When you’re in an open source community, you’re a part of a collective effort with a common goal. In the fediverse, there are early adopters doing a lot of the heavy lifting now. They’re the voices you want to follow to make sense of the place.

One such person is Chris Trottier. Chris describes himself as a “fediverse enthusiast” (he’s also passionate about video games). He’s a sage presence who makes smart observations and has a 10,000-foot view of all the innovation happening on the open social web — not to mention a few ideas of his own.

Highlights of this conversation:

00:48 Why Chris got involved with the fediverse 03:50 Hootsuite and Twitter APIs 05:35 A-ha moment from joining fediverse 10:05 Twitter’s original sin 11:55 Running own server at AtomicPoet.org 13:05 What is Akkoma 16:00 Chris’s take on PeerTube 19:31 Sora — third part client that lets you choose your own algorithm 21:43 Revitalizing social media UX 23:14 “The Doom of social media” 24:35 Accelerated innovation and developers 26:40 Where Chris discovers fediverse innovation 27:40 What Chris would love to build in the fediverse 30:15 Addressing the problem of survivability 33:00 The next wave of social 36:35 Power of open social graph 38:35 Leaving the city of Big Social 40:98 Where Mike sees this all going 42:22 Better topics in the fediverse

Services mentioned in this episode include:

Friendica - https://friendi.ca/ - a decentralized social network Misskey - https://misskey-hub.net/en/ - a microblogging platform Akkoma - https://akkoma.social/ - “sorta like the child of Twitter and email” Macstodon - https://github.com/smallsco/macstodon - a Mastodon client for Classic Mac OS DOStodon - https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon - a Mastodon client for MS-DOS Amidon - https://github.com/BlitterStudio/amidon - a Mastodon client for Amiga computers Sora - https://mszpro.com/sorasns - a futuristic iOS app for Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey; uses local machine learning to rank posts and feature contents to you Bluesky Firehose - https://firesky.tv/ - republishes every new post/reply from the Bluesky firehose in real-time Castling Club - https://castling.club/ - chess game built on top of ActivityPub

🔎 You can find Chris in the fediverse at @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @mike@flipboard.com

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave

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