"It's no longer science fiction to imagine your refrigerator autonomously purchasing your groceries with funds that it earns from launching a memecoin or staking ether," says the chairman of the CFTC.
Must be true then…
Johannes Ernst
Engineer, founder, organizer.
Let's put people back in control of their technology. The Open Social Web is a good start. Also wondering aloud where we are taking this planet.
Check out my home page for more info and links.
tfr
Home page with more info and links: https://j12t.org FediForum, the unconference for the Open Social Web: https://fediforum.org Dazzle Labs Inc.: https://dazzlelabs.net Pronouns: He/him/any
10/11/2026, 1 engagement
Consider that God also made the devil.
"Cancer Capital", ha! Great phrase by
.
When people in the Fediverse complain about VCs and Venture Capital, I think they mostly complain about that Cancer Capital, not so much traditional VC. We didn't have that term before, and it's a very useful distinction. Now we need one for non-Cancer VC.
9/3/2026, 1 engagement
Is it just me who cannot shake the idea that Natalie Harp is somebody’s very, very talented operative?
8/25/2026, 1 engagement
I'll be on a panel discussing the future of social media from a European policy angle on the 22nd at the European Union's San Francisco office, with some distinguished other panelists.
It's open to the public, but registration required. Say Hi if you are coming.
7/7/2026, 1 engagement
Looking back over 250 years, if you had to plot a score for the "health" of the United States since its founding, what would that graph look like?
Which times were better than now? Which times were worse?
I'm afraid I don't know enough US history to really have a firm opinion on many decades.
(For some value of "health")
W Social seems to have been quite successful in getting a big part of the EU establishment to sign up. Congratulations!
One wonders though if the step from US social media companies to a EU social media company was big enough. Wouldn't a move to your own instance in the fediverse been better?
Meta says they now have half a billion monthly active users on #Threads.
This is about 100x that of #Bluesky, and about 500x that of #Mastodon, at only about 3 years old. How do you explain this?
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/06/meta-launching-new-features-500-million-monthly-threads-users/
This includes Mastodon and Bluesky and all of the rest.
6/15/2026, 1 engagement
If you are not an engineer, but would like a glimpse of what real engineering looks like in practice, here is a slightly mindboggling writeup on how they reduced operating cost of Bridgy Fed, which bridges #AtProto and #ActivityPub. By A New Social CTO @[email protected]
https://blog.anew.social/bridging-on-a-budget/?ref=a-new-social-newsletter
5/11/2026, 1 engagement
I am having a lot of fun in #FediForum sessions this time. That's because we now have a real community here, built over some years, people who now know each other, have good personal relationships so there is a lot of banter in the middle of all the high-bandwidth, high-competence discussion. It's a great combination.
Great top-level question from @LaurensHof in his newsletter
"What will be the shape of the organisations that will actually build the future of the social internet?"
Would make a great conversation at #FediForum next week.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr160-everyone-wants-servers-and-nobody-wants-servers/
If the #fediverse (or the #atmosphere, same problem) were a startup and I had any say in it, I would make a list of all things that make it hard for it to have larger impact on the world than it currently has, and insist that we systematically work them down.
Because I don't think we are.
Of course, it's not a startup and should not be. It needs to be many projects, none of them dominant, otherwise we'd end up right where we wanted to get away from: centralized social overlords. 1/2
I want to applaud @rose.bsky.team and
for appearing on stage together and expressing a desire to cooperate. As I've said for a long time, #Bluesky and #Mastodon, #ActivityPub and #ATProtocol should not be fighting each other. The real opposition are the oligarch-controlled, enshittified, manipulating major commercial platforms. We have no chance of making a dent into their dominance if the revolution fights itself instead.
4/17/2026, 1 engagement
If you wanted to give a software demo of the #Fediverse, emphasizing of the value that this heterogeneous network provides to its people across platforms and applications, how would you demo this?
Has anybody ever done this? (well?) Ideas and pointers appreciated!
I’m unfortunately out of the country, but I’m there in spirit with all of you #nokings people on the streets.
But #ATmosphereConf is a bit related: contributing to a non-fascist media and news environment.
So happy to see that #Mastodon has become a member of the W3C and is now coming to the renewed #ActivityPub standardization activity.
From today's notes: https://hackmd.io/PaXqEd7-T7CLULV9Y4nwcA?view
3/6/2026, 1 engagement
Writing my own position statement for the upcoming Open Social Web un-workshop.
A main reason I ever started #FediForum is that I wanted to attend an event like it! And sometimes you have to create things yourself if they don't exist yet.
Trying to decide what my own position statement is on how to grow the Open Social Web, for our un-workshop. I have so many things to say!
But, the entirely unreasonable organizer (also me) insists that position statements must be concise enough that they can be stated in less than 5 minutes.
A good exercise, even if self-inflicted :-) If I can't say the important things in a few minutes, and in a way that people remember, I better work on it some more before inflicting my opinions on others.
2/10/2026, 1 engagement
I could use some help. I'm trying to make a list of all the websites that list ActivityPub 1) software 2) instances and whose content isn't too out of date. Here are some I know:
https://fediverse.observer/stats
https://delightful.coding.social
What else is there? Which is your go-to list?
I had missed that interview. Interesting!!
1/4/2026, 2 engagements
It’s a very compelling pitch: tear down anti circumvention laws and reap billions for your economies, while at the same time also becoming digitally sovereign.
Now do European, or other, politicianshave the guts to do it?
From:
1/1/2026, 2 engagements
Not just to respond to the Trump tariffs: if one wanted to get to digital sovereignty, the repeal of anti-circumvention laws is practically required, or the network effects likely will turn out to be insurmountable.
/cc
https://www.wired.com/story/us-trade-dominance-will-begin-to-crack/
12/26/2025, 1 engagement
Threads’ Fediverse integration now is “in maintenance mode”.
https://www.theverge.com/column/847806/head-of-threads-interview
#fediforumfriday #threads
@rose.bsky.team from Bluesky: We started with 90% of users being posters, now we are at 30%, but compare this with 1% on some commercial platforms. Conversations are happening again.
OH: ASCII Imperialism.
Not wrong. Still funny.
Totally agree with Cory. Today’s “AI” may or may not be useful to you or your company, but there is no way that it is financially sustainable. And giving the sheer outrageous magnitude of money involved, when the crash comes — and it will — it will likely be worse than any other crash we’ve ever seen.
From:
9/27/2025, 2 engagements
Learned a new word: Enshittocene.
what have you done.
9/2/2025, 1 engagement
I'm fascinated to (re-?)discover that the core #ActivityPub deliverable was the C2S API, not the S3S federation protocol.
Was the underlying assumption that servers were boring, one/few implementations could handle all cases, and innovation was going to be centered around clients?
From Enshittification to Disenshittification. The words keep coming to
!
8/27/2025, 1 engagement
I have no words. Maybe I should have words, but I don't.
#europe #dsa
What would it cost to run the #fediverse at scale? With billions instead of millions of users?
What does it cost to run a social network anyway? According to the annual reports of two companies that should know, the comparable seems to be about $1-$2 per user per month. And that's after stripping out a bunch of costs, like us not building ad tech in the fediverse.
Have better numbers? I'd love to see them!
From a recent talk of mine: https://spectra.video/w/k1rVULikPRfavCZ3WhXMgg
The world we have -- in social media, and more broadly in tech -- vs the world we want.
Does this look about right?
8/22/2025, 1 engagement
“Mastodon’s developers — many of whom were queer and trans — did not enjoy the privilege of living the totally open life: they needed privacy and safety, means to protect themselves from harassment.”
Which led to particular choices that were made for #ActivityPub. Good ones imho. 1/2
"these problems may be rooted in the very architecture of social media platforms: networks that grow through emotionally reactive sharing. If so, improving online discourse will require more than technical tweaks – it will demand rethinking the fundamental dynamics of interaction and visibility that define these environments."
Fellow social media innovators: Should we accept the challenge from this paper? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03385
How big is the open social web, the #fediverse, #bluesky etc compared to the big commercial platforms? It's a bit sobering.
From my recent talk "From millions to billions -- a plausible narrative for how to grow the open social web."
Got the newest #Fediverse book in the mail. Looking forward to reading it!!
It's a great big miracle the entire internet hasn't collapsed (more) yet.
Meta announced today that Threads now has reached 400 million monthly active users. Starting at about the same time with a similar product, Bluesky currently is at about 6 million MAUs. Mastodon and other Fediverse projects started earlier, and their numbers are even lower ... by some margin! None of them are growing much, while Threads is.
This tells me
The choice between a traditional social media platform or the open social web seems to boil down to "do I want to control people to only do things my way" or "do I want to thrive by enabling people to make their own choices".
7/30/2025, 1 engagement
Done with the slides for my talk "From Millions to Billions -- a plausible narrative for growing the Open Social Web", to be (first?) given at #FediCon this Friday in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
I expect this to be permanent work in progress, as this community / network / market / whatever it all is evolves, and I'm sure that some people will tell me it is not plausible or could be more plausible. Which would be the best outcome ... I love learning from my "audience" because it gets better that way.
Quite interesting conversation between
and Jack Dorsey on the history of Twitter, why Jack left Bluesky, and what he thinks is needed in terms of a social media protocol and why.
Agree or disagree, this first recorded episode in Rabble's new podcast revolution.social is worth listening to.
Seems to me these guys have no concept whatsoever of what science is.
7/16/2025, 1 engagement
Great piece on how we think about growth of Mastodon, Bluesky etc. and why it's (mostly) not working. By
https://connectedplaces.online/growth-narratives-on-the-new-social-networks/
7/8/2025, 1 engagement
Tim O’Reilly: “AI has adopted colonialism as its business model”. Strong words! But he explains: “Extract resources from others and use it to enrich yourself and your customers at the expense of those whose resources you have taken, without giving much back.” Guilty as charged I would say.
7/5/2025, 2 engagements
If we wanted to grow the Open Social Web by a factor of 1000 -- roughly the number of users on Meta platforms today compared to, say, Mastodon -- how would we go about it?
P.S. Obviously while keeping the good things we have here, and making them even better, rather than backsliding / enshittifying / ...
7/2/2025, 1 engagement
Hi @_elena, you obviously have gotten a lot of praise for your Fediverse video, and deservedly so. Many people commented on the sheer production quality.
I want to add that your narrative is also first-class. I cannot think of anybody who has told the Fediverse story better than you have, and usually the stories being told are much worse. How did you come up with it? That's also your work, right?
6/26/2025, 1 engagement
One of the big conceptual questions that's unresolved in the #Fediverse is: Just what exactly is an instance for?
Yep, it's a separate installation of server software. But what exactly does instance 1 give me compared to instance 2?
Answer A: it makes no difference except on policy: who runs it, what are their TOS, moderation policy etc. The Local feed has no significance.
Answer B: Beyond that, it defines a community. The local feed is essential.
Which should it be?
Fascinated by
's renaming of the "Fediverse Report" to "Connected Places". He could have called it "Global Townsquare" but he didn't. I very much agree. This is all about connecting distinct places on the web, not mashing them all up into one.
We need to separate identity from servers in the ActivityPub world. It's time. I should be able to have a single identity and use it with lots of servers from Mastodon to Lemmy and beyond.
Then, various instances could reflect different communities with different people in them, different features and policies.
This also would elegantly solve the "instance selection paralysis" in
's Deadly Fediverse UX sin #1.
Fortunately
is starting to assemble people to solve this.
6/18/2025, 1 engagement
"They promised connection. But they delivered addiction, surveillance, and manipulation."
What a simple, powerful statement about commercial social media by @_elena in her amazing movie.
I'm going to steal this. (With attribution of course!)
6/11/2025, 1 engagement
5/30/2025, 2 engagements
An unexpected obstacle to adoption. I assume Mastodon would be no different:
“I spoke with a few congressional staffers who said that they had tried using Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, but they gave up after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.”
https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/05/25/2025/semafor-media-anti-woke-identity-crisis
Utah is going to legally require social media interoperability and portability of the social graph.
Wow, this law has been signed and it somehow passed under my radar. IMHO It has a good change to substantially impact the open social web, in a very good way.
Thanks
for the tip!
5/22/2025, 1 engagement
The #InternetArchive wants your support for this petition urging the record labels to drop their existential lawsuit. I signed.
5/7/2025, 1 engagement
4/29/2025, 1 engagement
Bluesky account confirmation e-mail has the footer:
"Bluesky, the social internet."
Hmm.
The #Mastodon team has managed to get
signed up as a design advisor.
Congratulations, I can't wait to see impact on the product!
Cory Booker just broke Strom Thurmond's record for the longest speech in the Senate of the United states at 24 hours and 19 minutes.
👏👏👏
4/1/2025, 1 engagement
In the past day or so, it was pointed out that my FediForum co-organizer has made some public statements that are incompatible with the kind of community we want to bring together at FediForum, and that I personally disagree with. Accordingly, Kaliya and I have agreed that she will be transitioning out of FediForum.
3/30/2025, 1 engagement
I'm thinking of running a #FediForum session next week on:
Funding the open social web
It appears to cost about $1 / month / user to run a social network, based on public company numbers. (Counting volunteer labor as a donation at market prices.)
If we want the Fediverse to go from its current user numbers to 10x or 100x, and make it possible for most of humanity to get off the toxic platforms, we need to find those 10x or 100x or 1000x resources somehow. Let's brainstorm.
Ghost has made ActivityPub available to all of its Pro subscribers.
Interesting how they name and describe it:
"Social Web - y/n Federate your site with ActivityPub to join the world's largest open network"
#Ghost #ActivityPub
3/17/2025, 1 engagement
Dear weather, you are not supposed to be raining like this.
Unless the changing climate has some very nasty influence on you.
Just hit 430ppm CO2 this week for the first time in a few million years.
A detailed comparison table of Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and X. (In German)
3/10/2025, 1 engagement
#AI causes -96% in referral traffic according to this source. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2025/03/03/openai-perplexity-ai-search-traffic-report/
"Intimacy gradients" for social media.
A really important concept that at least I have not seen implemented anywhere.
https://www.socialroots.io/intimacy-gradients-the-key-to-fixing-our-broken-social-media-landscape/
3/2/2025, 1 engagement
Crowdsourcing ... for my talk about UX in the Fediverse and the social web, what do you think the biggest challenges are for user experience today?
This sounds a bit silly but I don't think it actually is ...
What is a good definition of "social media"?
A definition that isn't inductive ("everything sort of like Facebook") but one that defines the category.
All the definitions I've come across sound quite odd-shaped. What's your definition?
It's kinda important because if we want to create a better "social media" we should be able to define quite well what that thing is we want to be better.
There's this persistent rumor that East and West Germany were reunited some thirty-something years ago.
Here's the opinion poll map for this month's election.
2/7/2025, 1 engagement
Public service announcement: this is now the age where your data in the cloud is no longer safe. Offend somebody important and it is gone.
From:
2/1/2025, 2 engagements
says: "make all software social"
2/1/2025, 1 engagement
It’s fascinating to me that where a variety of reactions to a post exist — like Like, Heart, Fire, Dislike etc — these reactions are all about emotions. None of them are about facts.
For example, what if I could express “I believe this to be true” or “…to be false”? Or “I agree with this statement” vs “disagree”? Or “I have first hand evidence supporting this”.
It’s almost as if social media was created as an emotional rage machine, rather than something that supports fact finding.
1/31/2025, 1 engagement
What #fediverse software can express richer semantics than just “Like”? Eg Facebook as things like heart, fire, open mouth etc. One can imagine others like “I dis/agree” etc. If not, any good reasons why not?
Frank McCourt points out the "loss of free will" as a consequence of the large tech platforms.
Unusual, but I'm not disagreeing.
1/30/2025, 1 engagement
So if Threads is at over 100 million daily active users, Twitter used to have 217 million and hasn't really grown since (and perhaps fallen), Threads is now getting to the same ball park.
Compare to about 5m on Bluesky, and not sure how many daily active users in the ActivityPub world.
1/30/2025, 1 engagement
I want a better social media where people getting their news only from that better social media are better informed, more correct, less likely to believe in conspiracies or somebody’s self-interested BS or propaganda. Oh, and take action based on that better understanding.
I see zero reasons why this can’t be done. We just need to build it.
1/29/2025, 1 engagement
Somebody got #venture money in the #fediverse ! Openvibe got $800k from some VCs and Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Tumblr.
“Tech billionaires want to ‘overthrow democracy’ with social media, Spain PM Sánchez says”
A politician is understanding what’s going on here. Help, what now?
PS: what an opportunity for the #fediverse. How do we best go about this?
https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-pedro-sanchez-big-tech-billionaires-democracy-social-media/
Are there people using the #fediverse in countries in which speech is tightly controlled? Like Russia, China, … If so, how do they do it? Use VPNs to servers outside the country? Or …?
'I wish it need not have happened in my time,' said Frodo. 'So do I,' said Gandalf, 'and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'
1/21/2025, 2 engagements