Vladimir Putin's Forkiverse

[music] At the beginning of this year, Search Engine launched with fellow podcasters Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, our own social media network, and now something fairly unfortunate had happened there.

Before we get to that unfortunate thing, which is also pretty funny, I wanna refresh your memory about how we got here at all.

In January, in a moment of unmitigated optimism, we'd designed our network, starting with its name.

We could call it the Forkiverse.

I mean, I tried to do a, a blended name and came up with Searchfork or Hard Engine.

Um-

[laughs] Hard Engine.

Hard Engine sounds like it belongs on a different internet.

[laughs] That's a, that's in Casey's incognito tab.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Why did we do that? Well, not so long ago, people were very upset about Elon Musk's takeover of what was once Twitter.

Everybody was fed up with billionaires and the way they'd made social media addictive and polarized with their fiendish algorithms.

I mean, people are still mad about those things, but a year ago, people were talking about solutions, and one solution that was floated that I found very intriguing was that social media might be better if, instead of being concentrated, like just a few platforms owned by moguls, if instead it was really widely distributed.

Like you had all these little platforms that were operated by anybody who wanted to run them, but those platforms could be interconnected with each other through something called federation, a federated internet, a fediverse.

This seemed like a long shot but not entirely impossible plan for an actual better internet, and so Kevin, Casey, and I wanted to try it.

We wanted to build our own little piece of the fediverse.

And so on January 9th, we'd opened the Forkiverse up to any internet stranger who wanted to join, and then we'd waited.

It's kinda cool to see an unfilled universe.

It's, it's so beautiful to just see it, you know, without any, any misinformation-

[laughs]

... um, any, any sort of toxic hate speech or bullying.

Yeah, many people are saying this is the ideal social network, right?

[laughs] Really? It's, it's very zen.

All of this was documented in the Search Engine episode called The Fediverse Experiment.