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NYT's Hard Fork and Search Engine podcast started a #mastodon site in the #fediverse called the #forkiverse.

"Can We Build a Better Social Network?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/podcasts/can-we-build-a-better-social-network.html

I've talked before about the inherent limitations of Mastodon. It will never be like the commercial socials it replaces. It's slower, quieter, unlikely to reach your dear Aunt Sally or K-12 classmates. No realtime updates on earthquakes, traffic, etc. No talking with world leaders & celebs.

https://www.nytimes.com

Can We Build a Better Social Network?

Ted Curran M. Ed.

@tedcurran@indieweb.social replied · last week

The interactions we’re used to having on #socialmedia arose BECAUSE of the affordances of social media — the good ones and the bad ones.
Efforts to envision the NEXT thing take for granted that it needs to look like the CURRENT thing, ignoring how we socialized online BEFORE ~2008 when social stormed into all our lives. I think we need to rediscover pre-2008 web tech and rebuild a social web that routes around #bigtech.

#forkiverse #fediverse

Ted Curran M. Ed.

@tedcurran@indieweb.social replied · last week

The most exciting thing to me about #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse is that they also connect #blogs, #RSS, and #indieweb social mentions to #socialmedia in an open, interoperable way.

Frustrating, though, that mainstream users tend to ignore noncommercial solutions that aren't aggressively trying to attract them, especially when the onboarding experience is so confusing to newbies. Even if our tech platforms are ready for prime time, the human networks are only early adopter types.

Elena Brescacin

@elettrona@poliversity.it replied · last week

@tedcurran The main problem is fragmentation and onboarding. Fediverse is a series of platforms with their own concepts. In Fediverse you're active. Commercial social network public tends to be passive instead. Passive and not responsible of their actions because the algorithms does this and that. Interoperability is something they do not know about, because even when sharing the e-mail and phone number as examples (one identifier to call everyone) they don't even know because almost no one of them sends e-mail or calls (out of whatsapp or stuff) any longer.

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