Shownotes Transcript
Hey, it's lee from decoder with new IP top. We spent a lot of time talking about some of the most important people in taking business about what they're putting resources to and why they think it's so critical for the future. That's why we're doing this special series diving into some of the most unique ways companies are spending money today.
For instance, what does that mean to start buying and using A I at work? How much is that costing companies? What products are they? And most importantly, what are they doing with IT and of course, podcasts? Yes, the thing you listening to right now, well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital firms, investment funds and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.
And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the A I space, why are so many big players in tech deciding not to acquire and instead license tech can hire away cofounder? The answer, IT turns out, is a lot more complicated than that. Seems you'll hear all that and more this month. I'm decoder with the litel presented by strike. You can listen to decoder whatever you get.
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Welcome to the verge cast, the flagship podcast of really simple syndication and free in David peers. And this is the third episode in our series, all about connectivity. If you miss the first two episodes, we talked about telly and how we connect to content and beeper and how we connect to each other.
There are super fun epsom you should listen to today. I want to talk about something a little different. I want to talk about posting. And when I say posting, I mean IT in the broader possible way, like if messaging is how we talk directly to each other, posting is how we talk to the internet, an audience, the whole world, whatever you want to think about posting the threads or x or instagram that's posting, uploading youtube or tiktok also posting, posting is how a lot of creators have made careers, is how a lot of people and companies and even governments share and consume information. A huge portion of the internet is just places for posting and for reading other people's posts.
One thing we've been talking a lot about on the show over the last year is the way that these posting networks, these social networks, are changing. I really think we're at the end of what you might call the great platform age, where a handful of big companies in products like facebook and twitter and read IT and really not that many others own all of the posting system. Recently, we have things like mastered on and blue sky, which are big new ideas about how this all works.
They're more open, more interconnected, more like the web itself than just a specific platform. We've talked a lot about activity pub on the show in the last nine months or so. We're not going to do too much of that today.
Activity pub is the protocol that underlies a lot of the change that's going on. But again, we're not going to do too much of IT. Just a tiny bit of let me just put you this clip from flip word CEO mike mu from when he was on the verge cast back in April activity pub.
You know, when I think about IT, I think there are two things that IT does. And one of them is to create an open social graph that becomes a part of the web, which in and of itself, is a very big deal. The other thing that dies that creates a common two ways, straining platform or architecture, that allows services to be interOperable.
So what this means is that, as we've seen all these social media platforms basically just become other versions of themselves all have vertical video. Now we're all copying each other. They all build everything into this vertical stack that's totally proprietary.
And if you leave and you try to do a new one, you've got to rebuild your social graph as a creator, that's a big issue. As a brand, as a publisher, that's a big problem. So what this reminds me of as the days of A O well before the web really happened, everything is built vertically.
If you want to do to put something up on mind, you have to go to a business development will very well. And all of the innovation is locked in by one company. So they are only doing as much as that one company can do. And with this activity, pub breakthrough and what IT really allows is the web to flash again and to you know kind of reopen up all of that innovation that currently is really controlled by, just know, a handful of social media platforms today.
Like I said, we're not going to spend today talking about activity pub. I think it's important to understand, but that's not we are here to do today. We are going to talk about an acronym.
Sorry, not an acronym. I was get wrong. It's an initial ism. Two of them actually very similar, but also very different in some important ways. The first one is possible.
P, O, S S, E, this seems for post on site cynically ate everywhere. You don't have. Remember that i'll come back to IT.
The other one is pisos similar, but different. P E S O S, IT stands for post everywhere, syndicate own site. These are two ideas, and really one idea in two parts about how posting should work.
But they're really not all that different from one another. And I think that if you want to understand the future of posting, POI and pathos are the key. So the story of POI and paths starts.
In about twenty twelve, IT came out of a group called the web, particularly a guy named content chalk. This is how content describe the reason behind the idea at a google developer event. He was at all the way back in two.
And because I want to own my own content, I want to control IT, but yet I still want to stand touch with my friends. And that's really where posy came from, was just like diligent desire to owner on content.
But then, like me, my friends are reading on twitter, or my friends are reading on facebook, or my friends are reading on google leader, whether they're reading, you're like OK I act of a feed, right? It's sometimes using a twitter or if something just using twitter, I need to post copies of my content to twitter or facebook. But in all those cases, one thing try to do is like make sure that there's always links or or some identify points to original. And that's important because when you start kind of working these conversations in these different forms, you may want to actually write them back right in your own site and something might want to see like the whole story.
what's going yeah, the idea behind posy is basically this. Instead of posting by logging in the sun platform and posting only for that platform and the people on IT, then logging into another platform and posting different stuff for that platform and those people, the place you post should be your own website, a blog, social feed, the gallery, whatever. IT should be your website.
And that link back part that time I was talking about is also important. You see some possible drivers around the internet. They use full links to their post at the end of every post that they share.
Others will add like a six digit I D that you can add their website. You are and find that that way. Either way, the goal is to have your stuff be everywhere, but to always be bringing people back toward your own site.
The idea is that I think is yours that you publish on, and that's where everything starts. The way I think about IT is like, who owns the publish button right now? The platforms do you post on x by typing in a text box on ex? You post on instagram by using instagram upload feature.
But in a pasi world, the publish button lives on your website, your blog. Whatever thing you've created, you post there. And whatever you post gets disseminated to all the places that are audiences. I really like this approach.
This approach has a bunch of benefits to starting with the fact that it's just easier right now, even if you want to post the exact same thing to x and threads and rest on, you have to log in the three services. You do a bunch of copying and pasting. You post nature in individually, you have kind of three different conversations on three different platforms.
It's just disconnected in a way that IT shouldn't be. If you've ever used a tool like hoot sweet or sprinkler or one of those absolute brands used to post their suffer on the web, you know how useful just a simple, Better posting tool can actually be? I would give those tools to everybody pacs.
By the way, it's kind of the exact inverse in a pisos world. You can publish from anywhere using any tools on any platform. And everything you published gets sent back to your site.
So you post on instagram with instagram tools. You post on excess tools. But all of IT gets pulled back to your website, your blog.
Whatever IT is in that world, your website, IT, becomes more like an archive of your stuff published elsewhere. Whether possible sees IT as the place for the best version of your posts, that's where people should go to you. The difference is subtle but important.
But generally, I think both sides really see the world the same way and think that, in general, this platform specificity is a bad idea. That's really the bigger picture here, passing and pay. So both want to totally up end the way we think about our content and social networks.
Right now. These social platforms say that you own your content. We don't really if a social platform goes away, your stuff is just gone. If a platform decides you violate the rules and delete your stuff, also gone in the same way that activity pub makes your social graph towards between networks possible, turns the social networks into destinations for your content, but not the place you create anything. I think that difference is really important.
And the more i've learned about passing, the more I have come to see IT as a potentially powerful new way to think about posting and building content in general. But IT also does raise some really complicated questions. The way we think about posting now, posting is really only half the equation.
So what's passes planned for likes and repost and comments and replies and all the rest of the engagement that comes on these platforms? And if posse's idea is to just post the same thing on a hundred different platforms, is that actually what we want? And just from a pure aesthetic perspective, how does all of that work on one website? How do I make the whole internet of posting in content make sense on my domain? I ask the doctor, the author and activist in one of the internet's most kind of ten years, bloggers, what he thought about all of this.
He said that when he said of his new blog, pluralistic, about two years ago, he tried to IT here to the passing way of life. And then he explained how his system works. I'm going to play you his entire answer, which is very long and very technical because I think it's useful to understand what IT takes right now to really make this work.
I wanted to find a way to stand up a new platform in this moment where everyone gets their news and you know does their reading through these silos that then hold you to ransom. And I wanted to use those silos to bring in readers and to attract and engage with an audience. But I didn't want to become beholden to them.
And so I made my own posy thing. And so as when I started, I literally had an H T M L template in the default linux editor, which is called get at, which i've got like e max key bindings on. And I just literally would open that file and receive IT with a different file name, like I A pen the day, the day to IT, and then write a bunch of blog post in this temper.
And then I would copy and pace those into twitter threats tool and massed IT on. And tumbler and medium, like wanted a time individually editing as I went. And then I would turn IT into a text file that I would paste, into an email that I would send to a mail man instance where I was hosting newsletter, and then I had full text, R, S, S.
As well. And discourse for comments, which has its own syndication for people to follow you on discourse. That was a lot of manual work, and I made a lot of mistakes.
And a guy learn cornfield, whose, like, legendary cryo graph, who was following a, took notice of how many manual errors I was making and said, like, do you need me to write you some python scripts? And so he did. He wrote me a little python script that automates about three quarters of that work, which still leaves me with substantial work to do.
So I have a text editor tab open that has one of the two post i'm going to post today in IT already, and the other one just as a skeleton ton. And then I have a template file that has all the things that change from day to day, like a recap of yesterday's posts, my overview of my blog post from twenty years, fifteen years, ten years, five years and one year ago, my upcoming talks and promotional messages. I am running a kick starter for my next novel.
If I can plug that, it's at lost dash cause dot O R G. And so i've got that open. I've got a template open for social media, for master on and twitter that has a slightly different version of those same things that I manually maintain. I have a file called twitter to and a file called mastered on to, which have captures of that second post that i'm gonna publish today, but not the first one. There's an empty twitter and massed IT on that are still on my, on my desk.
And then in one firefox window, I have probably about ten taps, three or four media, and one is for wordpress, three or for tumbler, three or four twitter, and three or four masted on that are just kind of the templates for these things. And then in another window, I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten different tabs for articles that i'm going to referred to in today's blog post. And so I will then compose that in the text editor, run the python scripts on them that takes as long as IT takes to write a blog post. But then I will spend probably another hour getting everything into all of those fees.
Okay, you get the idea right. The process is rough. Curry finished his thought here by being very annoyed at how hard IT is to post long threats on x these days.
And he's right. And here's the problem, the existing platforms x and all the rest have no incentive at all to make IT easy for you to bring stuff in or get stuff out. They want to keep you using their tools on their platform as much as possible. But not only our platforms like blue sky and masted on a pixel fed, inventing new more open tools for posting and reading, there are new apps out there trying to passive y the internet as we know IT. Now we're going na take a quick break and then we're going to talk to the creator of one of them.
You'll be IT back.
Hey, italian, from decoder with the liptak. We spent a lot of time talking about some of the most important people in taking business about what they're putting resources to and why do they think it's so critical for the future. That's why we're doing this special series, diving into some of the most unique ways companies are spending money today.
For instance, what does that mean to start buying and using A I at work? How much is that costing companies? What part are they buying? And most importantly, what are they doing with IT and of course, podcasts? Yes, the thing you're listened to right now, well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital, investment funds and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.
And what is actually going on with this acquisition this year, especially A I space, why are so many big players in tech not to quire instead license tech and hire away cofounded ers? The answer, IT turns out, is a lot more complicated than that seems. You'll hear all that and more this month. I'm decoder with life presented by strike. You can listen to decoder whatever you .
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Or I were back. I think possible, as i've been saying, is a really good idea. I really believe in the idea of having your own space and owning your own content online.
I'm just not all sure how it's supposed to like work and how it's gonna easier and more doable than just signing up for a facebook account. So I called that maintain risk who's the founder of a service called micro dot blog to see how he thinks about IT. Micro dot blog has been around since twenty seventeen. I didn't necessarily start as a posy tool or a way to do activity. Pop posting IT just started because manton thought well before elon muk showed up that we needed a twitter that wasn't owned and Operated by one single .
company when the original premises was just could we rebuild a twitter like user experience? But based on blogs, so the time line in microbes is just host from lots of feds, lots of rs feds, whether their host to a microblog, someone all so so how do we emerge those together? So you don't just have like a few tabs open with your favorite websites and your in the domain name, that is more of a newsfeed timeline experience and that's what people want. But if the foundation of that, if the protocols can be open, IT allows us to build so many interesting apps, so many different types of experiences, it'll be way, way Better.
That philosophy, the stuff he's talking about there became a lot more real for him. And I think for a lot of people in the internet over the last year, Frankly, whatever you think about how elon musk is doing at x, the whole saga has made really clear that the services we care about and post on or fragile, make A D blog now lets you keep a simple blog, which kind of looks like tumblr.
R, I guess, and you can post photos or text or links or whatever. And when you post to my god blog, you can also automatically post to master IT on tumblr, blue sky medium linked in pixel fed noted and flicker a lot of services. One of the big criticisms that i've heard of the past approach end of tools like microbes blog is that actually posting the same content to all of those different networks is a terrible idea.
Networks have different audiences, different people, different norms, different ways of engaging with the system. At some point, if you're just posting to a bunch places all at once, aren't you basically spam? When I put that question to matter, he said he doesn't really see IT that way.
I think IT really depends on the person like what you're trying to get out of posting. If you are a quote, quote like social media presence and your influencer and you are really needing to target different groups, sure. But if you are posting first for yourself, like I want i'm doing something, i'm thinking about something, I want to share this with the world, then it's really a secondary decision about how people receive IT.
Like, so for me, I like to post to my blog. I like everything to be there. And if I post a photo to my blog, I would be great if everybody on different networks could see IT .
men did degree though, that the user interface for all of this is bad starting at the very beginning, which is that you have to registered your own domain. That is already too much work and expense for a lot of people. I mean, who wants to manage DNS records? Who even wants to know what DNS records are? mr.
Blog does push you to to register your own domain during the set up process, but manton actually said that probably doesn't push hard enough and make IT easy enough. And in general, he said, the real bar for websites and for party in general is that you have to be easier than creating a social account. And the thing is, it's really, really easy to create a social account that's a hard, hard bar to clear.
okay? We've got to take one more quick break. And then I have one more person I want to talk to at all of this, one of the people in charge of the internet biggest posting platform, and someone who thinks about this stuff way more than most people get back.
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If I were back, i've become obsessed in recent months with this question of how a posy system can work, how I is. A poster can control where all my stuff is, where things go. I can engage with people, but do IT all through a place that is mine is a really complicated system.
It's kind of a rewiring of the entire internet in a certain way. And I think it's gonna take everything from domain registered to R S S readers to social platforms to think totally differently about how they Operate. If we're going to make this work. And Frankly, i've wondered a lot if this is just an impossible dream, a cool idea about the internet of twenty years ago that just can't exist anymore.
Like is the toothpaste just out of the tube on the stuff? Now tell me, sort through IT, I call up matt moment, wag e, the C E O of automatic and one of the most important people working on wordpress, which is the software that powers basically half the internet, that has been a blogger for two decades and has been working on posting software for pretty much just as long. So I figured he might have some thoughts.
And surprise, surprise, he had some thoughts. The first thing I asked him was if he was familiar with the posy and p of ideas, he said, yes, he was. And that he actually liked the theory of IT quite a bit.
As someone publishing, I want as much interaction as possible. So why are you making me choose which network that goes to? I should post once I deal to my domain. And then he goes to x slash, twitter and threads and tumblr and all the other networks that have can have their own interfaces in network effects and everything like that. But my thoughts should go to all those places. Um they should all have A P S, where whatever interactions are happening on those platforms, I able to bring the men actually some really cool plugins that bring like twitter replies to tweet, which I think even and then as well if i'm interacting with someone else with their own devin, their own open web, like they should be away for our sites to talk to each other in a way that has the same effect as what sort of simple to do in this domain architectures.
This is a really cares how you think about IT as not somebody who runs one of these companies, but who was like been up bloggers on the internet very long time. Because I think the counter that i've heard to the pac idea is that it's just not true that you can post one thing and syndicated everywhere. And IT will worked that fundamental.
Even all all the networks are just text boxes or a vertical video. But they want different things. They have different norms and you actually have to kind of be different things in different places because that's just how these systems work. Is that a surmountable thing in the kind of pi era? What do you make of that criticism of the that he says.
yeah, I mean, there's new ones to each one, of course and there's like public companies like sprinkle spread that all they do is like a law. Folks who want to post to all these places like managed that. We've been thinking in our jet pad plugin as well, have been thinking a lot about what's the right way for this.
I think there might be something like the first step is posting to my blog, and the second step is I canna get some opportunities to customize IT for each network verses. I think where we mess up a little bit is by trying to make this all automated, which by definition, maybe loses some of the new nuances of like cropping the image of certain way or or maybe even not having a link. Maybe you don't, you know, link back to your post.
Watch you just sort of associate the I D of a tweet with canonical post on your side, and then you can have figure IT out on your side versus trying to have them looking back to you. So I think there is this is actually more of A A user interface and user flow issue. Then IT is necessary technical one.
I'm really into this kind of two or three step publishing process as as part of this as a way to get around this. The other nice thing is that like you want to aggregate as well. So I I don't want to have to go to all these places necessarily to find the people who are really care about following, and maybe will open an APP to see where they are, flavor of algorithms. And if IT serves anything interesting for me, but for people I truly want to follow, I kind of want something that brings that all together in a way that um again, as someone who runs in at work like tumblr r like I know this is like a trade off because I want people obviously to come to my things so I can show my hair and support the service everything. But as a user, I I really want everything together.
And one yeah I think that I think part of I am so excited about this whole next phase is like the creating the platform and the consumption can all be different things. They can all be the same thing in the same place, but they can also be all different things in different places. And if there is a whole bunch of like, fascinating products that are going appear when you can just be a reading APP like the fox IP footboard.
And they are thinking a lot about this stuff, like, how do we make the best reading experience for the festivals? We enough to worry about the text box is to post, and we just want to figure out consumption and exuding up. That stuff is so interesting.
is a few jobs to be done when you think about IT like and the apps bungle them in. The one thing paper used to bundle like classified and a bit is the news and and like my style stuff. Like what they do is they bundle like on board.
And I want to see something from b boy follow and bored. And I wanted see things that maybe, I don't know, I I want, you know, what is actually where they ve scaled a lot. I want to publish something.
And then finally, like, I want to see how people are interacting with the thing I published. I guess that maybe if I want to reply the things that people published or share things that people published, that's a really lovely loop. And actually, one of things I I miss most about kind of reader days is like how much I would give me to block.
Because when I was kind of one click or I used the wordpress book mark lit, you know, I could be on any site reading any article, and I was just one click that I share that to my blog. But at some point, I think, especially with wordpress making the title so prominent, like we made a little too heavy to do a post, and I want something a little bit more like a cut key or daring fireball, or like these bonus anding blogs. And how i've been trying to redesign my blog and made I T is to also have these titles post, which are a little just lower at the big title.
And the big image really makes you feel like I gotto right, like an essay, how to do something like, like post, where it's I really thought through and has lots, but sometimes I just wanted shoot something off a little shorter. It's not only a tweet because I want to have links and like, I want to be rich. But it's it's not like a essay either. You know, one of these magnet opposes that mark in trees and or program post.
I've been researching this stuff and talking to people about IT for months now. And here's what I think. I think this is the way I think it's a shame that we've all gotten used to give way all of our posts and all of our content just to get the engagement and connection that we get from these platforms.
I think IT is possible to have IT both ways, and I think a passing style system is a really cool way to get there, just as i'm hopeful that activity pub is gonna win and open up social to many more platforms and systems in ways of thinking about the world, i'm hopeful that passes can win too, because I think we shouldn't be stuck on platforms and more of the internet should belong to us and not companies. And there are are some really exciting science here. I think the thing blue sky is doing, where you can use your domain name as your user name is awesome.
A bunch of people. I talk to mention that to me as one sign of doing this exactly the right way. I also think tools like micro blogger a big deal.
And I think the growth of these new platforms like blue sky and mass don, can also bring new growth not just in how we post, but in how we consume posts and how we start them and how we organized. All of this is being broken in the pieces in really interesting ways. I also think you might just be impossible to pull all of this off.
The truth is, we do live in an era of all gardens where the biggest businesses in the world have figured out how to keep us and our posts glued to their feed and addicted to their publish. Funds for a possible to work will basically take a complete reinvention of the internet, from the blogging software to the social networks to like literally, the go daddy in her face, all of IT is gna have to change in order for this to work in big, meaningful internet shaping ways. If all of that does happen, and again, i'm hopeful, but its capital that IT will happen, IT won't happen fast or soon.
Even in twenty twelve, when the N. D. Web community was first talking about the web was a more open and less commercialize, then IT is now now I mean, you know what it's like to be online.
It's just commerce everywhere. So stay tuned on passing in peace. But here is my one piece, a very specific advice for right now.
Buy a domain name if you don't already have one by one that feels like I could be your internet home, your username, your blog, your archive, your publish, but your everything. Personally, I bought David pierce X, Y Z A while ago for this exact purpose, but i'm looking at IT now. And I could be David peer social, David p guitars, David p bingo, which actually rules.
David peer start golf, David p start apartments and so many other things. Get a domain and get ready for the future. When that domain is like your phone number or your email address or you're your user name, that IT is the signal of the part of the internet that actually belongs to.
I don't know how long it's going to take for you to be like that, but I think it's can be great. Sorry, that's IT for the verge cast yesterday. Thank you so much to everyone who is on the show, and thank you as always for listening.
This show is produced by Andrew ino and lame. James verge cast is the production and part of the box media podcast network will be back with episodes on wednesday and friday. They're still tons of news to cover this week from yet another netflix prize hike to cyberhomes ship dates to mario games and lots more. And then we'll be back next monday with the fourth and final episode in our country activity series. See then broken role.
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