my major concerns:

It concentrates more capital and power into fewer and fewer hands, which over time […] tends to work out terribly.

This concentrates capital and power not only with AI companies but also with the companies that make deals with them. For instance, if The Atlantic makes a deal with OpenAI, then ChatGPT will likely output news content from that source over others. Due to their bargaining power, The Atlantic and other large publishers can monopolize that distribution channel, pushing newer, smaller media companies out before they can even get started.I wrote more about that dreaded future here, but I also believe in a better path forward.

The Unrigged Internet

Hank and John absolutely nailed the problems creators face in this phase of online platforms and media distribution. We’ve spent years on sites like YouTube because we thought we were helping seize the means of production, only to learn that the creators don’t own the content or the relationship with their audience.

But it’s important to remember that the internet is not rigged but rather the platforms we’ve given power to. A rich, forgotten part of the internet still exists, and we’ve been discussing it since the first issue of this newsletter via a brilliant post by Molly White.

The internet we currently choose to live on—the YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok internet—is rigged against us because of the walled-garden nature of these platforms. These services, while advancing media and making a space for creators such as the vlogbrothers, do not enable creators to own their products. Instead, they depend on closed network effects that trap us in their ecosystem, making it impossible to export our content and audience to competing services if we strongly disagree with their direction (like using our content for their LLMs).

So how do we escape? As Hank called out in his video:

“[…] individual independent creators who all have fairly big audiences, and those audiences will absolutely go to bat for them when asked to.”

If we don’t want the internet rigged against us, big creators with dedicated audiences will soon need to start urging their followers to move to services that don’t lock us in and don’t use our data without our permission. We must push toward the Fediverse, where creators can import and export their content and audience between compatible networks. But we still have some way to go before it’s ready for creators.

Within the next year, we’ll likely see services like Threads, Flipboard, Ghost (where this newsletter is hosted), Buttondown, and WordPress, among many others, become compatible. That would mean users on Threads and Flipboard can follow a newsletter like Human-Generated Content directly in their respective feeds. And if I don’t want to use Ghost as my platform, I can move over to WordPress or Buttondown without losing my followers.

Once these services integrate, we’ll have the opportunity to execute the last network effect we’ll ever need in social media. If everyone is on the same network, you don’t need to convince your followers to join you elsewhere when you set up shop on a new platform. You can post from a platform that suits you and find your followers wherever they are on the open network.

I think John says it best:

It’s not just that the world might change. The world will change. And each of us has a little say in how that change takes place [such as] structural shifts toward or away from corporate power. The future is not inevitable.

You’re speaking my language, Mr. Green.

The good news is that there are internet-based media companies working toward this structural change as we speak, and they’re thriving while doing so. In fact, one of the companies was referenced in Hank’s video: 404 Media.

A Year of 404 Media

The rise of 404 Media cannot be understated. I’ve been talking about them for a while and consider them one of the many pioneers in this generation of New Alt-Media businesses.

For those who may not know, 404 Media is a media company started by four ex-Motherboard/VICE Media journalists who decided to start their own newsroom hosted on Ghost (see a trend here?). They not only own the business but also own their content and their audience through an exportable email subscriber list.

The site just had its one-year anniversary, and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down any time soon:

“Here we are a year later, and we are very proud and humbled to report that, because of your support, 404 Media is working. Our business is sustainable, we are happy, and we aren’t going anywhere.”

The team also takes this time to go over the numerous things they’ve learned over the last year, including the kind of audience they’ve been able to attract:

We have learned that there is an audience that is happy to pay for fearless journalism and fun blogs that are written by real human journalists who prioritize the interests of their readers, not search algorithms and AI bots. And we have learned that a small team can hold companies that are worth trillions of dollars to account if the investigations are good enough.

They’ve proven that a small shop that introduces new information to the ecosystem can be a viable way to run a news business, and they don’t have to give up their content to larger corporate entities to do so.

They do, however, call out one current downside to their model:

The biggest challenge that we face is discoverability. To the extent possible, we don’t want to have to rely on social media algorithms, search engines that don’t index us properly and which are increasingly shoving AI answers into their homepages, and an internet ecosystem that is increasingly polluted by low-quality AI spam.

Right now, most of 404 Media’s discoverability comes from closed-wall platforms, which means that – unlike email subscribers – they have no way of owning their follower lists.

All that will change in the coming months as Ghost turns on Fediverse compatibility. Once that happens, users on Threads, Flipboard, and Mastodon users will be able to follow 404 Media and have their replies show up as comments on the website, and 404 Media will have an exportable list of social media followers, just like the email list it currently has.

That means more discoverability for 404 Media, ownership of our content and audience, and coming as you are rather than needing an account on every new social media platform that launches with one new feature.

And the next time your favorite social media site gets taken over by an alt-right billionaire bad actor or decides they’ll use your data for LLMs, you can lift your follow graph – including 404 Media – and continue on another platform without missing a beat.

Now, if you ask me – that’s a future for the internet worth fighting for.

Thank you to 404 Media for setting a great example, and congrats on a successful first year. I have a feeling the second one will be even better.

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Human-Generated Content! If you want to be notified of future issues and other posts on augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free. You can also follow me directly on Threads and Mastodon.

You can also email me at anuj@augment.ink with tips, comments, or anything cool you’re working on.

Today, we’ll be talking about how companies have kicked off an effort to educate users, creators, and organizations about the Fediverse, along with a quick peek into a small part of the human internet.

But first, a couple of things:

1. I recently announced my new venture, A New Social, where I’ll be building tools and services for the Fediverse. The first tool is called Tomasto, which focuses on helping Threads users understand the Fediverse and all its benefits. More on that soon.
2. On WeDistribute, I wrote about Flipboard’s next major step into the Fediverse. The company is really close to going full-blown federated, and some of its takes on the social web are truly unique.

On that note, let’s get into it.

Fediverse Education Efforts

It’s been a couple editions of Human-Generated Content where I haven’t talked about the Fediverse, and there’s a lot that I want to share with y’all this time. In particular, I want to highlight efforts by social media companies doing the work to educate the world about the open social web.

Michael Foster of the Newsmast and Patchwork team put together a post about how Fediverse builders can help organizations and content creators join the Fediverse:

We need to articulate why it’s better to have a federated blog on Ghost than a closed account on Substack. Why podcasts should be federated accounts. Why organisations need to turn on federation - not just on their Threads accounts - but on their websites, forums and blogs. That’s where Fediverse storytelling comes in. The campfires, the open spaces, the secret paradise. It’s the joy of the open web - a place for organisations to make a stake, grow, nurture, build a home.

One important call-out Foster makes that I want to highlight:

Of the 2 billion websites in the world, around 43% run on WordPress. […] There are over 6,000 installations, and a recent post by Eugen Rochko of Mastodon showed that Jetpack (WordPress) is the second largest source of posts on mastodon.social, after the Mastodon web UI. So from this Fedicentric point of view, the plugin is a success.

This is key since WordPress now has a first-party ActivityPub plugin that not only syndicates content but also brings back replies as comments. With competitors like Ghost and ButtonDown already building ActivityPub natively, there’s an opportunity in the next year or so for a large wave of sites to switch on federation without much work on the owners. We need to focus on explaining to these owners how to bring their sites to the Fediverse, especially at a time when distribution via Google will likely soon start to dwindle due to AI-generated responses.

Speaking of which, WordPress is stepping in to help with education as well, with a YouTube series with Doctor Popular called The Fediverse Files. Their latest video is an enlightening chat with Mammoth CEO and Founder Bart Decrem, who discusses how we can make social media fun again.

Flipboard has Dot Social, a podcast (which I’ve referenced before) where CEO and Co-Founder Mike McCue chats with various players in the social web about the work they’re doing. The latest episode dives into the hard work IFTAS is doing with decentralized Trust & Safety. McCue also recently did an AMA about the Fediverse alongside Tracy Chou of Block Party on Threads.

Ghost has been giving humorous weekly updates about their ActivityPub integration, often diving into the complexities of building it into an existing ecosystem. They also gave a much-deserved shout-out to Fedify, a Deno-based framework built by Hong Minhee that makes it easy to bootstrap an ActivityPub server.

Foster isn’t the only one spreading his knowledge from the Newsmast team either. Saskia Welch, lead curator at Newsmast, has been blogging about important moments happening on the social web. One in particular that stands out is her post about “Influencing Influencers”.

As numerous platforms get closer to federating, early education is important. We need to work to get the word out about the Fediverse and its benefits to every kind of user while also being honest about its shortcomings.

I’ve been attempting to do this with some of my own posts, namely Ghost v. Substack, Threads on Mastodon, and my push for a Patreon in the Fediverse. WeDistribute, the not-for-profit publication I contribute to, has focused heavily on educating the public about different parts of the Fediverse. I also hope to do the same with my work at A New Social.

What are you planning on doing to spread the word? Feel free to shoot me an email if you’re working on educating or building for the Fediverse!

A Friendly Front Porch

On the polar opposite of the Fediverse, we have “Front Porch Forum,” a small social network for residents of Vermont, US.

Will Oremus of The Washington Post reports:

On Front Porch Forum, there’s no real-time feed, no like button, no recommendation algorithm and no way to reach audiences beyond your local community. It offers users no reward for posting something provocative or sensational, other than the prospect that your neighbors will see it and perhaps bring it up the next time you run into them at the grocery store.

The network is heavily moderated and actively chooses not to be real-time. Instead, every post goes through a human moderator, and there are no algorithms or signals of what posts are popular.

Typically, an online space with such overbearing moderation would result in angry pushback about free speech. But instead, it’s a welcome part of the network and maintains a pleasant environment for debate.

“What we say is, attack the issue, not the neighbor,” Wood-Lewis said. “If your issue is a barking dog or hypodermic needles in the park, then let’s talk about that. But don’t say, ‘This particular person’ or ‘This particular dog.’ We can’t fact-check that, and you could totally destroy someone’s reputation.”

Pre-emptive fact-checking of posts? That’s probably the most innovative idea I’ve seen in social media in years.

While I’m all-in on the Fediverse, I strongly believe in corners of the internet that are still focused on groups of humans building a small community for themselves. Not everything needs to be syndicated everywhere; sometimes, a neighborhood augmenting its community on the internet while moderating itself is exactly what we need. More of this, please.

The Sky Looks Bluer

Lastly, I wanted to call out Bluesky’s announcement last week about Mike Masnick, CEO and founder of TechDirt, joining its board. This a really exciting development, mainly because many of us who work in the social web were inspired by his piece “Protocols, not Platforms.” If anyone will give the right advice on where to take the network and the AT Protocol, it’s him.

Masnick expands in a post on TechDirt:

You should be able to build a decentralized, open, protocol-based social network without most users knowing or even caring about it. You should be able to build a system just as usable and feature-filled as traditional, centralized social media systems, while still creating underlying technology and infrastructure that prevents it from exploiting users like those centralized platforms do.

I couldn’t agree more. I spend more of my time on ActivityPub-related social platforms, but Bluesky absolutely nailed the onboarding process and has made the technology invisible unless you actually want to learn about it.

What excites me even more about Masnick being part of the team is this nugget he left in a Mastodon conversation: I, for one, am looking forward to hearing what he has to say 👀

Until Next Time

It feels good to be back in my pocket talking about the social web again. I wanted to discuss the impact of AI on human-made online content, but that meant there wasn’t enough space to talk about the Fediverse. But we are so back.

Hopefully, y’all enjoyed this edition and learned something new. I have much more on the docket that I can’t wait to share with you in upcoming posts and newsletter issues.

See you in a couple of weeks!

*I hope you enjoyed this issue of Human-Generated Content! If you want to be notified of future issues and other posts on augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free. You can also follow me directly on Threads and Mastodon.

You can also email me at anuj@augment.ink with tips, comments, or anything cool you’re working on.

Over the last few issues, I’ve been focused on telling stories about how human content is slowly being erased or added to datasets to be replaced by AI-generated content.

Today, I want to expand on a topic I discussed in issue #2: publishers striking deals with AI companies and what that means for their futures and the publisher landscape as a whole.

Before we jump in: last week, I published a post on the thankless work of the Threads community builder, and it somehow caught fire enough to land on Techmeme. The conversations that came out of the post, stemming from the wide spectrum of responses and experiences had by readers, were incredibly rewarding: some who agreed, some who had constructive criticism, and even some Meta employees who followed up. I’m so thankful to everyone who reads my work and engages with it this way, and I hope I can spark more discussion in the near future. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

With that said, let’s get into this week’s issue of Human Generated Content.

A Seat at the AI Table

On a recent episode of The Verge’s “Decoder” podcast, host Nilay Patel sat down with The Atlantic’s CEO Nicholas Thompson to discuss their data-sharing deal with OpenAI. The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, made a similar deal, although the full details of both are unclear.

We’ve previously discussed these data-sharing deals, but hearing from a decision maker why they opted to move in this direction was enlightening. Thompson makes the case for being a part of the conversation around how publisher content is used in the age of generative AI:

…if there had been a way early in Facebook to shift the way that newsfeed worked so that established brands weren’t given the same weight as non-established brands […] But one of the tweaks would’ve been, can you sort of change the weight and the way they design and the way the fonts work or whatever so that somebody in Macedonia can’t start a publication called The Verge with another Z at the end that looks just like you and has the exact same weight.

I think that one of the lessons is to pay a lot of attention, right? So, the AI search products have not been built and have not been launched as they’re built, and as they’re launched, what are the values we want embedded in them? Like how much text do we want them to show? How do we want the external Links to work? How do we want the level of summarization? Those are really crucial questions to get right at the beginning. And I think we are more likely to get them right as they do these kind of deals.

His goal is to get a seat at the table early and influence decisions, ensuring The Atlantic’s brand remains intact as ChatGPT summarizes its content.

I understand the logic here, but I have two problems with this take:

1. Influence is not enough: OpenAI will ultimately make decisions that enrich them over anything The Atlantic or their peers want them to do. Having a seat at the table does not mean they are decision-makers.
2. Consolidation is accelerated: Having only “established” brands at the table means that smaller media organizations without bargaining power remain outside the conversation. I’ve spoken about the inevitable consolidation of the media under AI summarization, and deals like this only exacerbate those issues.

It also looks like The Atlantic plans to integrate OpenAI’s technology directly into its website using credits they received as a part of the deal. Getting credits is a good way to test the generative AI waters, but there’s a part of this conversation that stands out:

They give us credits. So we are building tools on the business side with the engineering team that are using OpenAI, so we don’t have to rely on Llama […] we are just using OpenAI Credits, we are working with them. At some point there may be engineering support, there may not be engineering support.

This is concerning. The Atlantic is aware that there are open source models that would enable them to own their product–from publishing content to generative AI search of that content–and they consider that more of a reliance than partnering with a black box.

What they are actually doing is turning down the opportunity to own their technology stack and become an end-to-end product for their subscribers.

Using open-source technology is the opposite of reliance. The deal they just signed up for creates more dependencies, reduces the potential for internal innovation, and makes tech companies a stand-in for an internal product and engineering team.

The Atlantic needs to become OpenAI before OpenAI becomes The Atlantic, and not working on internal solutions is setting them back much further than I think they realize.

It’s not to say that they shouldn’t make deals with AI companies at all – growing a team and culture to build this internally will take time and effort that they may not have today. However, writing off an option that enables independence feels like a bad bet to make in the long term. The best time to plan for the future was yesterday, and the next best time is now.

We’ll have to see how this plays out as this deal solidifies and yields products across the ecosystem. I just wish publishers realized that they’re making only slight improvements to their interactions with tech companies rather than actually working to change their culture to build better inside.

Scrape and Imitate

Speaking of AI companies turning into publishers, this week, we saw one of the most egregious examples when a now-defunct fan-favorite Apple news site, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), was invaded by AI slop farm Web Orange Limited.

Jason Koebler of 404 Media reports:

This month, “Christina Warren” started blogging again for The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), a legendary and long-dead Apple-centric tech news blog that she worked at more than a decade ago. Warren was for years a well-known and very good tech journalist, before she went on to work for Microsoft and GitHub. The real Christina Warren hasn’t been writing these new posts on the zombie TUAW, however. The site’s new owners have stolen her identity, replaced her photo with an AI-generated one, and have been publishing what appear to be AI-generated articles under her byline.

So, not only did the website get taken over and filled with AI-generated content, but the original reporters’ names were used with AI-generated images that looked nothing like them. They also republished articles from their archives and rewrote them using AI.

Sheesh.

After being exposed, Web Orange Limited changed the authors’ names but continues to publish stories daily, all in the same AI-generated format.

To the unknowing eye, TUAW still looks like a legitimate website with real authors. But, as The Dead Internet Theory predicted, this is only a microcosm of the proliferation of AI-based content online. What do publishers do when top search engine results and answers from chatbots are not sourced by human-owned websites and are instead LLM-based content farms written and rewritten always to get top billing?

If The Atlantic is making deals with OpenAI to attract subscribers, what happens when it’s cheaper for OpenAI not to give them the real estate they expected because they can just invent AI journalists to write AI-generated stories that bubble up to ChatGPT responses?

And it looks like they don’t even need to make deals with The Atlantic to make this happen. In an investigation by Proof News, it was found that YouTube data is used by Apple, Nvidia, and Anthropic to train their LLM models. OpenAI has also been caught using YouTube data for their latest GPT models. And, of course, Google–who owns YouTube–is obviously using their treasure trove.

The dataset, called YouTube Subtitles, contains video transcripts from educational and online learning channels like Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard. The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC also had their videos used to train AI, as did “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Deals with AI companies may be a good stop-gap for publishers to catch up. But if they take too long, every AI company will likely have a half-decent replacement for them over the next decade. It may be sloppy, but it’ll be cheaper, and most readers likely won’t be able to tell the difference anyway–especially if the training set already includes them, their competitors, and so much more.

If publishers want to be serious in this next generation of media distribution, they need to start thinking about detaching from external dependencies rather than betting on letting tech giants build the future for them and, eventually, without them.

Own Your Stack

I spent a lot of time in this issue discussing how publishers need to own their AI stack, but that’s just one example of a larger cultural shift we need to see in the media industry. These AI deals are a symptom of a deeper issue with the way publishers look at the technology that distributes their content.

Publishers need to start considering their websites as end-to-end products, more than just linked posts on social media apps or blurbs in AI chatbots. The Verge has done a phenomenal job of that with its Story Stream, which makes its homepage more like a social media feed than a news site. Their focus is now on loyal readers rather than ones who happen to click on a story and forget that the site exists. They’ve shifted from click-throughs to an actual user base. And there’s even more of that coming as they invest in making their product into a Fediverse platform.

They’ve also launched two paid newsletters (Command Line, Notepad). Eventually, these newsletters can be distributed via ActivityPub, similar to what Ghost is doing with its newsletter platform. If that’s the case, a “Follow” on a Fediverse platform like Mastodon, Flipboard, Threads, or Ghost could prompt the user to pay to subscribe and get the newsletter directly in their social feeds instead of cluttering their inbox.

With that interaction model, The Verge will own its newsletter stack, social profiles, and audience all at once. The website-to-product transition has started, and while its parent company may be making deals with AI companies, The Verge is on a quest to become a technology company in its own right.

Perhaps more publishers need to do the same.

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Human-Generated Content! If you want to be notified of future issues and other posts on augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free. You can also follow me directly on Threads and Mastodon.

But there seems to be an existential question that keeps bubbling up under the surface every few weeks that finally came to a head on its first anniversary: Why does Threads exist?

The obvious reason is to be an alternative to Elon Musk’s X. But considering its heavy-handed approach to the kind of content Meta wants on the site, along with statements in early interviews, it’s clear that they don’t want to beat Twitter. Like Mastodon, Threads has very different ideas of what microblogging should be, which still leaves space for Twitter to exist for specific niches.

This isn’t inherently bad - Twitter wasn’t a great place for anyone’s mental health and is even less so now.

But here’s the thing—a platform can’t exist to be “an alternative.” It should be able to stand alone with its unique purpose and be built to incentivize users to follow that purpose. Meta needs to be transparent about what user success looks like based on what it wants the platform to look like years from now. Actions matter more than words.

Like any social network, you need to spend days, weeks, and months on it before really understanding what the culture is outside of what others–including the company running it–are telling you.

Contrary to popular belief, there are thriving communities on the platform, even if they look almost nothing like they did on Twitter. Talk to your typical active Threads user, and they’ll tell you that they either enjoy the experience more than they did on Twitter or that this is their first social media experience and that the pros outweigh the cons of being on the platform.

I want to dive into what Threads really looks like as someone who’s deeply embedded himself into the platform over the last year. With that understanding, I want to explore how the humans who have worked tirelessly to build those communities are not being incentivized or given the tools to do that work.

The Elephant in the Room

I keep saying user, but those familiar with the social media business know precisely who I’m talking about. Creators.

Wait, don’t leave! At least not until I can explain myself.

Every platform has a successful user base segment, and as they gain followers, they become that platform’s native creators. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram have “celebrity” creators, with a mostly one-way relationship between posters and commenters.

Microblogging works a bit differently. On sites like Twitter and Mastodon, creators are analogous to community builders. They engage back and forth with their replies, boost people with similar ideas, and help connect users to each other. They may look like celebrities because of their likes count and thriving discussions in their replies, but if you look closely, they’re actually fostering a community around their native content.

That’s not to say that celebrity creators don’t exist on these platforms, but they’re usually celebrities elsewhere and use microblogging as another distribution and promotion tool. They aren’t native creators of these platforms; most of the time, their real work and audience-building happen elsewhere.

Based on my observations, this is true for Threads as well. If you peek into NBA Threads or other sub-cultures on the platform, you’ll see a few top-level users curating the space and bringing more people into the fold through their replies and reposts. Many of these communities have spun off into Discords and Instagram group chats that leak back and forth into the main Threads feed. Hold that thought because it’s an important one.

If you ask anyone in these communities about their experience on Threads, they’ll tell you that they’ve made lifelong friends and have connected with people with interests they didn’t think they’d have in common. They’ll also tell you they’re connecting with people across communities they probably wouldn’t have engaged with otherwise because they connected through one or two people who led them to the whole group.

They’ll also tell you that most of that work happens outside the platform.

The Community Creators

In Tech Threads, you have users like Eleonor Rose, who flies city to city to attend meetups, open-sources her work, elevates users in the community who build interesting products, and set up a Discord server and multiple Instagram group chats. Johnathan Garelick also started a Seattle Tech Threads meetup series using Meetup. Those Discords, IG group chats, and meetups are where I’m actually discovering some of my closest friends on the platform.

In NBA Threads, creators like David Rushing and Sara Montour Lewis curate community posts, engage across replies to boost other users, and help drive conversations during games. There’s also a hilarious rivalry between the two, interwoven across many Threads. That, among other recurring conversations, keeps everyone engaged while games aren’t happening. NBA Threads also utilizes Discord as a way to have conversations off of the main feed.

Mind you, none of this is a one- or two-person show, and many other users aid in this work. But the builders are clearly bringing everyone together in these communities.

These are the native creators of Threads. They are thriving, building, and extending, and people around them are truly enjoying the experience. They are celebrities in their own right but community builders first and foremost. I see the hard work they do every day, and they’re the ones making Threads a social network that’s actually social.

And I’ve only mentioned two among many other communities that have silently grown on the platform.

The fact is, a lack of creators is not the elephant in the room. Creators exist on Threads, but they aren’t the same creators who succeeded on Twitter or Mastodon, nor are they the influencers on Instagram. Threads is a reply and elevate economy, and the people who have realized this are absolutely crushing it.

The problem is that much of that work is done using brute force and tools outside the core platform.

The Creator Paradox

So, if there is a unique way users are becoming native creators on Threads, the next thing we should expect is for the platform owners to invest and foster those creators and the communities built around them. And in some ways, Meta actually has.

Knowing that NBA Threads and other sports-related communities are growing on the platform, Threads has added scoreboards to the search experience for NBA and MLB games. This enables users to see a live feed of content alongside game stats. This is great! They found specific community needs and doubled down on them.

Also, understanding that power users need more of a live feed, they built a TweetDeck-like experience. There aren’t lists (yet), but the columns can include real-time search results, which is a good step forward. Lists would be a great addition, though.

But some other moves Meta has made have been more counter-intuitive.

For one, they aren’t incentivizing any community builders and meetup planners, nor have they launched discovery features as entry points to these niches. It’s tough to find your footing on Threads because the onboarding takes you to a feed of what looks like “celebrity” creators who likely started on sites like Instagram. I started some fresh accounts and used accounts of friends who aren’t as active – unless I knew exactly which communities were already thriving on the platform, I had to do direct searches to find these native creators.

Their money flow also speaks the same language. They’ve started various influencer programs that push Instagram creators (read: “celebrity” creators) to post on Threads with a promise of $5K if they get 10,000 views. They’re going for big celebrities like Taylor Swift, who, quite frankly, doesn’t care about the platform whatsoever.

With that, I have two simple questions for Meta:

1. Why are native creators who bet your platform on day one not getting financially incentivized for the labor they put in to make your platform worth visiting?
2. Why do you think that photo and video creators who, as Deirdre Assenza would say, “spam and scram,” will do well on a microblogging platform?

And herein lies the Threads creator paradox: Meta believes that the grass is greener if they inject creators from one site to another while ignoring that the creators who succeed on Threads are nothing like the ones on their sister site and are certainly not traditional celebrities. In fact, if they want to inject the kind of creators who succeed on Threads from platforms they own, they’re likely to find more ideal users who run Facebook Groups—community builders who engage and give space to their group members.

That said, they don’t have to look to their other platforms. There are clearly native creators ready to go who have put in the work over the last year. Give them the tools they’re using off-platform, throw money at them to host events, and give them tips to grow and engage with their community.

Invest in your native creators rather than constantly looking outward for validation with creators who will have difficulty finding success and will blame you for not getting it.

Now What?

An interesting turn will occur later this year when Threads federates because, at that point, it will matter less who the native creators are on Threads. But, even in a federated landscape, a platform’s culture will still matter because UX decisions, algorithms, and features will define how people create and engage within your ecosystem.

Currently, creators work for themselves while Threads looks for the next batch of users. Instead of pushing community-building features that enable organic growth, they’re trying to shove a square peg in a round hole and throw money at it, hoping it fits with enough financial incentive.

But Taylor Swift posted twice during a giant hoopla around her new album and never returned. Instagram creators are nowhere to be found in the communities natively developed on the platform. Creators from X who have large followings peek in every few months, ask if anyone is still there, and then don’t even look at the replies.

Suppose Threads really believes in boosting via replies, building communities around accounts that put in the effort, and having a positive culture within the local network. In that case, it needs to prove it by investing in the platform’s original creators instead of hoping to strike gold with old friends who are content where they’re already comfortable and successful.

Build for the real Threads creators, and I can promise they’ll help you build a larger network of communities.

Perhaps a good starting point would be understanding why your top native communities continue the conversation in Discords and Instagram group chats.

And Lists. Definitely Lists.

Thank you for reading! I’ll be continuing to post about the Threads and the Fediverse on Threads and Mastodon so follow me there if you’re interested or have any questions for me. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment and my newsletter “Human-Generated Content,” you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

On June 24th, two AI music companies – Suno and Udio – were sued by record labels via the RIAA for using decades of copyrighted music they had not licensed for training their models, generating near-exact copies of songs included in their training.

On June 26th, Paramount Global announced that it’s shutting down Comedy Central’s website after twenty-five years, erasing years of video content from Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert, among others who built the foundation for late-night talk shows and created comedy history.

Over the last month, we’ve learned that at least three AI companies – OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity – are ignoring a web-wide handshake requesting bots not to scrape content from a page, even after some promised to respect it.

Culture is either being erased or regurgitated back at us, and the people who created and recorded it have none of the power to stop it from happening.

Culture Erased

I want to start today with a video by Rob Markman, a former employee of MTVNews.com. Markman has worked as a hip-hop journalist for almost twenty years, putting work in at iconic organizations like XXL, Scratch, Complex, Genius, and – of course – MTV. With his extensive experience across print and online media, he’s written history time and time again.

After learning that so much of his and his colleagues’ work is being wiped away, he wanted to share his feelings and discuss his plans to ensure his work isn’t erased again.

Markman’s video is the inspiration for this newsletter issue. It’s a story we all need to understand from the source and is a required watch for anyone who cares to understand how much culture we just lost. So while I use some descriptions for context – please first hear what Rob has to say.

Video interviews with Kendrick Lamar before Section.80 and good kid, m.A.A.d city. Important moments with Nipsey Hussle and Mac Miller. The first interview with Joey Bada$$. Gone.

“What about the work that all of the writers, all of the producers, all of the editors? The whole staff for decades and decades put in the work - they have nothing to show for it anymore. Their work is gone.”

“What about the folks who weren’t there who have to go back and research what actually happened, what was actually said, what was actually going on […] Our future generations lose access to that information and it just becomes hearsay.”

While the Internet Archive has saved some of it – a resource that’s also consistently in danger of being shut down – hip-hop culture has lost a significant chunk of history. These are snapshots, so they don’t include any proprietary video content. Instead, where videos normally appear, there’s a broken player left behind. It’s probably why we haven’t heard similar news about Comedy Central’s site which is mostly videos.

Knowing all of this, Markman has taken important steps to preserve his digital footprint and ensure he owns his work personally. For one – his studio, editing process, and content distribution are done solely by him. He’s chosen YouTube as his platform, but since he owns his content, he can distribute it anywhere he likes and gain an audience from multiple platforms. If YouTube ever shuts down, he can still take those videos under his ownership and move them elsewhere. His content can exist where he wants it to.

It’s not a new idea, but as Anil Dash points out in his piece about the New Alt Media, there is a resurgence of reporters and creators who worked in large publications stepping out to build their own smaller shops. Not to grow exponentially year over year or eventually build out staff, but to report the news no one else is telling that they care about.

It’s also important for this to happen since our cultural history is being misused in countless ways.

And Regurgitated

I want you to listen to this song. I would ask if it sounds familiar, but…c’mon, right?

Over the last few months, it’s become apparent that AI companies are using copyrighted materials without purchasing licenses to use that content. Of course, none of this surprises us because it’s been obvious from day one. You don’t get a Drake voice without training on lots of Drake data.

But now, the RIAA is suing Udio and Suno, companies that make AI-generated music, and they’re using tracks like the one above to prove their point. As Mia Sato of The Verge reports:

In its complaints, RIAA included several examples of outputs generated using Suno and Udio that sound like songs owned by labels. One song generated by Suno titled “Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orle” [sic] replicates the lyrics and style of “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry. Another song called “Prancing Queen” generated using the prompt “70s pop” contains lyrics to “Dancing Queen” by ABBA — and sounds remarkably like the band."

Before we go on, I want to make something really clear: not all AI is bad AI. There are applications of this technology that will improve our lives in real ways, whether in medicine, climate science, or even an assistant to help organize some thoughts.

What I do have a problem with is that AI companies train their models by misusing online work – without any permission or financial benefit to the people and infrastructure that brought it to life. Not only is it learning from unethically sourced content, but it’s also often just Plagiarism as a Service.

A further extension of this problem makes me nervous: Recently, numerous media companies have shut down or sold once-major publications, and at the same time, media companies have also signed deals with AI giants like OpenAI.

There will be a point in time when media behemoths like Paramount will have licensed content to AI companies from publishers that they’ve shut down, like MTVNews.com. That would make all that work only accessible through a chatbot’s imperfect recollection of that history with no attribution to the humans that did the work behind it. A chunk of our cultural history will only be available through the regurgitations of non-deterministic chatbots, leaving us with a sloppy version of the work humans once did without any benefit to the people behind it.

Where do we even go from here?

A Collaborative Approach

Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media has an obvious solution to this in his essay about solving AI’s original sin:

“Pay for the output, not the training […] When someone reads a book, watches a video, or attends a live training, the copyright holder gets paid. Why should derivative content generated with the assistance of AI be any different?”

My point is that one of the frontiers of innovation in AI should be in techniques and business models to enable the kind of flourishing ecosystem of content creation that has characterized the web and the online distribution of music and video. AI companies that figure this out will create a virtuous flywheel that rewards content creation rather than turning the industry into an extractive dead end.

O’Reilly’s concept focuses on building incentives for creation that attribute and give back to the content that helped drive the outputs. This is what he calls the “generative AI supply chain”. If we have to live with AI, we should all be forcing these companies to source and compensate their sources ethically.

“Can you imagine a world where a question to an AI chatbot might sometimes lead to an immediate answer, sometimes to the equivalent of […] “I can’t do that for you, Dave, but the New York Times chatbot can.” At other times, by agreement between the parties, an answer based on copyrighted data might be given directly in the service, but the rights holder will be compensated.”

In an ideal world, independent creators like Rob Markman can do journalism at the source and put it in a package they prefer (video, audio, written, etc.). AI search engines can then source and attribute that content with payment back to the creator when someone asks a related query, even embedding his video for a user to watch the full content for further context.

And O’Reilly isn’t just talking the talk; his media company is building exactly this for their “Answers” chatbot:

Because we know what content was used to produce the generated answer, we are able to not only provide links to the sources used to generate the answer but also pay authors in proportion to the role of their content in generating it.

There are still two major issues with this. One of them, O’Reilly specifically calls out, is that these outputs need to be credible. In other words, hallucinations will be a major roadblock in solving these problems.

The other problem is systemic and one we’ve discussed in this newsletter before:

“What I see here is the further consolidation of the media industry. ChatGPT didn’t attempt to look at multiple different news sites for the same story to get multiple perspectives, they chose at most two. In other words: unlike the ten links in Google Search or even the “Full Coverage” option in Google News which enables the user to get multiple viewpoints, ChatGPT is choosing a couple sources based on who made deals with them.”

While a compensation model that aligns with license holders is a step forward, we don’t live in that ideal world I mentioned before, and larger media conglomerates are likely to win the chatbot response lottery. Google Search already prioritizes more established brands in its search algorithm, so we don’t have much evidence that it’ll be different this time.

So, while AI tools are seemingly inevitable and can benefit creators if built right, the best distribution tools will always be the ones that help creators directly interact with their communities and enable them to own their content. Ultimately, the solution must still be building your web of webs to elevate independent creation.

As I said in the previous issue:

“The new web economy is handmade, original, and delivered by humans. That’s quite delightful if you ask me.”

More on that part in the future.

For now, I hope that in this cycle of tech platforms, we have more companies like O’Reilly – building with empathy for the creators behind the work that powers their products instead of treating them as free resources for slop.

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Human-Generated Content! If you want to be notified of future issues and other posts on augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free. You can also follow me directly on Threads and Mastodon.

“My goal for the next issue is to not talk about the Fediverse.”

That was me in the last issue of Human-Generated Content and I would like to start by apologizing for this very predictable lie.

Hello, again!

Last time, we talked about the diverging strategies between publishers choosing AI or the social web - let’s continue that thread today. If you didn’t notice, there were a lot of AI stories over the last two weeks. And by AI I mean “Apple Intelligence”, which I will never say unironically ever again.

Today we’ll chat about A[rtificial]I, how the media should cover topics like Elon Musk’s latest tantrum, and we’ll end on an optimistic note about media’s place in the future of the open web.

Yeah, Fine. Let’s Talk About AI

That’s probably what Tim Cook said when Apple was planning the WWDC24 keynote. If I’m being honest - by the end of the recorded presentation, Tim seemed exhausted by all the hype and looked like he was ready to say “are you happy now?”

I’m not going to delve too much into Apple’s foray into LLM-based AI because, quite frankly, we have no idea if it’s going to live up to the promises they’re making. The concepts seem really smart but we’ve been fooled before. One of the many consumer-facing problems with non-deterministic technologies like LLMs is that we find it funny when it says something stupid, but if it doesn’t handle something as time-sensitive as a phone action properly - we likely won’t try it again. I’ll hold off until it’s given a fair shot in the wild.

What I do want to talk about briefly, however, is Perplexity.

Sarah Emerson and Rashi Shrivastava of Forbes report:

Perplexity appears to be plagiarizing journalists’ work through its newly launched feature, Perplexity Pages, which lets people curate content on a particular topic. Multiple posts that have been “curated” by the Perplexity team on its platform are strikingly similar to original stories from multiple publications

Sarah and Rashi then go over numerous examples where Perplexity copies articles word-for-word and creates searchable “Pages”, essentially replacing the original creation with a copy.

Plagiarism as a Service, if you will.

Perplexity ended up responding saying they know things are rough around the edges but they’re working on it. They also went ahead and said that they’re totally working with media companies to license their content. Cool, but the cart goes behind the horse.

But wait, there’s more! As it turns out, Perplexity is actively ignoring a web-wide handshake that tells bots to not scrape content from a page. Robb Knight, dev at Radweb and MacStories, discovered that Perplexity just straight up ignores the fact that they’ve been added to the robots.txt file:

they’re using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string

I believe the technical term for such behavior is “shady af”.

In a vacuum, we can look at these as slip-ups. What we see here instead is a pattern of behavior that puts anything that doesn’t benefit Perplexity on the backburner, leaving behind an intense focus on delivering something that differentiates them from every other AI product in this inflating bubble. And we all know there’s a lot more AI products than there should be.

Speaking of a lot more than there should be - let’s talk about Elon Musk.

We Need To (Not) Talk About Elon

This week, Apple not only announced their own AI features, they also showed off an integration with ChatGPT where Apple hands off requests it can’t handle to another chatbot. Their grand plan is to enable many third-parties to integrate.

This seemed to really tick off Elon Musk, who used to be the biggest donor of OpenAI until they didn’t let him be CEO. He threw a tantrum and took his money with him. Elon also started a competing AI company called xAI that’s focused on being “funny” and “not woke”, whatever all that means.

Long story short: he got big mad that Apple chose OpenAI and a bunch of journalists decided that it’s worth reporting on.

Elon says a lot of things every day - many of which are (gasp) lies - and angry rants every week - many of which are layered in contradictions. We don’t need Elon to be a part of every news cycle, even if he tries his best to be.

Karl Bode of TechDirt outlines the abusive relationship newsrooms have with Elon:

First it spent fifteen years hyping up Musk’s super-genius engineering mythology, despite mounting evidence that Musk was more of a clever credit-absconding opportunist than any sort of revolutionary thinker. After 20 years of this, the press still treats every belch the man has as worthy of the deepest analysis under the pretense they’re engaging in some sort of heady public service.

Musk is one of the richest humans ever and literally has the power to control wars. He’s used that money and power to purchase one of the most influential social media platforms, then changed its algorithm to focus more on him even if you signal that you don’t want it to.

Elon doesn’t need more amplification than he’s already given himself and yet…here we are.

Of course, the reasoning isn’t because it actually needs to be reported on, it’s because they know that “Elon Musk said…” is great for clicks. There’s likely someone looking at the metrics in these newsrooms chomping at the bit for another Elon tweetstorm so they can watch the numbers go up again.

Jason Koebler of 404 Media also dove into those financial incentives, but has important insight into why this is unhealthy in the long-run for the media business:

Elon Musk tweets a thing is the type of easily replicable blog post that Google, Perplexity, and OpenAI are actively automating through their AI summary tools and the deals that publishers are increasingly signing with AI companies to specifically allow them to replicate such types of content more easily. It is the type of blog post that X itself is already summarizing and generating for users with the deeply unreliable yet soon-to-be-deeply integrated Grok AI.

He goes on to talk about how to use social media content in a more productive way:

they are fundamentally taking something that is easily found on social media, embedding it, and calling it a blog post. There is and can be utility explaining a social media phenomenon or weaving together a narrative based on a series of social media posts.

Jason isn’t just talking about Elon here, he’s talking about how media businesses can survive this awkward phase of the human internet.

He isn’t just talking the talk either - 404 Media publishes on a platform that gives them direct contact with their audience (and is soon extending to the Fediverse). They focus on original stories that other newsrooms aren’t covering, which then enables their audience to share those stories to their part of the web. Instead of depending solely on winning an SEO lottery or a social media algorithm, they’re providing value to their readers and being amplified for it. And they’re profitable all while doing it.

So stop with the Elon slop, we can let AI handle that. You should focus on building your web.

A Web of Webs

In a follow-up to Molly White’s “We Can Have A Different Web”, Aram Zucker-Scharff (Engineering Lead at The Washington Post) outlines how we can build a more humane web by leaning on its fundamentals:

The internet then is the series of connections between people, at a huge scale. Not everyone is connected to everyone, but if you’re on the internet, you’re connecting to someone. So it isn’t so much a world wide web as it is world wide webs. […] The thing about webs is they are failure resistent (sp), one strand falling won’t take the whole thing down. You can punch a hole through them, but webs are also rebuilt regularly, they can fail and come back quickly.

Aram outlines various ways you and I can help build a resilient and redundant human web of information that builds upon each other, rather than one dependent on a few black-box platforms. It’s worth reading through this one and taking up at least some of these practices. I would start by building your own home(s) on the internet that you own, but there’s a lot more we can all do.

What I love about this moment is that we’re seeing more and more creator-turned-owner stories popping up as we see the managed decline of the platform-owned web. Anil Dash (VP at Fastly, Prince Superfan) wrote a piece that puts into focus the New Alt Media - a group of relatively newly-minted newsrooms that act more like co-ops than they do traditional media institutions:

There’s Flaming Hydra. 404 Media. Defector. Aftermath. Racket. Hell Gate. And so many more. This isn’t a new phenomenon — several of the publications in this broad category have been around for years. But we’ve reached a tipping point, for a number of reasons. […] And all of that is without even mentioning the important part: these new platforms are telling the stories nobody else is.

That right there is how creators, curators, and consumers are building their web of webs - original stories shared through platforms, amplified using humans that share with other humans. It’s how I find articles every week for this newsletter as I build my web next to all of yours. Look, Ma - I’m doing the thing!

I pointed out how we should start looking at these media companies in the last issue of this newsletter as well:

At this point, if you’re not looking at these publishers as social web platforms that are hosting hand-picked bloggers, podcasters, and content creators with a publisher’s infrastructure, you’re not paying attention.

But with Anil’s post, I think it’s worth calling out that most of these New Alt Media companies are doing something important: paid tiers. They may not paywall all their content, but they have options to pay to remove ads, get extra content, and/or gain direct access to the creators among other perks. And this is a good thing - good work deserves good pay.

Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Medium, wrote about the importance of the paywall for the future of human-made content:

Now we have decades of proof that attention-grabbing isn’t the same as good. Instead of the information superhighway that we were promised, ads gave us an internet where almost all incentives are to create cheap, high-volume, low-quality content designed to get as many eyeballs as possible.

By changing the incentives from ads to subscriptions, the creators in this environment are forced to focus on bringing relevant, timely, and original information to their consumers.

The new web economy is handmade, original, and delivered by humans. That’s quite delightful if you ask me.

Side note: Fastly, where Anil is VP, launched a new UX on Glitch that enables users to curate the open web. It’s giving me StumbleUpon vibes and I mean that in the best way possible. More on that in a future post - don’t forget to subscribe!

Until Next Time

Okay, so I talked about the Fediverse again. It definitely feels like if I want to talk about human-made content, the social web is entirely the center of it so it’s nearly impossible to not mention it in some shape or form. So no promises for the next issue. I’m just going to roll with the punches.

I also realized that I’m doing a terrible job of highlighting the linked content in this newsletter, so from now on I’m going to add a list of the main links in the issue at the end. I really urge you to read them since I only highlight specific parts - there’s a lot more depth in these pieces and you’ll thank yourself for taking the time to read through them.

So, until then - hope you have a great couple weeks ✌🏼

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Human-Generated Content! If you want to be notified of future issues and other posts on augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free. You can also follow me directly on Threads and Mastodon.

The first edition of this series brought the largest amount of new subscribers augment has ever seen, so I want to start by thanking all of you for joining me on this journey. As you can probably tell, I’m still trying to figure this out but I hope I’m leaving you with a few nuggets of knowledge and context with each post I leave in your inbox.

Before we jump in: I also wrote two other pieces on augment in between issues. Check them out if you haven’t yet, I’m really happy with how they turned out:

• Google Danced - Will Apple?
• Patreon Belongs in the Fediverse

For this edition, I want to talk about two conversations happening around the future of journalism. One side sees the end-times and is handing their content to be aggregated and summarized for easy consumption. The other side also sees the end-times, but is opting to change the way they distribute and build their audience. Yup - it’s another AI and Fediverse conversation. But I also warned you it would be last time so I hope it isn’t a surprise.

So let’s look at these two forks in the road and see what their potential for the future is.

The Publisher’s Dilemma

I want to start this with a blog post by Ben Werdmuller (Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica) that summarizes the current social media news landscape, different business models that have been attempted in the past, and the various solutions ahead of them.

We’re at the foothills of both changes: social media is likely to fragment further, and generative AI will become even more prevalent as it becomes more powerful. Newsrooms can no longer rely on their old tactics to reach their audiences, and they will need to build new tactics that take these trends into account if they hope to survive.

So here we are: the distribution strategies of the 2010s are looking a whole lot like the newsstands of the mid-2000s. The first time, the newsstands scaled back because the audience changed the way they consume the news. This time, however, it’s because the newsstands themselves have either decided they don’t want to sell the news or that they would rather summarize the day’s news instead - sometimes lying to you confidently as they do.

There’s a lot of more in Ben’s piece and I urge you to read it, along with subscribing to his newsletter. His experience in the industry has taught him about the dynamics between journalism and technology and I’ve learned a lot from reading his work.

I want to add another description from the piece:

These organizations must own their digital presence outright to shield themselves from risks created by third parties that wield outsized supplier power over their business models. They must build direct relationships with their communities, prioritizing open protocols over proprietary systems. They need to invest in technology expertise that can help them weather these changes and make that expertise a first-class part of their senior leadership teams.

So, which one are publishers choosing - open protocols or proprietary systems? Well, it’s complicated.

Publishers Turn to AI Companies

Let’s start with the publishers opting into proprietary systems. Namely, in the last few weeks Vox, The Atlantic, and News Corp have all signed deals with OpenAI. These deals go two ways - OpenAI gets a pipeline of up-to-date news content to add to their models and publishers get deals on OpenAI tools, some of which will actually be really useful for both the publisher and its readers.

It is important, however, to note that how news content will surface on ChatGPT is still unclear once these deals have a tangible impact on the experience. When I ask for the day’s news on the platform today, this is what it looks like: OpenAI responds with what it considers the four top news stories of the day First off, these are definitely not the biggest news stories of the day—there’s an election happening in India and a Bollywood actress’s endorsement is certainly not the most important part of it. But I digress.

Another thing to note about this response is the attribution: it does link me to news sites where some of this is sourced but it doesn’t take me to the article, it takes me to the homepages. There are no quotes from the pieces and no authors called out. There’s four stories with three sites and it doesn’t tell you which stories line up with which publications. Now, maybe all this will change after these deals but I currently see no real benefit to the media businesses other than an upfront, short-term bank deposit.

But it somehow gets worse. The next day I got more specific about what news I want to focus on and ChatGPT just straight up lied to me: ChatGPT thinks that the BJP won the majority in the 2024 Indian elections. They did not. This time it does a marginally better job of attributing the news to its sources, but fails at actually being accurate about the most important news coming out of the Indian elections. Am I supposed to trust ChatGPT as a source of up-to-date truthful journalism? Am I supposed to click on the links, go to the homepage of the news site, then search for the sourced story to confirm what ChatGPT says? Why are media brands trusting this system in its current state? I have so many questions.

If we ignore the truth - which is a really weird thing to ignore - there’s another major problem here. What I see here is the further consolidation - or as Kyle Chakya would say, flattening - of the media industry. ChatGPT didn’t attempt to look at multiple different news sites for the same story to get multiple perspectives, they chose at most two. In other words: unlike the ten links in Google Search or even the “Full Coverage” option in Google News which enables the user to get multiple viewpoints, ChatGPT is choosing a couple sources based on who made deals with them.

Not to get political here, but if a news story on ChatGPT is going to be sourced from a News Corp entity, I really want it to look for different perspectives. If that’s where OpenAI’s information is coming from, I likely won’t be trusting it. I think Vanessa Otero - Founder/CEO of Ad Fontes Media, the organization that invented the Media Bias Chat - said it best:

The rise of misinformation was mostly from bad actors and extreme partisans polluting news and political information. It increased the work required to know what was true in the news, which made a lot of people not trust any news.

AI summaries are mostly from enormous tech companies, polluting every kind of information, even the banal, which increases the work required to know what is true anywhere, which is making a lot of people not trust any information. This is worse.

It also looks like the journalists on the ground floor aren’t all that happy about this decision as well. Vox reporter Bryan Walsh had swift pushback for his employer:

But while I’m not a media executive, I have been working in this business for more than 20 years. In that time, I’ve seen our industry pin our hopes on search engine optimization; on the pivot to video (and back again); on Facebook and social media traffic. I can remember Apple coming to my offices at Time magazine in 2010, promising us that the iPad would save the magazine business. (It did not.)

Each time, we are promised a fruitful collaboration with tech platforms that can benefit both sides. And each time, it ultimately doesn’t work out because the interests of those tech platforms do not align, and have never fully aligned, with those of the media. But sure — maybe this time Lucy won’t pull the football away.

Tell us how you really feel, Bryan.

The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief, Nilay Patel had a bit of a different - or indifferent - reaction to the news of his employer’s partnership with OpenAI:

I don’t have a lot to say about this – our newsroom is independent of the company’s business dealings as it’s always been. We’ll figure out some disclosure language and do a disclosure when it’s appropriate, we are pretty good at those ;)

And based on The Verge’s recent moves, it’s pretty clear that Nilay is planning on taking his newsroom in a very, very different direction. In fact, let’s talk about it.

Publishers Turn to the Fediverse

In parallel, another conversation is happening around a direct-to-audience strategy using social web protocols like ActivityPub.

Sara Guaglione from Digiday reports:

The Verge and 404 Media are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.

I mentioned in the last edition of this newsletter that Semafor and The Verge have both been transitioning their distribution to using open social protocols like ActivityPub. In the long-run, The Verge wants to be a Fediverse-first publication. But as they work through this transition, The Verge - along with Semafor, 404Media, and WeDistribute among other publishers - are using Flipboard as a pipe into the social web.

One thing to note about 404 Media is that they’re currently hosted by Ghost, the same newsletter engine “Human-Generated Content” runs on. While 404 Media is currently piping through Flipboard, Ghost is also on the path of federating using ActivityPub. This means that with little to effort, all media organizations using the platform will be able to enter the Fediverse with the flip of a few switches.

Yet another publisher that’s on Ghost that’s also bullish on the Fediverse is Platformer, the popular newsletter by Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer. In a conversation with PJ Vogt on his podcast “Search Engine”, both Casey and PJ have a long, grim conversation about what AI means for the future of publishing. But Casey states the solution of what to do about it bluntly:

“We have to finish building the Fediverse”

Casey built Platformer as a direct-to-audience newsletter on day one and it’s clearly worked out for him. He leveraged the audience and network he built while writing at The Verge, including his popular newsletter series “The Interface”, and built a media business from the ground up using Substack while also syndicating some his content.

Now, Casey wasn’t the first to run the POSSE playbook, but he was definitely one of the few writers that understood how to run the blitz. He launched a Discord server “Sidechannel” for paid subscribers, he was hosting Twitter Spaces with Kara Swisher during the pandemic, he was booking interviews with Mark Zuckerberg, and he was picking up scoop after scoop in back-to-back issues. He took his audience and gave them strong reasons to stick around.

I think The Verge has seen how they can be an incubator for talent and their new homepage design is, what I believe, a direct influence of that realization. The Story Stream looks like a microblogging platform’s For You feed and the writers treat it as such. As they focus on their shift to the Fediverse, I have a strong feeling they’ll be importing their brand and author profiles to an organization-owned ActivityPub server. Authors could post from The Verge to reach their audience across all protocol-supporting platforms as if they were using Threads or Mastodon and The Verge’s brand profile could repost them when it’s appropriate, centering the writers behind the work rather than just the entity. If you want to see a sneak-peek of such a system, an enthusiast brought The Verge’s Story Stream to the Fediverse on theverge.space. Pretty cool, huh?

They’ve decided to invest in their own technology using open protocols rather than depend on proprietary systems. At this point, if you’re not looking at these publishers as social web platforms that are hosting hand-picked bloggers, podcasters, and content creators with a publisher’s infrastructure, you’re not paying attention.

Until Next Time

My goal for the next issue is to not talk about the Fediverse. It’s going to be tough but I think there’s a lot of Human-Generated Content that’s not related to the future of social media and I want to make sure I surface it as well. We’ll see if I can keep that promise but…well, we’ll see.

So, until then - hope you have a great couple weeks ✌🏼

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Human-Generated Content! If you want to be notified of future issues and other posts on augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free. You can also follow me directly on Threads and Mastodon.

“The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”

This quote lives in my head rent-free because I think every startup that’s a few steps ahead of its behemoth competitor needs to think like this.

Patreon is one such startup and I hope that they’re paying attention to what Meta is planning on doing with Threads.

Instagram in the Fediverse

In a conversation with Mike McCue - CEO of Flipboard and host of the Dot Social podcast - and Rachel Lambert and Peter Cottle of Meta’s Threads team, it’s clear that Threads doesn’t plan on being just another simple node in the Fediverse:

“You could imagine extensions to the protocol eventually saying, like, I want to support micro payments, or […] feel free to show me ads, if that supports you” - Peter Cottle

In other words, Threads likely wants to be a monetization center for online creators and eventually compete with Patreon.

What makes this more interesting is that Instagram creators can now cross-post their content from their grid (images, carousels, and reels) directly to their Threads account. For those users, Threads will be a portal to the Fediverse for their Instagram account. If Meta turns on subscriptions, Instagram creators will not only be able to get paid for what they share on Instagram, but across the whole Fediverse as well.

Instagram will turn into Patreon overnight while tapping into the endless supply of network effects on the social web.

Meta isn’t taking this lightly either - they’re committed to bringing Instagram users to Threads. They’re literally paying them to use the new platform and to bring their followers over with them.

Why would a creator send their audience to a third-party platform when Instagram and Threads can be a one-stop-shop with their existing followers while having access to new paid subscribers across the social web?

Patreon can no longer just be the place where creators are paid, it needs to be a place where creators can be discovered. And it cannot do that as a social silo.

Your Move, Patreon

Instagram isn’t the only platform that’s going to bring subscriptions to the Fediverse. Ghost is extending their platform in a way that equalizes email and ActivityPub subscribers. ButtonDown is doing the same.

Users in the Fediverse are taking things into their own hands as well. Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub spec, has a separate Mastodon account that requires a $5/month PayPal subscription to gain access to its posts.

Go type “patreon fediverse” into a search engine of your choice and you’ll find no shortage of users asking for a way to get paid subscribers on a Fediverse account. I’m sure there’s a whole host of solo developers working on competitors as we speak.

It’s clear a Patreon solution is something the social web needs. The question is: will Patreon be that solution?

“And I hope that, with our innovation, [Google] will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance. And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think that’ll be a great day”

That’s what a confident Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said after the launch of Bing Chat, the predecessor to Copilot.

Boy, did they make Google dance.

Two Left Feet

Google launched their Generative AI-based search this week and it’s going very not so good. Across the internet, people are finding that Gemini - like other LLM services like it - tends to lie. A lot. Like, put Elmer’s glue on pizza and eat rocks kind of lies. It also lies on serious topics too.

And it’s a known problem that doesn’t have a solution.

We all saw this coming, right? From ChatGPT and Bing Chat’s early hallucinations to Google’s Gemini having a pretty bad start itself, it was clear that this technology wasn’t ready to play at the scale of something as big as the portal to the entire internet.

Google used the most important real estate on the internet to paraphrase Reddit trolls and satire websites, pushing informed answers further down the page. They danced, tripped on their own feet, and it’s going to take a long time for them to heal their twisted ankle.

Hol’ Up, Let Tim Cook

But where do the rest of us go from here? Every company that owns the platforms that run our lives are currently caught up in the AI buzz. One of those is Apple, and while there haven’t been any official announcements, Tim Cook has confirmed that the company has been working tirelessly to add AI features to their products.

Apple is apparently about to step on the dance floor in a few weeks at WWDC and, to be completely honest, I’m a bit nervous for them.

One rumor suggests that they’re paring up with Google for generative AI features. If it’s just photography tools or better auto-correct, that’s probably a great idea. But if they were planning on replacing the engine under Siri for Gemini, this launch from Google may convince them otherwise.

There have also been rumors that Apple’s working closely with OpenAI. But the non-profit is going through a controversy of its own, stressing an already-strained relationship with creatives. Apple also recently brought the ire of creatives with its “Crush” ad, which means they’re likely walking on thin ice for the next little while with that community as well. Tying the knot with OpenAI may raise a lot of eyebrows.

The last option is to go full-Apple - build an in-house competitor that’s only available through Siri on their hardware. To be honest, there’s very little that Apple could do to Siri to make it feel worse than it already is, so betting on themselves and hoping it gets better over time like Apple Maps is probably the right bet.

Or maybe the right bet is go the route Apple is best known for - sitting quiet and waiting for the promises of AI to match real-world experience expectations. To me, the biggest mic drop Tim Cook could make on the WWDC 2024 stage is “Y’all see how bad this is right? We don’t want to get anywhere near it.”

But line must go up and, if we’ve learned anything in the current phase of tech, GenAI makes the line go very, very ,very up.

I hope Tim brings the right dancing shoes.

Up until now, augment has just been one-off opinions on gadgets and the social web, but I always wanted it to have an outlet where I could cover other people’s work on a regular basis. More specifically, I wanted a space to elevate tech-related conversations happening between humans across the internet.

I’m going to start this as a bi-weekly newsletter but I may change that if I find there’s too much or not enough content for that cadence. We’re just gonna roll with what works until we figure it out. Cool? Cool.

Anyway. I consume a lot of content. Like, an embarrassing amount. Here’s just some of what I found interesting this week.

Google I/Zero

Let’s start with a post-Google I/O all gas, no brakes conversation between Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel. The interview starts with “do you think language is the same as intelligence,” and it’s an underhand pitch compared to what comes after.

Before you jump in, I wanted to give some background to some of the topics they cover so you know what’s going on.

They spend some time discussing Google Zero: the idea that Google answering your questions instead of linking you to one will drive website distribution to zero. The Verge also recently ran an experiment where they got a Google Gemini-generated article about printers to the top of Google’s search results. This not only speaks volumes about the impact the AI boom is bound to have for publishers, but it’s important to remember that LLMs degrade when they scrape AI-generated content as if it were human-made. Google has a stake in solving their search algorithms to catch this content and it looks like they’re already thinking about it.

Additionally, In a recent interview with Joanna Stern, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati was asked if the non-profit used YouTube data to train their Sora video-generation models; Mira said she was unsure. YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan later said that if the pre-launch AI-generated video model was being trained on their videos without Google’s consent, it would be a violation of their Terms of Service. Nilay uses this to poke Sundar about how Google is also scraping other people’s data the same way for their models.

Alright, with that - you should be more or less caught up enough to watch the interview:

Nilay Patel discusses AI with Sundar Pichai

Is the Internet Dying?

This conversation has been coming up more often and with proliferation of AI-generated content on the internet, I don’t think it’ll be the last time I’ll be talking about it.

YouTuber chriswaves made a don’t-call-it-a-video-essay on the topic where he gets philosophical about what human representation means on the internet, how platform algorithms twist that representation, and what the introduction of AI-generated content means for all of it:

“The Internet is Dying and That’s a Good Thing” - chriswaves, YouTube

Watched it? I’ll give you a moment to come down from your existential crisis.

The video leaves us with a pretty crucial question: what do we do when humans are competing with content-generating algorithms to win over content-recommending algorithms? If human representation is already skewed by the needs of algorithms, how do we compete with machines that understand the skews significantly faster than us *and *generate that content quicker for cheaper?

Chris doesn’t provide an answer since he’s still seeking one himself, but I find it important to pull one important thread out of this: if human representation is skewed by algorithms, then why do we depend on so few of them? YouTube is a great website, but it wins not *just *because of the algorithm but because of the content it has locked in on the platform. I can’t watch a YouTube video on Vimeo or vice versa and therefore, both Chris and I are beholden to the one algorithm that helped me find his video.

But what if Chris could use one platform for distribution and I could use a separate platform with a different algorithm that I prefer? And when that algorithm stops serving me the content I’m looking for, what if I could go to yet another platform with a different algorithm - or no algorithm at all - and continue following Chris’ videos?

This is what decentralized protocols like ActivityPub (Mastodon, Threads, Ghost, Flipboard, PixelFed, PeerTube etc.) and AT (Bluesky) are trying to accomplish. If you want a deeper dive into how that cross-platform interaction looks like, I talk all about it here.

This brings me to Mike Masnick, who wrote an important piece about how decentralized social platforms can be an antidote to the AI-generated decline of the internet:

“decentralized social media could offer an alternative to the world in which all the information we consume is intermediated by a single centralized player, whether it’s a search engine like Google, or a social media service like Meta […] one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather than the one a giant company wants.”

In a social web where you can build a follow graph across platforms, you are only skewed by the humans consuming it. Maybe you skew a bit to double-down on an algorithm where your audience currently is, but to grow you’d eventually need to start catering across algorithms. In other words, you’re not beholden to a single platform’s needs. To cover a web of platforms, you need to focus on the humans on the other side of each one and you can decide where to put your efforts.

As newsrooms panic over Google Zero, it’s clear that they’ll need to turn to other distribution channels. Apple News+ is one that seems to be working, but as Josh Billinson of Semafor points out - it’s yet another distribution channel where publishers have no direct relationship with their readership. Semafor, like The Verge, brought their content to the Fediverse via Flipboard which does give them a direct relationship with their audience since they can potentially leave Flipboard for another Fediverse platform (even a self-hosted one!) without losing the audience they gained with the partnership. It looks like The Verge plans on taking it even further than that:

“We got to invent some stuff. I have a very enlightened CEO, Jim Bankoff, and he’s allowing me to poke at some ideas about those things. Like what does new distribution look like in the fediverse? And then our company has a giant sports property, and you know what hasn’t left yet? It’s sports Twitter. So I’m going to poke at it with *The Verge, *and we’re lightly exploring it, but I think there is opportunity there to build new kinds of media products that is really exciting.”

Exciting, indeed.

A New Web like the Old Web

And this brings us to our final discussion of the week: where do we even start building this new human-centric web? A couple weeks ago, Molly White (of Wikipedia and Web3IsGoingJustGreat fame) wrote a piece about how we can build it using inspiration from the internet of the past:

Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. *We can return. *Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

This sentiment really stuck with me, so I was excited to see when she followed up her post with a conversation with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, who has been re-writing his own company’s future, driven by open protocols like ActivityPub.

Here’s their conversation:

Molly White and Mike McCue chat about a new web on the Dot Social podcast

First off, I want to call out that this video is posted on Flipboard’s own ActivityPub-supporting server using open source YouTube competitor PeerTube. This means that I can subscribe to Dot Social on Mastodon, soon on Threads, and eventually on Ghost - the platform augment is hosted on - if I don’t want to have a PeerTube account. I can Like, Comment, And Subscribe ™ from where I decide to consume my social media and Flipboard owns their channel where they want to host their videos. And we can both move to alternatives without losing our follow graph.

That right there is the core of the “old web” Molly and Mike are talking about. The walled gardens of the recent internet were once the only accessible way for people and organizations to connect to their networks. Now, we’ve got the opportunity to knock those walls down again and connect to each other directly as humans rather than profiles we create for a small group of algorithms.

Molly also brings up one of my own frustrations with ActivityPub - integrating it takes a lot of work. There’s a lot of starter-kits out there for devs to build their own products (I’m loving Fedify myself), but working backwards from an existing platform is really difficult. This transition will take time and a lot of effort, but hopefully more tools and guidance will arrive on how to transition in the near future.

I don’t know if the Fediverse is going to take off, even if I’m being optimistic and all signs are pointing toward that being true. What I do know is that a protocol-based solution is likely the right one if we want the next generation of social web products to be owned by us, the humans.

To me - that’s worth rooting for.

Until Next Time

Lots of AI and Fediverse stuff, and I think this will likely remain the theme over the next few issues. WWDC is right around the corner and we’re bound to hear Apple talk our ears off about AI, there’s a lot of updates rolling out in ActivityPub-based networks and Bluesky (they just launched DMs while I was writing this!), and there’s likely a whole lot more conversations around Google’s major changes to their search experience in the coming weeks as well.

So, yeah - a lot more of this, coming soon. Until then ✌🏼

I hope you enjoyed the first issue of Human-Generated Content! If you want to be notified of future issues and other posts on augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free. You can also follow me directly on Threads and Mastodon.

But these changes will have larger implications for the newsletter landscape. Namely, I think this will eventually bring the slow death of another social silo: Substack.

Why I Picked Ghost

When I was looking to find a platform for augment, one of the major contenders was Substack. That being said, I have a lot of reservations about the direction they’re going with moderation, I’m not a fan of how they vertically integrated Notes instead of using ActivityPub, and I also didn’t like the lack of design options. But Substack stayed on the list because their discoverability network was valuable for someone who was starting from scratch.

I obviously eventually went with Ghost in the end - Substack’s moderation policy just didn’t sit right with me - but I did sometimes peer over at some of the writers at Substack in jealousy over the network they got to be a part of.

But, today, I have no regrets. The upcoming discoverability features from Ghost will surpass anything Substack offers as it leverages the expansive potential of the Fediverse.

A Distributed Explore Feed

I want to start this by showing a comparison between Substack’s Inbox page and Ghost’s Fediverse Inbox: Substack InboxGhost Inbox Looks pretty similar, right? Well, these two photos are not the same. As I wrote in my piece on We Distribute:

Ghost will now have an ActivityPub feed in their dashboard. This is similar to Substack’s Discover feed, except rather than just Substack Notes and newsletters, Ghost users will be able to interact with profiles across Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, or any other Fediverse service. For a lot of publishers on Ghost, this will likely end up being a replacement for their existing Fediverse account since it can house both their posts and their organization’s social interactions.

The problem with Substack’s Inbox is that it only includes Substack newsletters, RSS feeds, and their walled-garden “Notes” that you cannot access anywhere except their feed.

Ghost, on the other hand, choosing to not go the walled-garden route is now tapping into what will be the largest sharing network available on the internet. Fediverse users will be able to reply, repost, quote post, and like your content directly - not a post pointing to it - on their Fediverse service of choice. Then, all their followers will easily be able subscribe the moment they see the interaction from whatever service they’ve chosen to use.

Due to these network effects, as more services federate - especially Threads - we are likely to see discoverability of Ghost publications skyrocket.

Complete Subscriber Portability

Substack currently lets you export your subscriber list, but there’s a catch - you can only export users who subscribe to your newsletter through email. Users can also “Follow” a writer for their “Notes” which means a chunk of the publisher’s followers are now stuck within the Substack platform with no portability. Ghost treats ActivityPub subscribers as first-class citizens Ghost will allow subscriptions in two ways: email and ActivityPub. That means that your full subscriber list is portable to any other platform that supports email and/or ActivityPub as well. You can leave the Ghost-hosted option and self-host your Ghost newsletter. You can take your email and ActivityPub subscribers and go to another Fediverse-supporting newsletter platform.

Your content and complete follow graph remain in your ownership. No walled-off follow lists, no app-specific limitations - just a Fediverse service that enables you to be on the platform that makes the most sense for you. And the discoverability you worked so hard for comes with you.

Reducing Subscriber Lift

Ghost coming to the Fediverse also lowers the barrier to entry to subscribe for many users. They don’t have to feel nervous about sharing their private email with a website they rightfully don’t trust with that information quite yet. They also don’t have to worry about their newsletters - especially paid ones - ending up in their junk mail.

Adding a publication to a social feed is a lot smaller of an ask from users since their feed is a bit of a hodge-podge of their interests anyway. In fact, when I see a blog or newsletter for the first time, I don’t subscribe by email - I add them to my RSS and I follow them on social media. Eventually, if enough content is interesting to me, I go and subscribe through email if I have to for paywalled content. Being able to follow as a paid subscriber through my Fediverse address completely skips that middle step and keeps all my newsletters in one place rather than distributed across services. This reduced user lift means more subscribers and you get to meet them where they already are.

This also reduces the lift for publishers to track their subscribers and followers across different platforms. Organizations can house their Fediverse address in the same place they write their articles, which means they get combined metrics between email and social media all in one place.

Make the Move

It’s more than clear at this point that if you live in a social silo you will continue to be isolated from a much larger cohort of users that are all interacting across services. Substack’s greatest strengths of discoverability and portability are no longer as valuable and writers should start looking at newsletter options that keep them in control of their content and subscribers.

While Ghost is one of the publisher platforms that’s making this move, ButtonDown, Micro.blog, and WordPress are three of the many other services that will provide you with the wealth of Fediverse subscribers you’re currently held back from on Substack.

If the lack of moderation wasn’t the reason you left Substack, and you stayed because that’s where discoverability is, it’s time to look outward because there’s a large chunk of users waiting to subscribe to you through their social media accounts. Don’t be held back by a walled garden.

Thank you for reading! You can follow me on the social web Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment and my newsletter “Human-Generated Content,” you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

There were some early signs that Post was going to have a rough time, though. For one, the product launched as a PWA (Progressive Web App, an installable website) rather than a native app for mobile platforms. I love PWAs (I use one for Threading on Mastodon!) but for most users, if you’re not distributing your social product through the App Store or Play Store, you don’t really exist. That was a rough start, but likely was not the only reason.

The Silos

The other sign was that while the tides were turning over on Twitter and people began seeking a transition to another service, most power-users’ eyes were not turning to closed networks. Instead, they were looking to platforms that supported open protocols like ActivityPub (used by Mastodon and soon Meta’s Threads) and AT (Bluesky).

Now, most power users didn’t choose these specific platforms because of the option of interoperability or portability, but it was likely the reason they weren’t ready to invest in new networks that didn’t provide it. The trauma of losing their Twitter follow graph hit hard and they wanted options that would make it easy to transition from one platform to another without the friction of starting at zero. Post was not providing that option.

Similarly, another promising social news product that couldn’t find its way was Artifact, an app built by the founders of Instagram. It had useful features like AI summaries, writer profiles, a For You feed, and a well-designed user experience. It also had a closed social network similar to Twitter. It recently shut down and Yahoo acquired them for their AI features, not the social network. I don’t think federating with ActivityPub would have made it a billion-dollar company, but I do believe it would’ve been a valuable tool for news-focused social users that wanted to find content to share to their larger followings on generalist networks. A niche network for dedicated news enthusiasts that used their Artifact interest graph to find what to curate to their followers without needing multiple accounts to do so.

In other words, neither of these products tapped into the endless supply of creators, curators, and consumers that existed across other networks and instead cold-started their graph hoping it would heat up just based on great features.

The Endless Supply

Why am I so convinced that federating would have at least helped these products survive as niche offerings? Well, I worked at Flipboard when things were changing at Twitter and we realized that a closed network wasn’t healthy for the wider social web. Products like Flipboard didn’t work with Twitter, they worked for Twitter and while an internal closed network existed in Flipboard, I wouldn’t say it was destined to take over the role of the de facto microblogging platform.

This time, we needed to work with other social products. Our eyes turned to Mastodon and Bluesky so we could build social features that weren’t tied down to our own network. We launched a Mastodon server for users of Flipboard; we allowed you to connect your Mastodon, Bluesky, and PixelFed profiles to your Flipboard account; and, more recently, Flipboard federated 11,000 magazines so they can be followed on the Fediverse. Flipboard launched a Mastodon instance and account integration in Feb 2023. [Source] All of this has breathed new life to the product and it’s hitting its peak of interest once again. It’s turning into an app specifically built to help curators find content to share to a wider set of external networks and people are seeing the benefits of it. It’s now another giant pipe in the endless supply of the open social web and I think Flipboard has a whole lot more coming when it comes to working with these open protocols.

Flipboard isn’t alone in looking at their existing social features and opening them to open networks either - Medium, WordPress, Ghost, Flickr, Mozilla, and the list goes on. Even podcast services are starting to add ActivityPub support. The endless supply of the Fediverse is real.

The Rise of Niche Networks

As one of the co-founders of the ActivityPub protocol, Evan Prodromou, said in his recent essay about TikTok Notes not being a part of the Fediverse:

“New social services need a good justification for why they are launching in siloed mode in 2024” - Evan Prodromou

While I’m sad to see Post and similar products shut down, I think the greatest miss was not interoperating with complementary products like Flipboard, Artifact, WordPress, Medium, and Ghost to build out a cross-platform network of journalists, curators, and news consumers that could choose the experience that made sense for their use case without having to choose a silo.

I’ve always been of the belief that good products don’t need lock-ins and great products make it easy to leave. There will never be a social media experience that makes sense for everyone and federation means being able to try a diversity of options while being able to hold onto the same network. Users won’t have to choose the option that the majority have agreed is “good enough”, they’ll be able to choose the option that works best for them. And if you’re not enabling users to do so, you’ll likely be left behind no matter how great your product is otherwise.

Federation isn’t just beneficial for Mastodon or Meta, it’s an enabler of niche communities that can cater to specific needs. The open social web’s network effects are now in motion - if you’re not piping your platform’s content into it then you and your users are missing out on what’s going to be the largest sharing network we’ve ever seen in social media.

Thank you for reading! I’ll be continuing to post about the Fediverse on Threads and Mastodon so follow me there if you’re interested or have any questions for me. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

So, I did what any “normal” person would do: I went to my Mastodon account and added anyone I follow on Threads who had their Fediverse switch turned on so I could see their posts on Mastodon. And then I started taking notes.

This is my journey that started as an experiment to see how my Threads feed would look like on Mastodon and ended with me finding experiences that went above and beyond my expectations.

Nothing is Perfect

To start, this post isn’t a long-winded way of me saying I hate the Threads experience. On the contrary, they’ve made some delightful choices. It’s why I’ve been so active on the platform for this long.

My current need to look outward is more focused on what they haven’t built and likely never will. Nothing is perfect for everyone and neither is Threads.

Firstly, the app always defaults to the For You feed. I think this makes sense for most users, but it would be nice if power users were given the ability to default to a chronological feed.

Speaking of the chronological feed - frankly, it’s not useful. It skips posts without explanation and there are no replies, which means no conversations in that feed. You only see replies serendipitously in the For You feed so only Threads can decide which conversations you take part in.

There are also no lists. From the way it sounds, there will never be lists. I can go on for hours about what makes lists useful - and boy, have I - but I’ll save that for another day. The point is, I use lists to make sense of the chronological feed - almost like a hand-crafted For You feed that…no, we’re not doing this today. The point is, I need lists and Threads doesn’t seem to be interested in catering to that need.

Finally, the main reason I’m considering my options is the limited developer API. To put it short: there will be no third-party clients or augmentations of your Threads feed. The feeds Threads gives you are the feeds you’ll have to live with. And, as I mentioned above, those feeds are not doing what I need them to do.

And so, I looked to the next biggest thing that will let me interact with Threads while giving me more options for how I consume my content: Mastodon.

Known Limitations

In this first phase, however, there is an important issue that will be ironed out once integration is complete: while Mastodon users can interact with Threads users, Threads users cannot interact back. That means:

1. Threads users can’t reply to Mastodon comments or see them in Threads.
2. Threads users can be followed by Mastodon accounts but they will not be notified nor can they follow back.
3. Likes from Mastodon are not counted toward your Threads like count

Moreover, as of writing this post, 189 out of 1524 of my Threads follow list is captured. While there may be more than what I currently have, that’s about 12% of my follow list. Based on my conversations with various users, it seems like there are three popular reasons for why this may be the case:

1. It isn’t rolled out in their region yet but they plan on switching it on.
2. They don’t like the one-way integration and are waiting for full interaction with Mastodon users.
3. They don’t like that there’s a chance their post will remain indexed on Mastodon even if they delete it.

The first two will be solved, but the last one isn’t going to be easy and it’s not in Meta’s hands. I hope this changes in the future but I would understand if certain users didn’t want to be spread across the internet that way.

But, knowing all this, I pushed forward to customize my experience.

Organizing the Chaos

So here I was - a Mastodon user who has about half his following list sourced from Threads. I started by moving all my Threads follows into a separate list so that it wouldn’t fill my main Mastodon feed. I used the handy Mastodon List Manager, segregated my Follows by domain, and added the whole threads.net section to the Threads list. Then I switched on the Advanced UI (think TweetDeck for Mastodon) to get my real-time multi-column feed.

The reason for separating Threads users was to see how a real-time chronological feed for my Threads would actually look like. I also had to interact with Threads posts differently since it’s only one-way interaction for this phase - I had to pop out of the Mastodon experience by opening the post on Threads and interacting there. Luckily, most Mastodon clients - including the default one - make this pretty easy and by separating my Threads follows in an independent list, I could be consistent with that workflow.

As expected, the chronological feed became overwhelming to follow. But there was an easy solution - I used lists. This made my feed easier to consume and it enabled me to focus on specific topics based on my mood. When I wanted to chat with online friends in the Tech Threads community, I would stay in a feed dedicated to that. If I was catching up on tech news, I would stay in that feed. When I was ready for heavier news, I would head over to my politics feed.

It was nice to able to decide what kind of content I wanted to consume rather than getting an algorithm’s scrambled egg of the day that doesn’t consider what mood I’m in. But not all was perfect in my Mastodon experience, even if I put aside the one-way Threads limitation.

The main downside was that its UI is utility-first, design second. And coming from the polished Threads experience it left me a little unsatisfied. For instance: if a user does a multi-post (a thread), they come in reverse chronological order; the same is for conversations. In my opinion, threads and conversations should be grouped together in the UI to keep context. This, along with some other nits, left me wanting more.

The Client Search

But there’s a major benefit to Mastodon: it provides a full API so that third-party developers can augment the experience for specific needs, even niche ones like mine. The lists manager I spoke about earlier is one example of this. Flipboard is another for a links-focused view. And the many - there are SO many - third-party clients are all examples of how a user’s needs can be met even if the default options don’t.

With an ample amount of choices, I set out to find a client that matched my needs. I knew I wanted a few things that the Threads and Mastodon core experiences weren’t giving me: a prettier UI, a real-time feed, and better feed grouping.

And I had a final ask: an easy way to catch-up if I hadn’t looked at my feed for, say, 8 hours (a boy’s gotta sleep, right?). What I wanted was something that did what a For You feed does but doesn’t leave me endlessly scrolling. I figured I would find or build a separate tool since most clients would likely not serve that and there was no reason to limit my search for something so niche.

There were numerous options that I enjoyed using quite a bit. To keep things short, here were my favorites:

1. Elk - a minimalist PWA that makes some fantastic choices for the UX
2. Moshidon - an Android app that makes it easy to swipe between lists
3. Focus - a highly customizable Android app that includes a widget

I don’t have an iOS device, but I’ve heard Mammoth, Ice Cubes, and Ivory are all great options as well. But, as good as these experiences were, in one way or another they didn’t scratch my itch.

And then, I met Phanpy.

Hello, Phanpy

From the moment I saw Phanpy, I knew this checked far more boxes than I was expecting any client to.

Phanpy can be as simple or a complex as you want it to be. Want a single feed that refreshes when you explicitly ask it to? Default. Want multiple-columns hidden behind a tab bar? Easy. Want a multi-column, real-time chronological feed? Go for you extremely-online feed addict (it me). Phanpy’s column options It most certainly doesn’t stop there. As it brings new posts in real-time, it also groups conversations and threads so you don’t have to click around to get all the context you need to understand a single post. Here are two examples: the first is a thread with replies in between and the second is a three-post thread. Conversations and threads in Phanpy And sometimes there’s multiple conversations happening at once - here’s an example of a lively discussion under a post: Multiple conversations under a post on Phanpy Clean and easy to understand. And when a reply pops up in the feed, it brings contextual groups with it. It makes the chronological feed so much easier to follow, especially when you’re running a multi-column dashboard. To make things cleaner, original posts, replies, and reposts are all color coded to white, yellow, and purple respectively which helps break down the complex nature of microblogging feeds. Post in white, reply in yellow, and boost in purple So I’d found it: a pretty client that grouped posts in a real-time feed while making it easy for me to pop in and out of the Threads UI. And then Phanpy threw this in front of me: Phanpy’s “Catch Up” Feature What you’re seeing in the GIF above is “Catch Up”, a Beta feature of Phanpy that collects all the posts in your feed between 1-12 hours (configurable per catch-up) and organizes them in a more sane way. You can filter by user or by post type (single, repost, or reply), sort by various attributes, and it extracts out all the links so you can see what popular news stories were filling your timeline for that period of time.

It’s doing what a For You feed attempts to do but gives you the power of how you consume it. It also saves these sessions so you can go back when you’re ready to check different parts of it, kind of like how I use my Tech and Politics lists. I typically run this in the morning to catch up while having my morning coffee. I also use it whenever I’m away from my feed for a while - working, social events, family time etc.

Somehow, I found a client that even hit my stretch goals. Did I mention it’s a PWA so you don’t have to download any apps? It just keeps getting better.

Like everything, Phanpy isn’t perfect. For one, Threads posts federate 5m after posting but Phanpy will re-organize the feed chronologically. So if there’s a Mastodon post that’s been around for 2m and a Threads post makes it to my feed, the Threads post gets inserted underneath the Mastodon one. It makes sense but it’s made me keep my Mastodon and Threads real-time feeds separate for the most part.

Phanpy also doesn’t sync across devices which means that my preferences needed to be set up on each device I use it on. There’s an experimental feature that does this, but since it uses my Mastodon profile notes I decided to hold off until it’s production-ready.

There are some other limitations but overall, Phanpy hits enough notes for me that it’s hard to complain. The code is also completely open source so there’s nothing stopping me from pulling it, making some changes, and hosting a bespoke version of the app just for me. Which I will likely do if I decide to move to a Mastodon instance once Threads completely federates.

What now?

At this point, I haven’t decided if I’ll move my account off of Threads after federation is complete. I think there’s a lot going for Threads, especially on the experience front. I also have a feeling that leaving Threads will mean leaving behind some people I follow since I’m pretty sure not everyone is going to turn the switch on, especially if Threads never adds the option to turn it on during the onboarding experience. I’ve made a lot of friends there and I would hate to cut the cord completely. But after experiencing Phanpy, it’ll be very hard to go back.

Meta’s goal was always to build something Twitter-like, but for a billion users. The reason Twitter never hit that peak is because normal users didn’t understand it. From what I can tell, the design decisions Threads is making are for those consumers: a single For You algorithm, no real-time feed, and - say it with me - no lists. This basic experience will suffice for the 90% of users that mostly lurk, comment, and like and don’t want all the hurdles of understanding how any of it works. They’re the ones that open an app like Threads once every few hours, scroll until they’re done with it, then move on.

If that’s their goal, then - in my opinion - they’re succeeding in making all the right decisions for that user.

Unfortunately, I am not that user. I know many people on Threads who are not that user. And I appreciate that Meta has opened itself up to let users like me interact with and send content to Threads from an experience that works for them without being limited to Meta’s vertical experience. What a time to be alive, right?

After seeing the already-rich ecosystem of third-party clients - many of whom serve power-users and creators much better than Threads currently does - along with Meta’s decision not to allow third-party clients at all, I’m heavily leaning toward Phanpy for Mastodon for the long-term once Threads federates.

Honestly, though - would lists really be that bad, Meta?

Thank you for reading! I’ll be continuing to post about the Threads and the Fediverse on Threads and Mastodon so follow me there if you’re interested or have any questions for me. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment, you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are one of those devices. They’ve quickly become my go-to sunglasses, outdoor headphones, and instant camera all at once. Luckily, they arrived at my doorstep in time for a trip to Japan where I took it through its paces to fully understand how these glasses fit in my life.

I’ve owned them for about a month and wanted to share my thoughts about what I like, where they could improve, and what I think Meta needs to do to realize this device’s full potential.

But before we jump into that, I want to talk about another gadget that’s close to my heart.

Glass from the Past

My Google Glass, taken in 2013 I loved Google Glass. It’s almost embarrassing to say it at this point. The world has moved on from “Glassholes”, Google has moved on from taking any hardware risks whatsoever, and most companies are focused on bulky VR/AR/MR/Spatial headsets.

But I loved it.

I didn’t like how it looked, mind you. I didn’t like the tinny-sounding bone conduction speaker on only one side that did not so much send sound as it did gently tickle your temple. I didn’t like that it got uncomfortably hot. I didn’t like that it had a camera that wasn’t clear about when it was recording.

It was the concept I loved. The idea of putting an assistant in your ear, an ambient screen that only lit up when you looked at it, and a POV camera all in one device felt like the future. But Google didn’t balance this futuristic vision with societal norms and dug their heels in when the world told them so.

Then they gave up.

So why indulge myself in a trip down memory lane for this particular defunct device? Well, I think for the first time in a decade I finally feel that same excitement with a new device. And this time it didn’t come from Google, who has more or less given up on putting a computer on your face. It came from Ray-Ban and Meta, the latter of whom is very dedicated to putting a computer on your face, one way or another.

Classic Elegance, Modern Utility

The Ray-Ban Metas are simple to explain. You take some Ray-Bans, slap a camera on one side and a ring-light on the other, then throw in some speakers and a mic on the temples. If you’ve never seen them before and are imagining them in your head right now, you’re probably pretty close to what they actually look like. The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with case As I walked around Japan, no one could tell I was wearing smart glasses until the ring-light indicated that the camera was in play. That was a nice change from the double-takes I’d get with Glass.

The case also looks like a traditional Ray-Ban one with one clever trick - it has magnets along the nose-bridge that satisfyingly snap into the case to charge them. Super convenient and keeps the glasses safe when you don’t want them on. That being said, I don’t think I ever had to think about charging them - I could go a couple days without plugging in the case. Ray-Ban Meta Charging Case If Google Glass wanted to push society toward the future, these glasses are inching you only a couple steps forward from the present. Meta didn’t take any major swings here and I think for a second-gen device that was the right choice.

Look, Ma - No Hands!

The Ray-Ban Metas are now the best camera I own. It’s not because they take glorious photos and videos - they’re actually quite average. The reason is because they’re ready to go whenever I need them without any fuss. See something neat? Snap. Want to go POV for a walk along a boardwalk? Done. No need to bring out your phone, open the camera, then obscure your view with a viewfinder that you constantly have to look at.

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As I walked through Shibuya Scramble Crossing, I saw phones out as people bumped into each other, not being able to actually experience that moment. With the Ray-Ban Metas, I end up saving more memories and I get to lose myself in the moment I’m actually in. I didn’t think about the recording, I just walked and enjoyed what was in front of me. I can’t wait to bring these to a concert.

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The Ray-Ban Metas hit the content creation gold mine as an instant camera, but there was a learning curve since the camera is positioned on the left side of the glasses. While my early shots required me to think about the camera, I eventually got acquainted with the field of view and my recordings came across more natural. I still don’t like that only one side has a camera since it means the POV is at a slight offset, but it doesn’t bother me as much as it did when I was trying to get perfect recordings.

I also really dislike that you can only take vertical content. I get it - these were made for Reels. But it fails to connect the dots to the future that Meta themselves promises, which is being able to experience POV content in full VR. This device feels like it should be a trojan horse that makes people want to see their creations in Meta’s more expensive and capable headsets and yet there’s no connection to the two product lines at all. Even Apple launched spatial video for iPhones shortly before the Vision Pro came along.

If you notice, my nits really fall under one bucket: a single camera that limits the output of the device. There’s nothing wrong with making a Reels device but it’s limiting what these glasses can actually be for Meta’s long-term goals. But mainly, I just want the option to have horizontal videos.

All that said, I find myself always picking these up when I’m going out. I need sunglasses anyway, why not take ones that have a camera attached to them?

And the best part is that they triple up as pretty decent outdoor headphones.

Noise-Accepting Headphones

Remember how I said I hated the bone-conduction headphones on the Google Glass? While I disliked those, I did find it compelling to have headphones that naturally let ambient sound in rather than the “transparency modes” of noise-cancelling options. I wanted natural sounds and I didn’t want a device in or on my ears all day.

A few years ago, I picked up the AfterShokz Aeropex (now the Shokz OpenRun Pro), bone-conduction headphones with much better sound quality than Glass, and they quickly became my and my partner’s most-used audio option. They do a great job of not leaking audio - which makes them perfect to use around the house - and get loud enough to hear on the street or at a busy grocery store. I still need my noise-cancelling Sony XM4s for flights and louder environments, but I’ve now bought two generations of Shokz headphones and I don’t think I’m looking back any time soon.

The Ray-Ban Metas went a different direction and opted for speakers that sit close to the ears rather than bone-conduction. They get louder than the Shokz and have comparable sound quality which makes it perfect for outdoor use. Now, when I go out on a walk or go to a store, I pick these up instead of my Shokz.

But the major issue with these is the sound leakage - the moment I get the volume to a decent level, everyone around me can hear them. So while I take these out all the time, I’m still picking up my Shokz when I need headphones in quiet environments. A part of me wishes that these glasses used bone conduction, but that would require the temples to sit much closer to the, well, temples and that’s not an option for non-custom glasses. They’ve done the best they can with the given hardware but I hope they find a way to resolve the sound leaking in future versions.

Forgettable AI, for now

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Sunglasses will eventually get a multi-modal AI chatbot that is currently in limited preview. I’m not in that preview so I could not review those features but I’m really excited about the prospect of being able to ask about things I’m looking at.

For now, the AI features I have are limited to questions you would expect to ask Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa. Quite frankly, I’m pretty burnt out by voice assistants and the last thing I need is another device telling me what the weather is like so I didn’t feel like using the Meta AI all that much.

Once I get the multi-modal features I can see myself using this a lot more - especially on trips like Japan where I can ask “what is this?” while staring at one of the numerous shrines for more information. But, for now, it’s as useful (read: forgettable) as my other voice assistants.

The Missing Piece

So how do they make the AI less forgettable and make this device significantly more useful? Here’s the part where I tell Meta that they need to steal a couple pages out of Glass’s book: an ambient screen.

I would be less annoyed by the POV offset if the device had a viewfinder or instant replay of whatever I just captured. I would probably use the AI a lot more if there were visuals attached to it. Navigation instructions in front of my eyes would be endlessly useful. Maybe even steal a Pixel feature and show what music is playing in the background if I look up at the screen without a request. A screen would unlock so much more of this device’s potential and I found myself frustrated multiple times at Meta’s insistence on not pushing any boundaries.

To push this device category further, I think Meta would greatly benefit from a Pro lineup of glasses that pushes the envelope a bit. Two cameras and a screen alone would bring these closer to perfection. Rumor has it that the 2025 version of these will at least have a screen. Here’s to hoping.

Promising Future

The Ray-Ban Metas will remain in my device rotation for the foreseeable future. There’s just so much to love about these. I’ve captured so many more memories on this than I would have without them, especially during the busy moments of a trip.

We’re in the early years of this form-factor, but I think Meta is very close to having the next major device category for the average user. Even my partner who’s usually skeptical about wearables realizes the benefit of having these on my face.

But what Meta is trying to do will require a bit more of a leap. The kind of leap Microsoft made with the Surface or the one Apple took with the Watch - taking an existing form-factor and advancing it forward for a new generation.

Perhaps Google Glass leapt too far too early. But if there’s a company I think can find something in between that and the Ray-Bans, I’m now convinced it’s Meta.

Thank you for reading! I’ll be continuing to post about my journey with the Ray-Ban Metas on Threads so follow me there if you’re interested or have any questions for me. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment, you can subscribe here for free!

You’re likely here because you saw me posting on Threads, Mastodon, or Bluesky about this new project I’m kicking off. It’s been something that’s been on my mind for longer than it should’ve been and I’m excited to finally take the plunge.

augment is a blog / newsletter by me, Anuj Ahooja. I’ll be using this space for longer-form content. A place to review gadgets and apps I’m using, commentary on social media and technology, and some occasional personal updates.

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