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Making the “ruthless” business case for the #OpenSocialWeb, here is Helen Halvack from the Verge:
Helen: “I’ll give you the ruthless business answer of why I’m interested in open social web projects like Surf from the Flipboard team. So platforms like MetaX, they are openly hostile to news content in their algorithms. They have moved away from that.
They are no longer great discovery sources for us. Links in general even. Forget news, just links. They’re not like good places to hang out anymore.
Could you start the Verge now, the way we started The Verge, or you started The Verge 15 years ago? The answer is like probably not, or you would need a lot more money because starting something for free and finding audiences for free is much harder now.
A lot of audience discovery is people buying ads from Mark Zuckerberg, right? I would rather not give money to Mark Zuckerberg. I would rather spend money on journalists in our newsroom, which means the discovery problem, like can we solve it a different way?
…To the point of discovery, I would love to acquire acquisition channels for us where, again, I don’t have to pay to play.
The open social web is a lot more friendly to news. I think there’s opportunity there for how do you get the next cohort of Verge audience. And then as Nilay said, as we think about our website, our product experience, I think there’s really fun ideas about how you create new product experiences that attract people to The Verge, because the open social web, you can surface in all kinds of different ways.
So that would be my cold business answer of, I would rather give our money to the newsroom than be buying acquisition from Meta or whoever.”
From The Vergecast: The Vergecast Vergecast, 2026 edition, Apr 21, 2026
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More from Nilay on the Verge and the #OpenSocialWeb:
“You can get some traffic and that’s great, and you can’t live or die in traffic, [as] the traffic can go away. The Yahoo algorithm cannot send you traffic to your links on the Yahoo homepage anymore, which is a real experience that we’ve had. Google can go away.
That’s just traffic. It just comes and goes and that’s great. The [real] goal is to turn the traffic into audience and have people come to you directly and care about your brand and your people…I don’t take that for granted at all.
Then the real goal is to turn the audience into a community, and we are very lucky that we have that too across platforms. So I just look at these open distribution protocols.
This is how I can go get a bigger community. We’re going to be where you are, and if you reply to us or like our posts or engage with us on BlueSky or Threads or Mastodon, we’ll get some value from that too.
And the people who are out on those platforms, we can curate that work in other.
…I’m not saying we’re going to get there tomorrow, but that is the vision, is to say our community exists in all these places in a way that is additive instead of constantly dividing our attention.”
From The Vergecast: The Vergecast Vergecast, 2026 edition, Apr 21, 2026
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Love this post from Nilay on the value of the open social web to media brands today:
“David: “I think the question here is essentially, what is sort of your current theory of the case about connecting The Verge to these broader open social protocols? "
Nilay: …“I think all great media brands grow up with their distribution. So the Verge is just like a good example. We’re like, we started in 2011. We started a giant desktop website. And like phones didn’t exist in the way that they exist now. Like we came up with distribution on the open web….
So when I say, if we were starting the Verge again today, what would we do? The…exercise in my brain is what is the distribution that’s on the way up that you would build a thing around?
And maybe for the last five years, the answer has only been YouTube. And then there was like a brief minute when the answer was TikTok. And I just think it’s hard to survive on those platforms…. I’m confident in this conversation. [What we need] is distribution that no one controls.
There’s no Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, literally with a knob being like, I don’t like you and turning you off, which is a thing that I try to run away from. And so Bluesky is like open distribution, Activitypub is open distribution and that’s why i keep saying that’s what we would start we would start a thing on the open distribution that no one controls and try to make our own way.
There’s like layers and layers of things to solve here, but it just seems obvious that we should connect to the next generation of distribution that no one controls. “Because that to me is, that’s always the thing, a media brand that’s on the rise, should be trying to do.”
🎙️ The Vergecast
📻 The Vergecast Vergecast, 2026 edition
👤 with David, Nilay, Helen Havlak
⏱️ 14:36–16:59
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Very gratified to see this built on #OpenSocialWeb protocols. Can’t imagine why any new social or parasocial network today would be built on anything else. techcrunch.com/2026/05/0…
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Well put: it’s a reminder of the social media we once glimpsed & seems so far away now. But we can build it back. “I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there’s something quietly beautiful about a place where people share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage.
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Yes. Given the givens, Democrats should do all of this. California should do another round & I do bet Maryland residents fire the one state senator that was holding things up this time. AND they should do the push for a national ban on gerrymandering, too. www.axios.com/2026/05/0…
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We are going to run out of sites for our training data pretty soon at this rate.
“Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers—which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive—published their findings online in a paper titled “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.”
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This is very welcome, and I referenced it in my recent article on Fediverse progress: “Decentralized social media platform Mastodon plans on adopting its own end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for private messages.
Mastodon announced the upcoming feature in a blog post about receiving €614,000 ($724,000) from the Sovereign Tech Fund, an effort backed by the German government to support open-source software. "
I do wonder if or how this could work in concert with other open E2EE messaging, I’m thinking of #DeltaChat or #Matrix protocols or Dan new Sup messaging effort.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mastodon-plans-end-to-end-encryption-for-private-messages
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More from Luis I really like, this time on #RSS:
“Let’s talk about the best way to access all these feeds. My preferred and recommended approach is using a feed reader.
When subscribing to content on the open web, feed readers are your secret weapon.
RSS might seem like it’s dead (it’s not—yet). In fact, it’s the reason you often hear the phrase, “Wherever you get your podcasts.” But RSS goes beyond podcasts. It’s widely supported by blogs, newsletters, and even social platforms like the Fediverse (Mastodon, PeerTube, etc.) and BlueSky. It’s also how I’m able to compile my starter packs.
I’ve written more about RSS in Rediscovering the RSS Protocol, but the short version is this: when you build on open standards like RSS and OPML, you’re building on freedom. Freedom to use the tools that work best for you. Freedom to own your experience. And freedom to support a healthier, more independent web.”
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A conversation spinning out of #Fediforum. I like this from Luis…
I do think there is a “there, there” on the “agentic web” and the “open social web.” Frankly I think the Open Social Web may be the first and best place to explore the web and agentic web interactions and how to make them more human-serving.
“That feels like exactly the kind of problem the open social web community is well positioned to think about. If agents are going to act on behalf of people, transact, coordinate, or make claims in shared spaces, then identity, transparency, governance, and trust cannot be afterthoughts…If open social web builders do not help shape this kind of infrastructure, my guess is that centralized AI platforms will. And if that happens, these systems will probably become less open, less resilient, and less interoperable over time.”
https://lqdev.me/posts/mycelium-fediforum-ai-agents-open-social-infrastructure-04-2026/
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Via Connected Places Newsletter, very worth applying for this if you are doing good work on the Open Social Web:
“…Applications are open for the first Open Social Awards, and I want to make sure they’re on your radar. The awards, presented by New_ Public, PublicSpaces, and Waag Futurelab, are looking for projects built on open social protocols that are past the prototype stage and in active use. That includes applications, shared infrastructure, and tools built on any federation or interoperability protocol. The awards will grant €10,000 to a grand prize winner and €5,000 to two excellence award winners, sponsored by ZDF and Bluesky. If you’re building something on the open social web, or you know someone who is, this is worth applying for. The jury includes Audrey Tang, Mike Masnick, Johannes Ernst, Melanie Bartos, Robin Berjon, and myself. Applications are due by May 1st, and winners will be announced at the PublicSpaces Conference in Amsterdam on June 5th. You can apply here:
https://newpublic.org/OSA " -
Good luck everyone doing demos at tomorrow’s #Fediforum. As a reminder you can follow the #Surffeed for it even if you aren’t in the surf app beta here:
https://surf.social/feed/surf%2Fcustom%2F01jvprse7ptd6b9gccy3m9g547
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This feels wise for the #EU:
“We don’t need a “European [add US social media platform]” – that would be just a different kind of centralised trap – we need a commitment to open protocols for our digital infrastructure. By moving our digital hangouts and town squares to decentralised protocols we ensure that no single entity – be it either governments and/or a volatile billionaires – can pull the plug on our democratic discourse and exchanges.”
https://blog.gelbphoenix.de/the-architecture-of-autonomy-and-freedom/
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Josh Marshall captures this dynamic well:
“As the Iran war drags on, I wanted to share some thoughts on the proper context in which to see the conflict. Donald Trump lost this war in its very first days. Everything that has happened in recent weeks — the threats, the negotiations, the live-on-social-media breakdowns — has simply been a matter of trying to get free of that fact. This isn’t a political attack. It’s simply an accurate appraisal of what we all see. More importantly, it is the only way to understand what is happening now. Everything that’s happening today and for weeks has been focused on breaking Iran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, something it didn’t have before the war started. That’s the definition of failure: fighting a war and continuing a war to clean up the mess the war of choice actually created….
The Iranian leadership sees that just as clearly as everyone else. And as [trump] waits he and the global economy sustain damage. He’s stuck and since he won’t recognize that fact the conflict and the massive damage to the global economy continues, even if the scale of the fighting, for the moment, doesn’t.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/making-sense-of-the-iran-war
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Am a fan of both Rabble & Ben, so very much looking forward to checking this out today: “Revolution.Social podcast with Rabble talking about an alternate history of social media….” #OpenSocialWeb
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This new AI tool called Malus.sh is pretty wild, cloning open source software to sidestep ANY copyright. I bet this sort of thing will change EVERYTHING for web and native apps, not just open source code, and probably sooner than we think.
So, how do developers survive when the “product” can be cloned instantly?
I saw this exact same thing occur to the music industry and more slowly to the film industry, who thought they were in the business of selling shiny discs to consumers and got beat out in part by pirates (which was a body blow) but then later legitimately by streamers (Netflix, Spotify, AppleMusic) who understood this: You have to move from a product mindset to a service and relationship mindset to the end users.
Music. Movies. Now it is software developers turn in the barrel. And soon, not just OSS software developers.
In the digital space, and even more now in the AI incarnation of a digital space we are moving from a Functional Economy to a Relational Economy.
In this new landscape, the “moat” isn’t your features or your codebase. Those can be mirrored or cloned or pirated. The only true protection left is Community and Momentum.
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Relational Value: Users stay because they want to be part of the ecosystem, the brand, and the direct feedback loop with the creators.
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Innovation Velocity: Users trust the true developer to innovate and iterate faster than a clone can keep up.
The value of software is shifting from what it does to who is building it and who is using it beside you. The clone might have the same code, but it doesn’t have the soul, the support, or the future roadmap. Are you building a product that can be copied, or a community that can’t?
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/malus-clones-software-copyright
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Very glad to see the #HardFork and SearchEngine podcast Fediverse community server continuing to thrive. So they are at 10,000 or so registered users, and hovering at a healthy 1.4 thousand of those as monthly active users. That tracks to normal rates on social.
And the conversations are active and growing. I think I underestimated the power of focused, topic-based server communities on the fediverse. (Ironic I know as i founded one based on the #Indieweb community) Those are as important or more than big general purpose servers.
Go #Forkiverse. Power on.
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Anil Dash’s piece is a wake-up call for the #OpenWeb. The threats he outlines feel scarily accurate, a “perfect storm” that needs us all to pause and then consider how to counter them. Definitely worth your time. www.anildash.com/2026/03/2…
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Mark Qvist built #Reticulum, an open mesh protocol some call “the next internet.” It ran on nearly any network, even the most meager, for free. Then he vanished. The dev community took over, and ran with it. Great story here: nodestar.net/mark-qvis…
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I’ve long been fascinated by the #mesh network #reticulum & the #LXMF messaging protocol built atop it—especially for areas w/o reliable Internet, or where govt. blackouts occur. I strongly believe bridges from LXMF to the open social web & open messaging protocols like #DeltaChat are strategic. I’d love to connect with others sharing similar thoughts.
Links: https://reticulum.network
