 Hello there, welcome to today's webinar after Twitter, understanding social media protocols. Today we're going to discuss social media evolution, alternative platforms and trends, activity pub, mastodon, Nostra, threads, with ex-Twitter dev, Evan Henshaw Plath, aka Rabble. You'll learn about decentralization significance for nonprofits and online communication, the event supported by an award from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. My name's Billy Bicket. I'm from TechSoup and I'll be your event host. So yeah, we're TechSoup. Our mission is focused on building a dynamic bridge that leverages technology to enable connections and innovative solutions for a more equitable planet or for good. And now I'm going to introduce our speaker for the event. A pleasure to have Evan here, Evan is a technologist who explores the intersection of product engineering and the political systems in which they exist, his passions in the space of new emerging startups and making the world a better place through civic technology projects. He's led product and engineering teams on companies ranging from his own self-funded startups through every stage of venture capital and also at large Fortune 500 companies. From 04 to 06, 2004, 06, he was the first employee lead developer and architect, Odeo's Ruby on Rails web app platform, a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Odeo is best known as the company which created Twitter. As such, Evan is well placed to tell the story of how through learning from failures, pivoting to open innovation and experimentation, Twitter came to be. In 2007, Evan became the lead web developer and hacker at Yahoo Brick House where he was the architect of FireEvil, first Ruby on Rails application to be launched at Yahoo. He funded Cubox and 08, the premier Latin American agile Ruby on Rails consultancy, a creative agency that builds digital products for businesses and that was acquired in 2012. In the NGO space, Evan helped found and grow the indie media network, an independent and alternative group of media activists and organizations that offers grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues. He co-founded his latest venture, Crafted Code in 2014. So with that, I'm going to pass the mic to Evan. Thanks so much. I really appreciate everyone coming here and the civic tech space is and the non-profit space is near and dear to my heart. And so I'm very excited to be able to share with you sort of what we're doing and to communicate the history of social media platforms and the back and forth that it's had so that we can understand this moment we have going forward. So to understand where we're at now and what's going on, I think we need to understand where we came from. And I'm just going to walk through a little bit of the history of what goes on. I'm going to talk about the Twitter story, the rise of Usenet versus AOL, the debate about or is media and social software on the internet commercialized or not, blogs mastered on the Fediverse and then newer emerging alternatives like Blue Sky and Nostra. We can understand where we are now if we don't understand our history. We have to understand that social media in some form, digital communities have existed since the 1960s. This is not a new thing. And it's very important to realize that we are repeating cycles of history. And so we are repeating sort of things that go back and forth and to understand where we're going and understand the conflicts and what we should choose to do with social media. Now we need to know that this history originally all social media was non-corporate. It was run by university and research labs and there was one overarching internet forums that was spread across computers and it was the one forum for everybody. It was called Usenet, this protocol called NNTP. And that is what existed from the 1970s into the early 1990s. It existed for a long time and it was what people thought of when they thought of using the internet. It connected everybody. Everybody had a single forum and there were lots of ways in which sub forums were managed, similar to subreddit today. It was very text-based, it was very nerdy, super academic, the academic culture shaped the design of the system. But then eventually the US government opened up the internet to commercial activity. And when they did that, when, oops, I don't know how to see the chat. When they did that, what happened was all of a sudden we started getting people doing advertising and we got spam and we got the culture that held together the tight internet that worked in social media from the 1970s and 80s stopped working and they started being spammed across the internet and people started using it for advertising. And at that moment, all of a sudden it became possible to make a lot of money on the internet. And so we got the first commercial internet, we got AOL and Confuser and we got companies that tried to make money off of it and they enclosed it and they included what they controlled, what kind of speech you could do, they controlled what you saw, they told you experience, they charge you money for it and they opened it up to many more people using it. On the open side, you have Mosaic, the web browser in the existence of the web, which is this idea that anybody could set up their own web server, their own site, their own content without having to go to a corporation in Virginia that decided who could say what. And the web enabled us to publish ourselves, enable any person to become their own publisher and their own ability to create their own news. Now we think of blogs as this sort of normal thing. It's universally accepted, but if we look back at what was going on, before that, the only way to get to an audience was to own a magazine or a newspaper or radio station and people tried to make zines, but those zines didn't, they didn't reach a large audience. Logs let all of us reach a large audience. Underlying blogs, and this is really important to understand the existence of the online blogs, we had this idea of a news reader, this RSS reader, Google Reader is the one that people remember. But the idea that you could have an application, you bring the news from all the sources you want together, like email, and you could read them and you decided what content you read it, right? You decided what you were, but it was oddly antisocial because your consumption experience was solo. You didn't connect it with anyone else. The news readers had this sort of format called RSS. It's still widely used today and it is the basis by which all social media that we have today is derived. Everything everybody is doing stuff that's based on this work. RSS is actually what gave us podcasting because podcasting itself is actually just news reader RSS speeds with a little link to an MP3 file for the podcast. And so podcasting comes from this and becomes its own huge world that's independent from everyone else and ends up not being enclosed. It's the one major social media platform that doesn't get controlled by any companies who never get centralized. What I started working on was a podcasting company called Odio and we wanted to make podcasting easier, more accessible, less nerdy. And that ended up happening. We also were a for-profit company. So we are trying to democratize the media and this is an article in New York Times and we put together and we built up the startup, but then Apple came along, launched iTunes podcasting and completely obliterated us. That would be a side note that no one cared about, except for the fact that we went through this process to say, what should we be doing? No one would have heard of Odio if it weren't for the fact that we started debating what to do next. And we started doing these hackathons. And the hackathon idea is you get together in a day or a weekend and you build something very quickly and then we download it at the end of the day. That hackathon is what created Twitter and Twitter ended up bringing social media and the timeline and the idea of being able to communicate with people and to mix reading and writing content together to a larger audience and became important. Originally it was called Friend Stalker because we never went to launch with that name, but it was a joke. And essentially it was driven by an idea that is a combination of what are the the messages that you get as a bicycle messenger delivery? These kind of status updates of where am I and what am I doing with an activist tech platform that we had launched in 2004 called TextMob, which was using text messages to coordinate protests. And we combined those with the concept of blogs remixing the media that existed before it. And this is really important. Human communication and social media is never new. We think of it as new because the apps look new. They feel different. We've got visual face filters or we're getting text message updates or things like that. But actually what's going on is we're reproducing the same sets of human interaction over and over again with new technological substrates. Twitter was super simple. It was super easy to use. It made it accessible. It was also built on all these open standards like RSS so that you could build applications on top of it and it would be very easy to use. But it caused both solved and caused the problem of information overload with the newsreaders. You had that inbox problem, you know, that sort of unread messages problem. Everybody you're following is writing new articles and you're not being able to read them all. It's impossible. And instead of them disappearing, you get a little red number that gets bigger and bigger. The core innovation of Twitter is it solved the problem of what to read based on who you're following and what they're sharing. So you handle your friends out, they go and they read articles. They say, this one is really important. They start sharing it. And then if it is important, other people start replying and you get a conversation around it. And Twitter in many ways killed the RSS reader because it made it social and made it easier so people switched to it. And then this is by 2007, 2008, we get the original rise of social media. And it becomes something that isn't just a few nodes or a few academics are doing, but a much larger set of society. And we get social media companies. When we had the era of Usenet before commercialization of the internet, there were no social media companies. There was no companies doing stuff on the internet. Then we had AOL and a community of people rebelled back and created blogs and created podcasting, which were very open systems with very few companies behind them. Then in 2007, 2008, all of a sudden it looks like there could be money here. And so we get social media companies and the practices that existed by hackers and groups of people together started getting adopted in a larger audience. I don't know how I might just drop out of screen share here so that I can open up the chat and hopefully that stays open. There we go. Now I can see the chat for you guys. We have these social media companies. They're rising up and it becomes an issue. And almost immediately, we have this idea of that there is a problem that centralized control of what people are doing and how they're working is not going to be OK. And that eventually it's going to be a problem if we enclose the comments. So it's not like people in 2007 who were building these systems didn't realize that this was going to be an issue. But we. So we started having this resistance. We started saying, oh, no, we've made a mistake. We've given these companies too much hands and this is going to be a problem. And this is before most of everyone has joined any of these systems. But the resistance actually didn't look like this. It looked more more like this. A bunch of nerds sitting around in a table trying to preserve the open nature of social media, the open nature of the Internet. And Bill tool, this is a slide from 2010 or so, which said, we need to have interoperability between all these systems. We need to have this be an open ecosystem. And they develop this concept of activity streams. And you can see that this open protocol from late 2000 actually had everyone engaged in it. And it had a vast diversity of kinds of applications that people were building and you could go in and you could remix it. So this is a app called Yahoo Pipes that I worked on that let you basically take feeds from one site, one content and remix it and rebuild it. And you have these concepts of mashups and users were in control. And that work is what led to this activity pub standard in 2012. Now, by this point, the rebels building open standards and open systems are losing. But the work continued. And that work led to what we now call the Fediverse. So the whole time in which Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are growing, the community of people are off doing the development for an open alternative that has better set of values and a better set of people communicating it. And it's important to realize that there is a direct history from the feeds that existed in Usenet to what existed or assessed to something called Adam to activity pubs, activity streams, activity pubs and what we have with Fediverse and Mastron. There's a direct history. And all of the companies doing this work, what they do is they take the open ideas and open standards and they make them usable and accessible to a mass audience. And that is a trade off that lots of people felt very comfortable doing. And so we have starting in 2017, this thing called Mastodon, which takes this protocol called activity pub and makes it super easy. It makes it look like Twitter. And the why does Mastodon exist? Mastodon, the Fediverse exists because. Initially, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all of these other platforms were very open. Initially, you had this idea that you didn't need permission from the company to participate. And over time, these companies realized that if they controlled their environment and controlled their users, they could sell ads. Mastodon exists a few million, a couple of million nerds go off and use it. And it's a side story because the reality is for more than a decade, maybe 15 years, the open community has lost. The open community has not been able to have a good sense on where what we should be doing and how to work and people weren't using it. And centralization one, centralization one, because the user experience was better, centralization one, because you could find your friends because Apple and Google created mobile phones with an app store experience that they can control and they get to approve. And so there were a whole bunch of systemic activities and also financial ones, which is if you are an individual developer working on Mastodon, you venture capital isn't going to come to you and give you lots of money. But if you are Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest, they give you all the money to pay everyone to build it. And so the community couldn't compete with the amount of capital that the markets flooded into things and the economies of scale. And once these platforms took hold, they realized that they needed to replace the chronological timeline with something that was algorithmic, something that helped you better decide how to sort through all this mess of content. And the algorithms themselves aren't necessarily bad. The problem is they're not tuned to us, the users. The algorithms are tuned to keeping you engaged on the platform as much as possible and watching the ads. So couldn't the add the orizal of video is because it makes a more passive media. It's something that's easier to control. It's easier to get people to buy ads. And with that, with the ability to direct massive audiences, we see the rise of influencers. Now, influencers existed in the age of blogs. They existed in the age of use net. They existed. You could say that Thomas Payne was an influencer for producing his his pamphlets during the American Revolution. But what social media did with algorithms and the big corporate platforms is. They found a way to detect who had content that was particularly good and particularly engaging and blow it up to an audience that we didn't know was possible. And became a huge business. The thing that had been just a side project that no one thought could make money became a huge business. And that power corrupted. And eventually the larger set of society saw the problem that the creators of these systems saw from the very beginning, which is it's dangerous to have this done. And that came to a massive head when we saw Elon Musk by Twitter and start destroying it. All their backstory and history is a way of. You can't see. Sorry. I want to see the chat and I cannot. That whole history is the show that there's there's this for running conflict between the idea that are our social spaces are digital social spaces that we're creating. Is it going to be a protocol? Is it going to work like email and the web and RSS activity pub? Or is it going to be a platform that's provided by a single company and the platforms by single companies for a long time became dominant? And they became the thing that we know of and we think of as social media. But that is not necessarily the case. And a few years ago, Mike Mazznick, a journalist, wrote a very influential essay called Protocols versus Platforms in which he advocated returning social media to being protocol based and removing it from the control of these corporations. The thing with protocols is. Once you say, oh, we should have a protocol. And then you want to make them. Everybody thinks that they can make their own. And so this is a incomplete list of decentralized social media protocols. Every one of these is distinct. And every one of these was created by someone who thought they were going to solve the problem of engaging in the world. And when, you know, you look from the perspective of a non-profit person who is in a technologist or in communications, you look at all of these and there's 10,000 choices. But most of them you don't want to choose because really want to follow where your community is and what the community of users are. And I want to give some overview of all these protocols and the space that we're looking at today so that you're having a better chance of understanding. Sort of roadmap of what it all means. First off, there's a whole set of protocols which are called self certify. Self certifying means that your account, your user, your data is driven by a set of cryptographic keys and not by an account or the username on a database on a central server. So the users are in control of it as opposed to the platforms. You control the keys to your own house. You control the keys to your own car. Self certifying protocols say that a non self certifying protocol like Twitter or Instagram is more like Uber where you might have access to the vehicle they could take you around. But you don't control it and they can delete your account. A whole set of these protocols are driven around the idea of having servers. And so that means that they're not fully peer to peer. Your content exists on these servers. And some of the ones that you've probably heard of or Mastodon or Blue Sky, there are a whole bunch of others. That are interesting. And the idea is that your content sits up on servers. Another set of protocols are what I would say is more radical. These are peer to peer protocols, meaning there's no servers at all. It means your devices, your phone, your laptop directly communicates with everyone else's devices. And these are super neat because they are able to allow to have very good encryption and very good privacy and they're very censorship resistant. And they can work when your internet connection goes down. They can work all the time, but they don't work very quickly. It's the slow food version of social media. And then there's a class of ones which I don't think is going to be particularly interesting to folks in this community, which are a whole bunch of people discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum and cryptocurrencies. And they said, this is decentralized money. Why don't we do decentralized social? And my personal opinion is that it's this is a terrible idea because it's a bunch of people attempting to integrate financial transactions into people's social interactions. And one of the things we see is weird dynamics going on that are even worse than centralized social media platforms where people are paid per post or paid per audience. There's a bunch of cryptocurrency stuff. It's frankly a mess. And mostly I put it up here to suggest that people avoid these projects. DSNP is worth pointing out that is the project behind project liberty and unfinished labs. They are very nice people who are very well meaning, but they are building a very cryptocurrency centric system. And then one thing that we saw come up with Elon Musk taking over Twitter is an explosion of other corporate media, social media platforms. These are essentially the same thing as Twitter and Instagram, except you are asked to trust the creators more than you trusted or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever is running TikTok, which is odd that we don't know a personalized name for them. Some of these systems are really nice and they're really good, but they're all going to replicate the exact same problems that existed on the centralized platforms. You don't own it. It's not it feels like a public space, but actually at the shopping mall. And I list down here in the right hand corner threads because there's very little difference between sproutable, post-news and threads. They're just who do you want to own your social space and how do you want them to run it? And to understand how all of these systems work, I've created this diagram that might make sense. The little people are individual users with Twitter or Instagram threads. Facebook, TikTok, everybody's relationship is through the central platform. You don't have any connection to anyone else with mastodon in the Fediverse. Everybody chooses which server and community to and that server controls everything. But you can move between servers and you can talk to people on other servers. You're choosing when you use mastodon in the Fediverse to not just have your username be minus rabble at mastodon.social, but also that mastodon.social is going to provide the technology infrastructure for you and the trucked in safety rules for you. So we see a bunch of people in organizations that actually go in and sit existing in there. Now, Discord is someone asked a question, where does Discord? Discord is a centralized server, only one company runs it. But from a user's perspective, it works much more like mastodon in the Fediverse because you have communities of users who go and create that. Telegram is a great question. Telegram is a very centralized chat platform. In terms of its technology, it works exactly the same way as Twitter or Instagram or Reddit. There's a single company that controls everything. And when you think about Discord and Telegram, you have groups, you have communities and in those groups and communities, there are people who are moderators and they get to make the decisions. But the platform still owns and controls this. What does that mean? Look at the Reddit rebellion that happened. A bunch of Reddit users didn't like that Reddit, the company was shutting down third party applications and charging them more than they could do to exist. So the moderators of the communities helped and they acted like a union. And they turned all of their subreds private and they closed out the community and they created acts of civil disobedience. But because Reddit controls all the servers, all Reddit did was remove the moderator privileges or delete the accounts of everybody leading the rebellion. And so it was very hard to continue that. And this fight between the user communities and the platforms was lost because the platforms. Control the servers. Someone else asked about signal signals at interesting hybrid. It is open source, but it is not an open network. Signal does a very good job of protecting privacy. Things are encrypted on your device and the only people who can see them are the recipients of the messages. But everything has to go through the signal servers. And so signal does a great job of protecting your privacy, but they don't do it any work on protecting your autonomy. If signal were to decide that they didn't want encryption the next day, then it would go away. You don't have any say they do things where they promise it. They show you the source code. You could audit the source code and I trust signal a lot. But if they weren't to go evil, there's nothing we could do about it. Now, another set of protocols that I want to talk to you about that you might have heard of is Noster and Blue Sky, both of which have been in the news. The way both of these systems work is and they're the communities that you are very different. They're positioning in the media is very different, but the underlying technology is essentially identical. You have multiple applications that are your client applications. And those client applications can talk to multiple servers. So the user controls their identity, their account, the user controls their social graphic where they're connected to and which communities they're participating in. The servers just host your content for you. So the servers don't have the power of mastodon where there's many different fiefdoms or the corporate platforms where everything is centralized under single corporation. And I think that the Noster Blue Sky model is the model we want to go to for building a comments. Lastly, there are what I call cryptocurrency social media protocols where the problem of abuse and harassment and government governance is handled by financial currencies and being able to pay. And so sometimes you need to pay to not have spam. You need to pay to have spam. You need to pay to have an account to register your name. I think it's a terrible idea to intermix them and would recommend everybody stay away from the social media protocols that are using blockchain directly because it's just bad. So why protocols? I think I've talked about this some platforms are like shopping malls. When you go under shopping mall, it feels like a public space, but you have no free speech rights. If you start organizing a protest in a shopping mall, the mall cop will pick show up and pepper spray you and drive you out of the mall or politely ask you to leave, depending on where you are. You can't then go and say, what about my First Amendment rights? What about my free speech rights? Because it's not actually public space. It's a space provided by a corporation for the corporation's needs. What open protocols give us is a commons, which is a shared public space under shared governance. And that commons, I think, is the thing that most aligns with what all of us do in the nonprofit space, which is creating a civil society where communities of people can come together and solve their own problems and make their own rules. This gets back to elder Ostrom stuff, where she states that. We have an alternative to the state owning and controlling everything or corporations owning and controlling things. We have community ownership, which doesn't mean a free for all, but it means that people can do local regulation and enforcement of that without central, higher authority, either corporations or the state. And what we're building and all of these social media protocols are a network of commons that can we can then use to communicate and organize. When we think about the social media protocols and the commons, what is a commons? A commons has clear design group boundaries, rules that are make sense for local conditions. They ability to enforce those rules, the ability to make rules and understand who the rules are, a system of being able to help people to accountable, prosecute people from violating the rules and build up self governance and the ability to exist in the larger society. I think a lot of you are probably familiar with their work. Given all that and where we come from, what are the alternatives? How what should you be looking at now? What should you be looking at now? And I don't have great answers for that, except to say, I think that there are several things that I think people with all the communications and technology and nonprofits should be looking at and following. And I think it's a moment of experimentation and engaging in several places at the same time. First off, by far the largest community that is independent corporate control is the Fediverse. Most of you probably know this as Mastodon. Mastodon is one set of software and one way of using it. But there are video streaming things that look like YouTube that are decentralized. There's something called Pixel Fed, which is more Instagram. They're right freely, which is more like medium Lemmy, which is more like. Reddit, there's mobile is on, which is more like meetups, there are all these different applications and you can install and use them. One of my problems with the Fediverse and why I think we need to look at other platforms is. They don't interoperate very well. So if I run a peer tube to host videos and you run a peer tube to host videos, our users can change videos back and forth and follow people and it works. But it won't know who my friends are and what my account and what my data is from my Mastodon server and it won't be able to connect to who my friends are on Lemmy with the Reddit thing. Or when I go through to write freely, which is a media like thing, it can't figure out that I'm the same person who's doing these Mastodon or sharing these videos or photos on Pixel Fed. And it's a tool that allows a lot of collaboration, but it ends up repeating part of the problem of vertical silos. Another system you might have heard of is Blue Sky. There's a lot of misinformation about Blue Sky because it makes a good story. Blue Sky was initially funded when Jack Dorsey was still running Twitter. And it is an entirely independent company from Twitter. Twitter put in money and got no ownership of it. Jack Dorsey pushed money to get it built, but is not involved in the operations in any way whatsoever. He has a board seat, but he doesn't own or control it. And Twitter and Blue Sky. First goal is to build something like a better Twitter. But that can open up and exist as a commons where users can migrate their accounts, where users can choose which trust and safety regime they want and how they want to work. The issue that's based with Blue Sky is. It grew very quickly as people left Twitter and left what Elon Musk was doing to Twitter. And the community of users want something that is entirely at odds with the mission of the company and the platform. The community wants a better Twitter. The people building Blue Sky want an open commons where you can't. Delete, you can't prevent the Nazis from being able to speak because it works like the web. You can't prevent Kiwi farms from running their hate website. And what you can do, though, is you can build the ability to have a commons where you set boundaries and rules and enforcement around different spaces. Another one is Nostar. Nostar is very similar to Blue Sky, except that Blue Sky is run by a company that got funded by Twitter and Nostar is run by a community of hackers. And Blue Sky is more like a cathedral and Nostar is more like a bazaar. They do very similar things, attempting to solve very similar problems. And at some point they're going to interoperate. Because Nostar doesn't have a company controlling it, you have many different kinds of applications that are built up on top of it. You have a meetup app, you have a Q&A app, you have a bunch of others. And one of the things that I've been working on is trying to provide a easily accessible community control thing. And so this is this app that I built. And I'm not saying you should use my app just that I've been in the space of working on it and it's attending to make a tool that uses control where they get to divide their own enemies. And in particular, because of my own activist background, we're building into a whole bunch of features around communications, event organizing and fundraising. We have seen that the ability to fundraise for nonprofits and collect donations is really powerful. But one of the problems with centralized platforms is they don't want us to reach our own audience. Facebook did all this work, got everyone to create Facebook pages for their organizations, they got millions of people to like them. And then when you post a Facebook, only 5% of the people who like your page ever see the content. And so what we're trying to do is build a platform for organizing where the connection between individuals and the organization they're connected to is direct and not mediated through a platform. And if you want to do fundraising, if you want to do calls to action, engagements, everything else, it is a connection that is as valuable as having someone's email address or phone number, but is rich as the social media applications. So that is a little bit of what we talked about. I would love to I'm going to skip back to the first slide here. And I would love to hear any questions. I didn't we have a bit of time here, 20 minutes. And let's see folks who come in with connections. Yeah, so the plans for interoperability between the platforms, Eli, is that with centralized platforms, you needed to ask permission with the Vettiverse and the emerging decentralized platforms like Nostra and Blue Sky. You don't need to ask for permission. You just need the user's information. For example, in North Social, Maya, it's running on Nostra. But if you put in a mastodon style username, it goes to the gateway and follows people through the Vettiverse. And the gateways that are being developed between Nostra and Blue Sky work the same way. There is multiple servers that do translations and all of this. And the Blue Sky user will think they're following people who are on Blue Sky. And the Nostra user will be following people on Nostra. And the servers on the back end will translate and we sign all the messages back and forth, the platform that is leading all of this translation interoperability stuff is actually something called Matrix, which is a chat and group messaging platform that supports interoperability with everything. And so we are learning from Matrix on how to build on things. Feel free to ask other questions. Yeah, so I think we don't know which of these platforms will take hold. We don't know what will work. But if I were a nonprofit, I would look at some of what, for example, the European Union did to the European Union. The institution that is in Brussels. He had used Twitter accounts for their public messaging and their announcements. And instead of registering an account master on social and making a thing, they set up their own domain name and their own server and they put all of their official accounts on there. And then they published to them. And then they also went and created official accounts on many other platforms. And they were able to own their own domain names. As Darius said, they were able to control their relationships and they're not running an open social platform for everyone. They're doing the willy for them to publish their stuff. And I think that is the most important thing. And then taking that content and publishing it in all of these different places, because the audience is much more fragmented. And so I don't think it makes sense for organizations to stop publishing to Instagram or people who are on TikTok to stop making viral videos on TikTok or even stop using Twitter. But I think you need to think about the platforms that you have on these new protocols, Nostra, Blue Sky, master on the better verse. There are many different servers beyond mastodon that you can use. As having a value similar to having your membership bases, emails and phone numbers, and that's a much more direct way to connect to them. And you're not going to have a platform say, we really won't show your messages to people because you are buying advertising. And to me, that's critical that we control our own relationships and we own the space where we communicate in terms of nonprofits. That lets you do your own fundraising, do your own communication, and you don't have Meta coming along and saying, why don't you just buy ads or TikTok as a fundraising platform that where they take a majority of the revenue from it, which is crazy. If you are someone has a question, this is interesting, but how is it relayed back to nonprofits? If you do marketing, say for social media, for a library, how do you use this information? I think you use it by saying that you need to start looking at where people are going and we have a fragmentation of the world. And you need to publish your content and engage in conversations in all of these places. And maybe there's a server that many libraries are sharing, you can set up an account there on your website, you can talk about that, you can set up software that cross posts between all these other things. There are tools like Hootsuite and others, buffer that you use for marketing that will publish out all these systems and then bring the information back in and realize that you want to prioritize the ones that aren't going to control you in the long term. And so I think that's the thing you want to do. And I would say someone else has a question of who controls the host for the nonprofits, there are many services you can pay a reasonable amount per month. And they will do all of the security updates and maintenance and everything else to host these different services. And I highly recommend that you outsource that to someone to pay for it. But the organization should own its own domain name. It's really important that you be able to own your own means of communication. Because if you don't, then all of a sudden we could have a thing happen like what Elon Musk did when he took over Twitter. I'm happy to take more questions. If there aren't any that I'm going to I'm going to wrap it up. But I think the biggest takeaway is that at the moment, the Fediverse and Masternaut is one piece of software in it. Is the first place you should go and you should do it not an exclusion of the corporate platforms, but in addition to them and publicize that to your base in your audience. That's where you're publishing. And I think it's important to have accounts on Blue Sky and Nostra and other things like that as a way of experimenting going forward. With the realization that that's not the audience. One one last part that I think people might not have heard is when Meta launched their new threads project product, which got 150 million users signing up for it within a week. They promised that they would interoperate with Mastodon and the Fediverse. And that's a huge thing because it takes what was the closed platform of Facebook for so long and says that the open version may end up winning. And if they really do support it, it means that the Fediverse goes from a project of a few million people actively using it every day to hundreds of millions of people actively using it. And that's very powerful. Now, Billy asked, how do you engage with me in my work? You can follow us on social media. If you go to Nostrum, you can sign up for our beta of the app. It's only on iOS at the moment. But there's also access to the rest of our posts on social media. We have a mailing list and the the last thing is that the there are a whole series of events and conferences and things that are going on in this space and people experimenting. Every summer, the Internet Archive organizes the decentralized WebCamp, which brings all the people in the space together. It's a really fantastic event and they offer discount or free tickets for people who volunteer. And the there are meetings and meetups for people doing the Fediverse all the time all over the world. And I highly recommend that you research more and engage with this. I want to thank everybody for sitting here listening to me. I hope that the history and context of this was useful. And I would say that, you know, to me, the biggest outcome is that we've been in this struggle between open protocols and community driven social media platforms and corporate ones for as long as we've had the Internet. And there have been times in which companies have taken control and controlled all the social spaces. That's what it felt like when AOL came out. I read them in Meta and Facebook and TikTok controlled everything. But there have also been times in history when it was entirely community control and it really has been a comments. And I think if we realize that we can push the pendulum so it stays as a community driven project more and longer. And we can carve out space that doesn't have to just be around selling people things. Thank you very much. I hope this was useful. It's a little weird not being able to. Yeah, Ravel, thank you so much for taking the time to drop your knowledge and experience with us. That was a really insightful and helpful play of history in the last 20 years or so, and also a great framework for us to start thinking about more sovereignty around our data and ways to think about moving into a more decentralized technology strategy and implementation. It's clear that some folks are asking questions about the direct connection from where we are now in this conversation to implementation. And we want to it's probably important to name that this conversation or talk wasn't about the implementation part. As Ravel mentioned, this is much more of a framework and a mental model or set of mental models to think about decentralization in a way that's relevant to your work. And if you're interested in taking this conversation further, we we have a Slack channel. We have a public good app house Slack forum where we can be in conversation. So tune in for that. But for now, please, anyone who enjoyed the fun, the fun ride tonight, please give some reactions of celebration and love to Ravel. Thank you for joining us and we hope to have you on again sometime.