You Know What, Meet Your Heroes

I just spent two days at Fediverse House, a SXSW-adjacent conference created and hosted by Flipboard. In the weeks leading up to it, I had waffled back and forth over whether I should go, and what the experience would shape up to be. My biggest fear was about what form this thing was going to take: I still felt a little uncertain about Flipboard and larger businesses coming into the Fediverse, and hoped that this wasn't just one big cynical marketing event that failed to grasp what the Fediverse was actually about.

So, How Was It?

My worries were unfounded. I had a wonderful time. Actually, the gathering was pretty wild, and there were more than a few surreal moments. One of my favorite stories that came out of this happened when Ben Brown liked one of my statuses. I looked across the room, and he was sitting in the same pose as his Mastodon avatar.

Meeting Friends, Not Just Avatars

First and foremost, I have to speak towards the nature of meeting online friends in person for the first time. Talking to people you normally see as avatars is super weird, and some people, such as Evan Prodromou, are people integral to the space that I’ve incidentally known for over a decade. It’s been a long time coming, and honestly was a delight.

I spent a lot of time hanging out with Damon, who is now We Distribute’s cofounder. We’ve been in communication non-stop since we pretty much started working together, and it was refreshing to see how well we got along in person. We talked about our hopes and dreams, our frustrations, and what we hoped to accomplish. He is a hilarious, amazing, beautiful person, and I came away from this event wishing we could hang out every day.

Some other familiar faces I spent a lot of time with were Jeff Sikes, who is a regular in our chatroom, Charles Iliya Krempeaux from SpaceHost, and Jennifer Plus Plus, who is working on LetterBook. Together, our ragtag little group bumbled through downtown Austin, trying to make sense of where we were, and where to find the good food.

Meeting Colleagues

While I consider most of the people I met here to be friends (or at least, on friendly terms), it was also remarkable that many of the people I talked to were people I had either previously interviewed on Decentered, or at least was familiar with their years of work. Suddenly, I found myself talking to Manton Reece from Micro.blog, Andy Piper from Mastodon, and Mike McCue from Flipboard. Somehow, I managed to keep up with conversations, and didn’t feel like a total idiot! I met all kinds of people, from journalists to app developers to people who were just curious about what this was all about.

Biggest Takeaways

So! They managed to get all of us big-brained Fediverse nerds in a room. How did the talks go, and what were the biggest discussions about? I'll try to break down what stuck with me the most:

• General Excitement: the network is growing. A lot. On the corporate side of things we have Flipboard, WordPress, Tumblr, Threads, and Ghost. On the other side, we have a number of open platforms entering the fray and reaching maturation, like Wafrn, Loops, Manyfold, Hollo, and NeoDB. FediDB reports that there are now 15 million accounts on the network.
• ActivityPub Update: Evan has more or less confirmed that Social Web Foundation is working with the W3C SocialCG to develop ActivityPub 1.1, an updated version of the protocol spec.
• Long-term Sustainability: This is something I've been feeling for a while, talked to a lot of people at length about. Cards on the table: nobody is totally sure about long-term sustainability for the network. This manifests in a few different ways: projects having to compete from a small pool of donors, lack of businesses and commerce in the space, and most importantly: admins, moderators, maintainers, and other community members performing free labor for years and years of their lives for no compensation. The Fediverse currently lacks any kind of payments layer. It doesn't have to be crypto, but the lack of any kind of plumbing or infrastructure for this is dire.
• UX and Ease of Use: People don’t want to have to think hard about the experience to "find where the decentralization is", for lack of a better phrase. Onboarding in particular is not super great for most Fediverse platforms, even the more polished ones. Furthermore, there have got to be better ways to help people navigate these systems: just simply looking up another person or pulling in a remote status for interaction are largely dependent on workarounds and assumptions about usability.
• Rethinking Advocacy: The Fediverse, and Open Source in general are, for the most part, tremendously bad at marketing their value to the general public. Some of this boils down to targeting the wrong groups of people: we're great at marketing towards the people who are already here. But we almost fall over ourselves when trying to explain the values of our system, mostly because we rely heavily on technical jargon and abstract concepts as value propositions. "It's decentralized!" isn't going to appeal to 99% of the population.
• Bluesky and the Fediverse: Several members of the Bluesky team attended the event, and interactions between Evan and their team were surprisingly cordial. For his part, Evan seems to have dialed back a lot of his public comments about Bluesky and AT Proto, and even went as far as saying that they were also technically, on some level, part of the Fediverse. Paul Frazee also gave a great talk, and it was kind of cool to ask him about his prior experience working on Beaker Browser and Secure Scuttlebutt.

In Conclusion

I had a wonderful time! I don't necessarily want to talk about just one subject non-stop for an 8-hour event, but I was in good company. I met some interesting and wonderful people, and came away from the event feeling invigorated. I think the community has been through some really rough patches over the last year and a half, and that had me feeling down in the dumps for a while. I always forget how valuable it is to meet face-to-face and really get to know people.

Special thanks to Mike McCue and his family, as well as Mia Quagliarello and Jessica Jordan from the Flipboard Team. You all are lovely human beings, and I look forward to working together in the future!