Post Status Happiness Hour Session Five

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, Michelle Frechette sits down with Doc, a professional yo-yoer and creator of engaging content around the Fediverse. They delve into the evolution of social media platforms, exploring how different channels like Twitter, TikTok, and Mastodon offer unique ways to connect with various audiences. Doc shares insights on integrating WordPress with the Fediverse and discusses his work with Automatic, including the quirky and creative content he produces. They also touch on the importance of local community engagement and the future of social media platforms. Tune in to learn about the latest in WordPress, social media trends, and how to embrace the diverse digital landscape.

Top Takeaways:

• Evolving Social Media Landscape: Social media platforms continually evolve, with newer platforms like TikTok and Mastodon offering different ways to connect and engage compared to older ones like Facebook and Twitter.
  
• Importance of Platform Diversity: Using a variety of social media platforms can help reach different audiences and fulfill different purposes. Doc Pop highlights the benefits of embracing both mainstream and niche platforms to connect with specific communities.
  
• Fediverse Integration: Connecting WordPress sites to the Fediverse through plugins like Activity Pub can enhance visibility and engagement within decentralized social networks, allowing content to reach broader, niche audiences.
  
• Creative Content Production: Doc Pop discusses the value of producing creative and engaging content, such as hand-drawn animations and cheesy puns, to make technical topics more accessible and enjoyable.
  
• Community Building and Local Engagement: Building and participating in local communities, whether through small events or local meetups, can be rewarding and impactful. Doc emphasizes the importance of fostering these connections in both the WordPress and yo-yo communities.

Mentioned In The Show:

• Torque Magazine
• Doc Popular
• Facebook 
• X
• TikTok
• Mastodon 
• Threads
• Activity Pub
• Buddy Press 
• Fediverse
• Reddit 
• Automattic 
• The Verge
• Doc Popular About Page
• Fediverse
• The Fediverse Files

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Doctor Popular 
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

[00:00:02] Michelle Frechette: Welcome to the happiness hour. How are you, doc?

[00:00:05] Doc: I’m doing great, Michelle. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:08] Michelle Frechette: Thanks for joining me. It feels like a little bit of a role reversal, if I’m being honest.

[00:00:13] Doc: Yeah, absolutely. It’s on the other side of the screen. Yes. Yes. I’m excited to be a guest on your show. And I love your background, by the way. I always compliment your setup, but today this is. This is so far beyond what it was before. I feel like this is great. I love that.

[00:00:32] Michelle Frechette: This is my home office. And since I only work from home now, I needed to. I needed to make it feel like, you know, comfortable. So I got my, my photography, I’ve got my dad’s guitars and instruments. I’ve got my speaker jersey from Phoenix last year. I got my coworker of the day, Jeff.

[00:00:50] Doc: Hi, Jeff.

[00:00:51] Michelle Frechette: Wave, Jeff. Yeah. So this is, this is my spare. Well, it would be the spare bedroom if it wasn’t my home office.

[00:00:59] Doc: Yes. It’s great. I love it.

[00:01:00] Michelle Frechette: Thank you. Thanks. I enjoy being in here myself. So what you can’t see is everything piled on the desk in front of me. I just make sure it’s really clear behind me.

[00:01:10] Doc: Yo yos, a sponge. This thing

[00:01:13] Michelle Frechette: We have, well, I mean, those are all important things. If anybody watches you on TikTok and all of the other places, they will recognize all of those items for sure. So it’s hard to believe there are people who don’t know who you are. But if you would take a moment and just introduce yourself in case there is somebody who’s never heard of Doc before.

[00:01:35] Doc: My name is Doc. I have a long history as a musician and professional Yo-Yoer and comic book artist. The past ten years I was working for Torque Magazine, which covers WordPress news. I was working for WP Engine covering that. And I was doing a series of live streams near the end as well as like, I think I ran the Press This Podcast for four years. It was a very fun journey that ended in March of this year after. After just shy of 10 years. Like nine. Nine years, eleven months. No one cares. And currently I’m making a series of videos about the fediverse for Automattic and WordPress.com. but I am still a freelancer. I’m not an Automattician.

[00:02:20] Michelle Frechette: Very good. And I missed having you run the Torque Social Hour on Wednesdays. And so before we started setting up this happiness hour, in case anybody’s curious, I did reach out to you and make sure that you didn’t feel like I was stepping on your toes or usurping any of your previous space, but it felt like there was a gap that needed to be filled where you had left a pretty big footprint. And hopefully I do it a little bit of justice in starting to pull the people, people out and talk to people in WordPress about the things that are going on for them. So thank you for your kindness in supporting me in this. I appreciate it.

[00:02:56] Doc: Well, I want to say thanks for this, not just for replacing the Torque Social Hour, but also we lost the WP Water Cooler recently, and I think there’s a lot of room for what you’re doing and kind of a lack of news this past year in particular, lack of news and coverage and, you know, plus community building like this. So it’s really cool that you’re doing this.

[00:03:20] Michelle Frechette: Well, thank you. And it’s really nice to have you here. It feels like if I could, it’s gonna sound so silly, but it’s almost like a little fangirl moment, like when I can have you on my show as opposed to having been invited on yours all of these years. So thank you again for being here. I appreciate it. And I reached out to you and very early on and said, I’d love to have you on the show. And you’re like, yeah, we could do something, whatever. And then I was like, hey, can we talk about the fediverse? Because I started to see your videos that are for Automattic. And WordPress.com, especially on TikTok, was the first place I saw them, I believe. But then I’ve seen them in other places as well and on WordPress.coms blog also. So I have been intrigued about the fediverse. I guess it’s my show. I can say that Twitter has turned into this giant shit show over the last few years, right? It’s very much owned by one person who who rules it with an iron fist. And although I am still very, very active there, because that’s where a lot of my interaction happens, I have joined Mastodon, I am on Threads, and I’ve had people challenging me. Like, I don’t see you on there very much. And so now I’m trying to cross post all the things so that I can help people in different areas, especially with, like, my Wednesday tweets, the job threads that I put out there. People are like, hey, can you do that in, like, LinkedIn? I’m like, I can’t do a whole thread like that because I don’t have the time. So I found this thing called Unroll Me, which gives you a link that has the list of all the things. And so I’m able now to share those across multiple platforms to help people, but that’s only because they exist. But I’ll tell you, when I first tried to join Mastodon, it was confusing as hell because I had no idea. Like, you joined Twitter, you just joined Twitter. You’re sitting on somebody’s server. You don’t know it’s owned by Twitter, right, or X or whatever. But with Mastodon, you have to find a server. You have to hope they don’t close their server down. I did lose my server and have to migrate to someplace else, which was not. Yeah, I mean, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought, but it wasn’t easy either. Right. So, like, there’s just things that go on with that. And so for me, who’s using it but not understanding exactly how it works, I did watch your seven minute video this morning. So a little bit better idea. The first video on WordPress.com that you have out there, I think there was some ukulele playing or something.

[00:05:45] Doc: Oh, yeah, there’s everything in there. It’s like a schoolhouse rocks of the fediverse.

[00:05:50] Michelle Frechette: I also want to know who was throwing the paper wads at you, but tell us about that later. But tell us a little bit about the fediverse. Why is it interesting to you? Tell us about the project that you’re working on. We’d love to hear.

[00:06:02] Doc: Sure. So the fediverse is a series of apps that are connected through a shared protocol. And the most common fediverse is powered by Activity Pub. So some people say the fediverse is a capital or proper noun, right? You know, capital f, fediverse. And it is Activity Pub. And other people say, no, anything that’s kind of using this system. So, like, eventually Blue Sky will have things kind of connected to it and eventually other, you know, Noster and things like that. So there will, I think, be multiple fediverses, and then they’ll have little bridges that connect them. But at its core, it’s just this idea that you have this one protocol that everyone says, okay, we’re going to use this thing and everything’s built on top of it. Now, what that allows us to do is create a social network that you can follow people on other social networks. You don’t have to just be limited to Instagram. It’s sort of like as if you could be on Instagram by choice, but follow people on YouTube and leave a comment on YouTube from your Instagram account. That’s kind of the dream and exactly what you’re talking about. Uh, the idea of, like, oh, man, I’ve got, I’ve got my X, I’ve got threads. I’ve got Blue Sky. I’ve got, uh, probably LinkedIn. You’re probably sharing stuff on. I’m just guessing. Like, there’s.

[00:07:18] Michelle Frechette: Yeah.

[00:07:18] Doc: And then Mastodon on top of that. And that’s not fun to have to go in and copy paste. And it’s never just as easy as copy pasting, right. It’s always this thing of, like, uh, you have to get it right and maybe even speak a lingo a little bit or whatever.

[00:07:30] Michelle Frechette: And like how many characters each one are you allowed? And all of those things. Yeah.

[00:07:35] Doc: So the idea with the fediverse is that you won’t have to do that. That you can pick the one that you want. And if it’s federated, I can pick the one that I want and I can follow you and other people can follow you and comment and like. And it’s not just like, it’s. It is very similar to RSS because I think a lot of people watching this probably are familiar with RSS, where, you know, the people are kind of hosting their sites, and anytime they write a blog post, it updates their RSS. And if you have an RSS reader, you get notified. You don’t have to come and check their site and log into their site and all the time. But the difference with, with Activity Pub and RSS is RSS was one way. So if you had a RSS reader and you were kind of subscribing to all your favorite blogs, you still had to go to that blog to leave a comment or, you know, create an account on there to, you know, like it or whatever. But what’s happening now is, is that we have this, this thing, this Activity Pubs, very similar to a two way RSS. And the, the sign up, like you said, for the moment, is pretty tough. You know, you were saying the first thing you had to do on, on Mastodon is pick a server. But it’s, it’s kind of funny. I think that’ll get smoothed over. But it is kind of funny because if someone came to you and said, I want a WordPress site, you’d have just the same amount of difficulty. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s WordPress. Okay, cool. You’ve picked that up. But, you know, you got to pick out your server, you got to pick out your host or whatever, right? Like, and there’s also, like. And, you know, this, that, that sort of thing, the same onboarding stuff. I think in the fediverse that a lot of open source projects in particular WordPress, have so very similar. How do we. Because you don’t want to be like, making a video saying, okay, if you want to join WordPress, if you want a WordPress site, then here’s the place. You feel weird driving traffic to a company. You kind of want to leave it very ambiguous. And that’s what we’re having in the fediverse  is I use Mastodon social. It’s kind of like one of the big ones. But in my videos, even I’m like, reluctant to tell you, like, the easiest thing is to go and sign up for this one thing because we do want everybody distributed. We don’t want one person to win. So we’re going through the same conflicts that you’ve heard in the WordPress space for many years in terms of like, how do we, how do we make this easier to get people just to, they say they want to do this thing. What’s the one click to get it in? And there’s always these little tiny hurdles, but in the end we have a more open system.

[00:09:50] Michelle Frechette: It reminds me a little bit of like, when people were like, oh, cloud computing. Like, cloud is great. It’s in the cloud. And like, like the undertone was the cloud is other people’s computers. Like, it’s not really like in the sky somewhere, right? And like, my mom, who’s older, is like, what do you mean? It’s other people’s computers? Well, it’s not just in the ether, mom. The ether is not what is, like, what you think it is. Right? So that kind of thing. The same is true here. And like you said, like finding the server that you want to be. Perhaps the hurdle is we don’t think about social media that way, right? And so let’s say Mastodon, for example, and Threads, it’s still somebody’s computer somewhere, right? But you have to choose which one. For Mastodon especially, you have to choose which one you want to be involved with. And so with Twitter, with Facebook, with Instagram, I don’t have to do that. I just created a create account and it’s there. So there was that little, like, mental hurdle of, yes, it’s still social, but there’s a little more involved in setting it up so that you actually do have this freedom. But also because it’s other people’s servers, there’s also can be a cost involved with it. Right? So, like, if I’m on social as well, I was on somebody else’s, and it was starting to cost them too much money to run that, which is why instead of asking people to donate to keep their server space running, they decided to close it down and have us move someplace else, which is fine. That’s their prerogative. No ill feelings at all. Moments of panic when I was trying to figure out how to make it work. Anamika Bovalette, she got on a. Bless her, she got on a Zoom with me and walked me through the process of how to move from one server to the other, because for whatever reason, I was just not getting it or just overwhelmed with the idea. So there is a little bit more involved in setting it up, but once you set it up, it’s the same as posting any place else, which I think is true. The benefits outweigh the, like, the somebody owning all of your data kind of thing, right? So we know. I guess it’s possible you could get kicked off. So somebody, if you’re saying things that go against your server owners, whatever, there are rules about, they can set up rules about those things, but also, different servers are set up almost like neighborhoods in a way. So there can be. There can be similarities in the people who are. Maybe similarity is not the right word, but you explain it, because I’m not. I’m struggling right now to explain it, but I know that, for example, I know David Wolfpaws on a server that is really LGBTQ oriented, and so that’s like, his neighborhood.

[00:12:33] Doc: There’s. So I’m on kind of a. Just a vanilla Mastodon server that happened to be created by the founder of, like, Mastodon. And I picked it so that I could get kind of like, the bleeding edge updates that they might roll out. You know, they’re going to roll things out there first. I guess it’s sort of maybe the equivalent of being on, like, WordPress.com or something like that. It’s sort of like a version of that that you could be on. And then there’s. There’s other. I think communities is a way to put it, but other servers, and each of them has their own rules. And David Wolfpaw is on, I think, Tech LGBT. No, I can’t remember the. The server, but it’s, you know, it’s a Tech LGBTQ server, and they’re, you know, the advantages of doing something like that, like joining a server like that, might be if you’ve had a lot of harassment in the past and maybe you want to have a community that’s not just about the community, that not just your neighbors on the server, but also that your moderators are kind of like really doing a good job. And moderation in the fediverse comes down to the moderators because if you have this thing where anybody can set up a server and kind of send spam or hate or whatever, the way that we fix this is very similar to how we fix it in email, right? My email can’t edit someone else’s email. You know, Google can’t go in and change the text of an email, but what they can do is they can say, hey, you’ve been flagged as spam or a scam or phishing or hate or whatever. So we’re just going to block you. And if a server is doing too much, if that person just kind of joins another, creates another account on the same email server, then Google might just block that whole server. So that’s what the server kind of community does is their moderators are going to be listening to reports and if they get a lot, they’ll be like, hey, we’re seeing that this one specific server hate.mammoth or something is just set up just a troll. We’re just going to block them. And we’re also going to publish this suggestion to this list that we’re on so that other communities don’t have to, they can see our suggestion, they can take it or not. It’s not like you, the user is going to have to go through this. But the moderators do, which is a lot of work, bless the moderators for all their work. It’s kind of like, again, going back to WordPress, it’s like the people who review, you know, code code submissions or review plugins or stuff like that. Like the volunteers there, it’s very similar to that. Yeah. And then, you know, like you said, they have vibes and you can opt to see the people on your server, which is kind of different than like how X or Threads works. It would be sort of similar to like a list, you know, if you had like a list of friends that were interested in WordPress and a list of friends that were interested in, you know, something else. Right, like cats. But it’s like a whole server dedicated to that. But that doesn’t mean you’re, you’re limited to just seeing cat post or posting about cats. You know, for the most part, you could just be on any server that you like because you like their policies or whatever, because it’s a friends, you know, server and you could just post to the rest of the fediverse and you’re just a first class citizen of the whole fediverse. You’re not just on, on that thing. But that was verbia. Hopefully that worked.

[00:15:36] Michelle Frechette: It kinda, correct me if I’m wrong, but in my head it’s kind of reminding me of Reddit, how there are subreddits and you could join different subreddits, but you could also look at them without joining the subreddit because I love Reddit. So I’m all over there all the time and each subreddit has its own set of rules and moderators within that subreddit that you misbehave. They can kick you out of that, but it hasn’t removed you from Reddit altogether. Is that similar?

[00:16:01] Doc: That’s a great analogy. That’s probably better than saying it’s discord because you do have to join a discord server where if you’re looking at other people’s Mastodon servers, it’s just a website and you just go and you just see the community there and stuff like that. Some people might have their settings to private, which makes sense, but for the most part you can just visit and you don’t ever have to actually join and create a second account like you do on Discord. So I think Reddit comparison is a great analogy. The one difference is if, if Reddit shut down, all those communities are gone. If Mammoth shut down, all those communities are still there and they, you know, it’s an open source thing. They could spin it up a different way or whatever. But there’s no, there’s no one person at the top that could flip off a switch and kill all those communities overnight. And there, there is actually, you know, the, the fediverse, we talk about it like it’s very easy to think of the fediverse as Mastodon. It’s the way that a lot of us, this way that, you know, you and I got into it and tried experimenting. It’s our first kind of experience with it. But there are UH, YouTube, uh, Clones or YouTube versions that are on the fediverse and they’re peer to peer hosted. So uh, the files are being hosted by people who are watching the files and the comments and interactions are all done through Activity Pub. So it’s federated and I can follow them from Mastedon, I can follow the peer tube. And similarly there’s a whole Reddit, it’s called Lemmy. And you know, it’s probably always insulting to say, you know, this is, this is the YouTube for the fediverse and this is the, the Reddit for the fediverse. And this is the Instagram for the fediverse. But like, just to kind of help give an idea, there is an online community called Lemmy that is set up with the same exact structure as Reddit has. So you have forms, you create one account, but you join forums within your account and you can join the Morrowind or this or whatever, but it’s all hosted on decentralized servers. Again, there’s not one switch that gets flipped off and they’re doing surprisingly well. I’m not an active Reddit user, so I can’t really compare the two. I haven’t like jumped on board with Lemmy, but I’ve gone on to like, there’s a WordPress page on, let me, like a, you know, r WordPress for Reddit, there’s one for Lemmy. And it’s very active. Like it’s a, it’s, you know, there’s, there’s certain communities, I guess obviously an open source community to like WordPress is going to be a little more active on something, you know, like that for, for the fediverse.

[00:18:24] Michelle Frechette: How does one spell, let me, because I want to investigate it later.

[00:18:27] Doc: L e m m y.

[00:18:29] Michelle Frechette: Thank you. Yeah, check that out later for sure. What’s interesting to me, so I was, I’m older, and so I remember when the Internet was first coming to the general public, right? I know it existed a long time ago in different various formats, but back in 1993, I believe, I was working at a college where we first got the internet. And I remember them saying, oh, you have the internet now. And I remember thinking, what do I do with it? Right? So, like, I remember going, I was like, I don’t even know what to look for because I mean, clearly in the early days, everybody didn’t have a website, but I live in Rochester, New York, so I was like, I wonder if Kodak has one. So I typed in Kodak.com and sure enough, Kodak had a website.

So I remember looking through it and I was on a tiny little Mac, like one of those ones where you had to put the disks underneath. Like it was like this biggest screen, right? Tiny little thing. And I was, and I was like checking it out and I hit the back button and realized that the link color had changed. So where all the links were purple on black to begin with. Now that link was yellow or vice versa. And I was like, oh, they know where I’ve been, right? So like, that was the whole idea of like, they’re watching us, big brother’s watching us kind of thing. But the idea that the internet would just live on a computer at that point in time. But now it’s apps, it’s discord, it’s all of the things that we can do because the web exists, not just these websites that we visit. So like for example, we’re streaming on the web right now through something called Streamyard. I could have Zoom on my phone, right? Like it’s not just all in just one place. So I think the fediverse allows us to think about that in more ways than we could have, you know, 30 something years ago when I first discovered that links changed colors when you changed pages kind of thing. For sure, it is all very fascinating. And for somebody who doesn’t code at all, like me, it’s still a little like out there, as far as I understand that it works. I don’t always have to understand how things work to know that they work, but it’s super, super interesting. Now you are doing a series of videos for Automattic about the fediverse. I discovered the first one. Are there more that are already out? I think there’s maybe three or four that are out, right?

[00:20:50] Doc: There will be five in the first series and we’ll see, you know, hopefully there’s more series in the future. Uh, and the first three are out. The one with, um. Yeah, so the very first one is, what is the fediverse? It’s like, uh, hopefully an explainer for, for anyone, no matter how non technical they are. It’s just, uh, hopefully going to be helping them get on it. And then the second one is an interview with the co-creator of Activity Pub. And just hearing him talk about things like, he uses this analogy of like back in the, back in the day when you had a phone number, you couldn’t move it around from carrier to carrier, right? So you were kind of locked in. And then what the US government had to do in that particular case was open it up where you were allowed to move your phone around and saying kind of, that’s the sort of thing that we want to have with user accounts, right? Where you could move your account around and not even just your account, but also keep all your likes and history and post and even the followers if I move to a different server. So that’s, that’s a fun conversation that’s out there. And then the third episode is an interview with Bart DeCram, who’s building apps on the fediverse. He’s building an iOS app called Mammoth. And if you’re hearing this conversation and if you’re like I tried signing up for Mastodon. It was a pain in pain in the butt. Mammoth is definitely the best user onboarding experience, and they even have their own server, which you can opt, you know, to choose, but you’ll have this. It takes away a lot of that scary, like, what’s happening here kind of thing. So it’s really fun talking to him because he’s a really, he’s a really passionate guy. You just kind of talk to him and for the next week you’re kind of like, yeah, open source, open protocol.You’re just like excited about stuff.

[00:22:26] Michelle Frechette: So in that first video, I think it was almost seven minutes, if I remember correctly. So I watched the whole thing. I actually watched it at the regular speed. I often watch things at like one and a half speeds so that I can hear them faster, but I was like, I don’t want to miss anything. So I watched it at the actual speed.And you did talk about this on the screen. You did talk about Activity Pub and how it relates to WordPress because it’s actually a plugin in the WordPress repo that you can do. So if I have activity pub on my website, what does that do for me?

[00:22:56] Doc: So if you have the Activity Pub for WordPress plugin, you can write a post and obviously have it enabled set up. You can write a post and your post is now a first class citizen of the fediverse. And that’s the way Mateus Feverley puts it. He’s the creator of this plugin. And he was, you know, I was thinking of it as like, oh, so it’s like an auto share, right? Like it Automattically tweets or whatever, right? He’s like, no, it is a first class, it lives on the fediverse. Like when you make a change to your post, that change will be updated as it lives in there. And so that means that, again, using that RSS analogy, instead of like following someone’s blog through an RSS reader, you could just, in Mastodon, you could also sign up to my blog. You know, not me, but to my blog. And when I write a post, it just goes up there. And if you leave a comment on that post, right, just like it’s, you know, you just see it in your feed and it’s a blog post I shared, right? But you leave a comment that comments going to appear underneath my blog post, it’s a comment, like a real comment on my post. Or you could like it and it gets liked on my comment. You don’t have to create an account, you never have to visit my site. So for journalists, I think in particular, who have kind of put all their eggs into Facebook’s basket and then got screwed over by that, right? And they’re like, okay, we learned our lesson. We’re going to put our eggs in Twitter, right? And, you know, kind of, yeah, so like, this is a way for them to just focus on writing on their site. And now they don’t, they don’t have to, you know, not just share it to these platforms, but like, they don’t have to put their, their eggs into those things and watch it crumble. You know, hopefully the fediverse catches on, um, which is still, you know, it’s still growing. And so I’m saying, you know, if or when or whatever. But when that happens, then they’ll, they’ll really own their, their audience and they can, you know, move their site over, do whatever they want and their people can keep following them, not get disconnected, and, you know, not have an algorithm kind of obscure. Like, uh, you know, in the early days of Facebook, they were really promoting, you know, web traffic and then they kind of, you know, turn that dial down and you started barely getting anything unless you paid money for it. Well, no one could do that in the fediverse, right? So like, you know, we are seeing some news sites kind of adopt that. Like The Verge is really talking about what they want to do, you know, with Activity Pub integration and kind of like saying, this is everything else we’re doing right now is temporary. All this posting, everything. Our main goal is just to post on our site and you know, federate the content and have people comment on it from there.

[00:25:28] Michelle Frechette: And true to open source nature, this is in the repo, so it’s a free plugin as well that you can use on your website.

[00:25:35] Doc: Yeah, and it’s a bit of a suite too, because there’s a bunch of stuff built in the indie web community and kind of, I guess, just the indie web community. There’s things like Web Fingers, which allow when people mention your blog in a post on the fediverse, it also kind of connects to your blog in interesting ways. And that’s Web Fingers. Um, I don’t know how that works. Uh, I don’t know if it’s Activity Pub or what, but he, in this, uh, in the suite, when you activate it, you also have access to all these little different things that you can activate that really bring your site to life. It kind of adds all this. It turns your site into like a living organism in a weird way. Like you, sometimes you’re like getting comments and like, where did that come from? And you’re like, oh, it’s because of they mentioned it here and that’s federated. And so that mention shows up here even though they weren’t even replying to my fediverse post. And so, yeah, it’s really cool. It’s really exciting.

[00:26:27] Michelle Frechette: I think about sometimes like that when you create an Org chart, let’s say you’re using, I can’t even think of words right now. Like you’re creating a PowerPoint, for example, and you’ve got blocks and you’re connecting them and you draw a line between one and the other, and there’s like these terminals between the two. This is more like opening those channels so the information can flow as opposed to just putting point to one another, which is a much different way to handle it as well. Very cool. So what was the impetus for you to become part of this? I mean, obviously we all like to make money and jobs are jobs, but I feel like this is more than just a job. Taking on these videos and talking about the fediverse because somebody wanted to hire you to do it, it feels a little more personal to me how you’re getting involved with this. What are your feelings about the whole thing?

[00:27:16] Doc: It’s a passion project.

[00:27:20] Michelle Frechette:  I was gonna say. I’m not wrong, am I?

[00:27:21] Doc: Yeah, yeah, no, no, it’s absolutely like, um, when, you know, when I was, I was laid off from Torque earlier this year, I put out, I keep wanting to say tweet. I put up, put out a post right, on, on various networks, but, you know, put out a post saying, you know, I’m looking for new work. If I could do literally anything right now, I’d love to do something in the fediverse, like talking about the fediverse. Right. And obviously not coding because I’m not a coder and some folks at Automattic happen to be interested in doing something with that, right. So I don’t know that they were like, oh, we just need to hire Doc. I think it was sort of like they were looking at doing something around the fediverse. And then, you know, I opened up and it just, it, you know, it worked out. 

Michelle Frechette: The stars aligned.

Doc: Yeah, but what a dream job. And if it, and if it is just this one series, I’ll still be incredibly grateful because, um, I feel like we’re documenting something really interesting. You know, being able to interview these folks and hopefully explaining the stuff in a way that’s pretty intriguing. I do know a lot of folks that, you know, tried, you know, joining Mastodon, what, 2021 or whatever, when Elon bought Twitter, and, you know, they didn’t stick around. It didn’t stick around. But I have a optimistic feel for the long term of this because we have things like Threads, which is, you know, owned by Instagram or owned by Facebook. I guess they’re. They’re federating, right? There’s a federated thing. So we’re already seeing some large players integrate it. And I think we’re still also figuring out what else could be done because we’re just mostly thinking about it as a social media platform. But I think there’s some really cool stuff that could be done that we haven’t figured out. And I think that we’re seeing explorations on things that we. We can’t even. I can’t even tell you what they might be because they’re such new concepts. But, like, as an example, right, if podcasting switched from RSS, which is an open protocol that anybody can publish a podcast, and you can choose any podcast reader and follow them, you’re not, like, in Spotify, right? You can do whatever you want. Well, if they switch to Activity Pub, just as an example, you could have the opportunity to, like and comment on a post and see other people’s likes and comments. And there could be a whole. I mean, I know some podcasters a little, like, iffy about, like, having comments up here, but there could be a whole new wave of sharing and interactions that happen to things that we already have existed, and there could be things that we haven’t even thought of that are out there that could be connected to this. But in the. In the early days, it is very similar to, I was on Twitter in 2007, and trying to get my friends to join Twitter was just a giant pain. They were like, I’m on Facebook, bro. I’m happy. Like, just. Just use Facebook, you know, and. And I wasn’t even like, oh, Facebook is evil, or whatever. I just kind of really like this thing. But trying to explain why, you know, to people and how to use, uh, at signs, right. How to, you know.

Michelle Frechette: And hashtags.

Doc: Yeah, hashtags. Yeah. Like, it was. It was hard. And so, like, for me, you know, I was there for the birth of web two, and I lived in San Francisco, where it was kind of all around, and, you know, there was, like, parties happening because someone tweeted something. And that night, there was, like, a massive get together. You know, I kind of remember seeing that enthusiasm and stuff, and then seeing people build on the APIs and then seeing the APIs get closed and kind of the fragileness of all that. And I feel like, I feel like I’ve gone back in time ten years or something, maybe more than ten years, 15 years. And all of a sudden I feel like we’re in the same exciting, like explaining how this works. Some people get it, some people are like, that sounds weird. But then, you know, I think, I think ten years from now, it’ll just be very normal. And you won’t even use the word fediverse, you won’t use Activity Pub. Just like you don’t say, you know, what’s your RSS feed? I want to subscribe to your podcast. You just say, oh, what’s the name of your, you know, I think we’ll, we’ll eventually get there. But for right now, it is kind of like, you know, I’m trying to figure out how to explain it and people are trying to figure out what exactly the advantages are and servers. And I think, I think, you know, ten years from now, it’s going to be a lot more normal. I’m really excited about that.

[00:31:22] Michelle Frechette: I love that. That’s great. And I think it is. I think, like, I remember getting on Facebook. I worked at a college. I was on Facebook before most people could be because I had that .edu email that you had to have at the beginning, right? So, like, I’ve been on there way more years than I should probably even admit to. And I remember people saying, oh, you should get on Twitter and you’ll exactly like, what about Facebook? Nothing’s going to replace Facebook. And now I’m like, go to Facebook. It’s all advertisement and groups. Like, it’s a, I’m not seeing hardly anything of my friends. And either they’re not posting or they are in Facebook’s choosing not to show it to us or whatever, because it is proprietary and they can do whatever they want. I also, just as a little aside, love when people post, put this on your page, tell Facebook that you do not allow them to use your images, and blah, blah, blah. Like, oh, people, if you only had a clue, one tiny little clue, and you wouldn’t be posting that nonsense. But, but then I was like, okay, I’m gonna embrace this thing called Twitter. I work in WordPress now and that’s where people are talking and heavy. So I was like, I had a Twitter account.

I hadn’t really done anything with it. And then all of a sudden my daughter goes, you know, you’ve got like, whatever it was 40 followers. I go, oh, that’s pretty cool. She goes, you’re supposed to follow people back, mom. At the beginning, I didn’t even have a clue, right? So I was like, oh, my gosh, I don’t want to be rude. Started following people back. It’s grown over the years. Having a podcast helps, you know, I’m nine people away. Nine followers away from 18,000 followers on Twitter. But Twitter’s a cesspool right now for the most part. So it’s like, ah, now I gotta build another following someplace else, which is still okay. As long as you’re talking to the people that want to hear you and you’re listening to the people you want to hear and all of those good things, it’s pretty cool. And I love TikTok. I don’t make a lot of tiktoks, but I love, like, that’s, that was my pandemic ability to feel connected to the outside world. Then I discovered I probably knew that you, I don’t know what the right term is. A yo-yoer, yo-yo artist, yo-yo expert. What do you call yourself?

[00:33:22] Doc: Yeah, professional yo-yoer.

[00:33:24] Michelle Frechette: Okay. And I started following you, and I’m like, every once in a while, I see all these really cool videos of, I didn’t know you could do that with a yo yo kind of thing. I can’t even get it to just go up and down the string like it’s supposed to. So you found some pretty awesome ways out in the world and different platforms to show different sides of yourself, too, which I think is pretty cool. And that’s one of the beauties of not just being stuck in Facebook. Right. Is embracing what different platforms can allow us, how different platforms can always connect to different audiences, which is pretty cool, too.

[00:33:59] Doc: Yeah. And, you know, social media has been really good to me. Like, you know, blogging has been, you know, really nice to me and able to reach people and document things and have an excuse to maybe go out to an art show and, you know, experience it so I can, like, vlog about it or whatever. But, like, social media has been this whole other thing, you know, for a lot of folks, it’s about, like, oh, I, you know, wrote something that William Shatner and he wrote me back. Right?

[00:34:24] Doc: You know, but, like. But like, I just remember, like, kind of like, this feeling that the world had gotten a little closer on social media. And throughout the years, you know, when people talk about social media being evil or whatever, I’ve just always been a little sad by that because you know, I think there’s a lot of good that comes from it. And I have, like, a whole yoyo community on Instagram. Like, all of my Instagram following is just yo-yoers, and all of my TikTok is just yo-yoers. And, you know, and then my Threads is always a little bit more sophisticated, like a bowtie or something. And my Mastodons, like, here’s what I’m eating. And, you know, here’s this movie I’m seeing, right? So, like, it’s kind of fun. I feel like it’s. I see why we want all of our. We want one platform so that all our friends are there and so that all we have to say is, what’s your name? And then, you know, just type it in and you’re good. I see that. But then I also see kind of the beauty in all these not just decentralized systems, but even, like, you know, why people might be on, like, a small discord or whatever, right? Even if I kind of hate going to lots of stuff, I kind of feel like I I understand that, like, there’s this beauty here and there’s these connections that are happening, and so, yeah, I’m definitely a big proponent of, like, if you don’t like Mastodon, don’t. Don’t use, like, if you tried it and you, you know, you don’t like the community there, find the communities that you do like. And also, don’t. Just. Don’t just pick one thing. Like, you don’t need a. You don’t need a winner, right? Like, you can have your Reddit account, and you just. You don’t use it for promoting anything. You just use it because you want to chat with people and, you know, stuff like that. You can. You can do that. I feel like we’ve kind of, like, gotten to this vibe where this is a bit of a rant, but I feel like we’ve gotten to this vibe where everything needs to be some sort of professional thing, right? So, like, we used to have this Instagram page of our cat, and, you know, years later, now it’s all, like, our upcoming talks or whatever, right? And, like, you know, we kind of feel this pressure to be professional everywhere. Um, and I’m hoping that somehow, I don’t know if the Activity Pub or, you know, the fediverse will kind of, like, fix this, but I’m hoping that somehow we get back to this idea that, like, we can have our fun, weird, casual places and not need to be on all the time. That’s a rant. Unrelated to anything else.

[00:36:29] Michelle Frechette: I think it, I think it makes sense, though. I think about like all my high school. I graduated high school in 1987, so many of my classmates are, I’ve friended, right? We call different acquaintances different things on different platforms, of course. But I’ve got all these friends from high school on Facebook. When one of them finds my Twitter account and follows me there, it almost feels like, what are you doing here? Nobody invited you to this party. I mean, it’s public. They can follow me there and wonder what the heck I’m talking about. That’s fine too, right? So, yeah, it’s just. And then different parts of your, your life. So I was on the school board for twelve years, so I have local, I live in Hilton, local Hiltonians that still follow me from when I was on the school board. And I would talk about things that were happening in the local school district who now just are being served WordPress stuff all day, every day, if they even log into Twitter. So it is interesting. And partitioning different parts of your life kind of feels right in some ways, for sure. And hardly ever, though, do I post a picture of what I’m eating. I save that for dming my friends specifically. Like, you would love this steak, for example.

[00:37:37] Doc: Yeah, send it to my partner.

[00:37:39] Michelle Frechette: Exactly, exactly. So what else is on your docket this year, Doc? What else are you working on? Is there anything else that you’re excited about happening? Will you be at WordCampUs? Like all of the things. Things.

[00:37:52] Doc: I don’t know if I’ll be at WordCamp US. Also, the World Yoyo Contest just happened last week and I missed that too. I’m not quite going back to big events yet, but I am trying to go to more hosting small events, hosting local yoyo meetups. I’d love it if there was. I don’t think we have any local WordPress meetups, which is weird. At San Francisco. There was a whole bunch here. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah, 

Doc: A while ago. But if there were, you know, I’d love to start going back to those again, but just doing a lot more, like, I guess talking about like smaller communities or whatever, like doing a lot more kind of local things would definitely be a thing that I’d like to do more of, you know, attend and maybe get organized. As far as work, there’s two more episodes of the fediverse files. Next week is how to connect your WordPress blog to, uh, to the fediverse. Kind of like a screen grab. Oh, actually, that’s two weeks from now. That’ll be the last episode. And then after that, there might be more work with Automattic. Um, and I’m not sure.

Michelle Frechette: Time will tell. 

Doc:  Yeah, yeah, it’d be fun. They’re, they’re, you know, they’ve been really great to work with. So far there, uh, they have not said no to it. Like these videos, I’m making songs, I’m making hand drawn animations. I’m like putting in the cheesiest jokes. Pun definitely intended. And they never said no, say anything I like. This is awesome, you know, because it’s really fun to be able to take something you’re. I’m clearly passionate about this, but, like, take something that’s kind of, you know, technological and new and be able to present it in a very corny way is magical. And, yeah, I still just on my own, I, you know, blog on docpop.org. i’ve been blogging since like, 2002 on there, so. And I don’t know why. Like, sometimes I’m like, writing posts that I’m like this. I really should be getting paid for this much work, but it’s just nice to have out there today. Today, Michelle, I wrote about a musical style called hit em, which a guy on, a guy on X dreamed he just, he wrote this, like, post on, on X, and he was just like, had a weird dream that this girl came up to me, a rave, and said, there’s a new style of music called hit em. That’s 212 bpm, which is very fast. And 5/4 music. 5/4, you know, time signature. So he just, he just wrote that on X. And the next day people are like, singing, you know, hit em songs, you know, this terrible, this terrible, like, this thing that’s clearly not a good thing for electronic musicians. And now there’s like compilations and stuff. So I wrote about that this morning.

[00:40:31] Michelle Frechette: I’m gonna have to check that out.

[00:40:33] Doc: Yeah, yeah.

[00:40:36] Michelle Frechette: That’s awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to come talk to me today and share with us about the fediverse and the work you’re doing over at Automattic right now. And, yeah, anytime you want to come back, whatever you got to talk about, just hit me up. I would love to have you back on the show. We should get you on WP Coffee Talks sometime too. So I’ll send you the link for that later.

[00:40:53] Doc: Coffee talk.

[00:40:54] Michelle Frechette: Sign up. Coffee talk.

[00:40:56] Doc: Michelle, can I ask you before we go, so, like, I think. I know, I don’t think. I definitely tuned out of WordPress on that super, you know, hyper level. Right? Like, I still use it and I still love it. I tell my friends about it, but, like, I tuned out of it. And so that was, like, in March, and I feel like there’s been, like I said, WP Water Cooler has gone. Your show has popped up. Can you give me a recap what’s happened since March in WordPress? And, like, in like, four minutes?

[00:41:28] Michelle Frechette: Oh, my goodness. Let’s see. So, like, there’s more plugins now. People are growing their sites. I don’t know how to summarize it in four minutes, but I can send you some blog links later if you want.

[00:41:41] Doc: Sure, sure. Is. I mean, is everyone still, like, is everything still. Everything? Was AI right when I left, and I don’t think anybody found anything.

[00:41:49] Michelle Frechette: Oh gosh. AI is like, it’s everywhere. You can’t even go to go to Google right now without AI prompts there. So, yeah, I’m not. I mean, okay, I am a fan of AI for some things, but not all things. And I don’t trust that every answer that gets supplied to me is the right answer because of how it’s pulling things out. So trust, but verify, right? I use it for ideation, quite honestly. Like, if I want to write a blog post about ten ways to do something, I’ll say, hey, what are ten ways to do something? But then I write about those things. So I look and see, like, oh, I don’t want that one. I do want that one. I hadn’t thought of that, you know, so I use it sometimes for ideation for different things. It’s definitely not going away, though. But you can still tell for the most part if a photo has been created is not actually a photo, but a graphic created by AI, because fingers and hands still aren’t perfect, but they’re getting really close. And the WordPress.org photos directory. I am one of the moderators, and several people have submitted AI generated images. And as moderators will be like, I need somebody else to take a look at this one. Should this, you know, is this real or is this not kind of thing? Oh, we got a question. Let me pull this question up. This is for you. So this is from Marcus. Should he be connecting the WP World to the fediverse? Do you know what the WP World is, doc?

[00:43:14] Doc: No. Is it a news site?

[00:43:16] Michelle Frechette: It is not a news site. It is. It’s basically. I’m trying to figure out how to say it, Marcus, if you have a way to throw it in the. A quick thing you can throw in there. It’s a community, basically. So we all have our WordPress.org profiles that are kind of limited and only allow us to show certain things. The WP World, Marcus has created it. So it’s the WP.world, it imports a lot of information from your WordPress.org file. So you can show any plugins you’ve created, any photos that you’ve put in the directory, things like that. But you can also say, I’ve been to these different WordPress events, I’ve organized them, I’ve spoken at them, those kinds of things. This is where I work, these are the languages I speak, and I’m forgetting a lot of things. There’s a lot that goes on there. So Marcus is wondering, should he connect it to the fediverse? Is there an opportunity for community like that? What are your thoughts?

[00:44:10] Doc: Well, okay, so, so first off, um, well, uh, going way back, the way I actually got interested in, in the fediverse was by interviewing WordPressers for the torque social hour. And uh, some people were telling me they were like building Activity Pub. And I remember when the first times I heard it mentioned was uh, Buddy Press, which if uh, Marcus is using Buddy Press for um, for the WP World, that’s an example right there where Buddy Press hopefully is working on Buddy Press Two, which is going to be switching to activity pub to be able to handle users. And then you can have these decentralized conversations as well, the same way. So Buddy Press itself would almost be a Mastodon, it would be a new type of social network that looks exactly like a web form, but is decentralized. But as far as if you have a site like what you’re talking about, the things I’m thinking of are actually kind of very old school web, two kind of ways of connection. Like definitely you could install the plugin and so that if you have posts that are getting shared, those posts will get shared to the fediverse, right? So you can have that fediverse integration just through Activity Pub for WordPress plugin. But also you could have things like, hey, we’re using these hashtags and so like you kind of list those and maybe having a way of scraping the hashtags from all the different places, right? Like scrape them from mammoth or, sorry, Mastodon, scrape them for threads or whatever. So like there’s, there are ways that you can kind of do it, there’s nothing too revolutionary you have to do there that’s just like, like I said, just kind of like a web two kind of mentality of, you know, having, having a hashtag using kind of spreading that around Threads unfortunately limits the number of hashtags you can use. So that makes things a little difficult. Anyway. Yes, Marcus, I think at the very least you could have your post getting shared to the fediverse. And you don’t have to like create an account. You’d have to sign into the fediverse. It’ll be all Automattic. It’ll create a server for you and everything. So it’s a pretty easy experience. And then past that, you know, including fediverse handles and including hashtags that people use and maybe having some kind of real, real world, real time scraping of hashtags would be cool.

[00:46:17] Michelle Frechette: And Marcus, as we were talking about, if you were in this, in the chat at that point in time, but there is a plugin for Activity Pub which you can see right there and you can search for that obviously in the repo. Oops, I collapsed the wrong thing. There we go.

Yeah. So yeah, I’m not sure how to summarize things in four minutes for you, but definitely the WP World can do a lot of that for you if you sign up for your free account over there, Doc, and be able to see a lot of really cool things that Marcus is doing over there. And he also has a newsletter which I’m guessing if he’s doing it as a post, could then be put out into the fediverse also. So those newsletters, those could be shared out that way for sure. Maybe the Underrepresented In Tech.com should join. Lots of possibilities. I love it. Lots of possibilities. Let’s see if we got another comment. Marcus says thank you, which is pretty awesome.

[00:47:10] Doc: Thanks, Marcus. Thanks for watching.

[00:47:12] Michelle Frechette: Fantastic. Just before I forget, next week we have Nathan Ingram and Kathy Zant are coming. They have a new product called Monster Secure. I’m gonna let them talk about it a little more next week, but if you want to preview Monstersecure.com and they’re gonna come talk to us next week about that. And I’m sorry, cats like scrambling behind me that I’m like, what is going on? They’re going to come talking to me with us next week about Monster Secure, which is a way for you to kind of client proof your website by teaching your clients through their courses how to behave properly with their own website and not sink the ship, so to speak. So I had an opportunity to take a little bit of a look through their website and it looks pretty awesome. So I’m really looking forward to speaking to them next week about that.

[00:48:07] Doc: Is this, this might be a spoiler, but is this a new company?

[00:48:12] Michelle Frechette: I don’t know if it’s a new company. It’s definitely a new website.

[00:48:15] Doc: Okay.

[00:48:17] Michelle Frechette: It’s similar to Monster Contracts. Right? So Nathan has his, what, his business, monstercontracts.com, where, and it’s the same Monster. So it’s definitely in the Monster family, if you will. And it’s definitely still about WordPress and WordPress businesses. And Nathan is definitely in the business of educating people and he and Kathy have come together to talk about security of your website and how you can talk security to your customers, which I think is pretty cool. So we’ll be talking about next week. They really are. They totally are. So, well, I’m going to wrap things up. Thank you so much. 

Doc: Thank you so much.

Michelle Frechette: I really appreciate you being here. Look forward to chatting with you more about more things in the future. And I’ll touch base with you over on Post Status Slack and we’ll figure out the next time we’re going to chat and what we’re going to chat about. So thank you.

[00:49:02] Doc: Thank you so much, Michelle, congrats on the show. I hope you’re having a lot of fun doing it. And thanks, Marcus, for chiming in with the questions. I appreciate that.

[00:49:10] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, fantastic. And I’ll let you select me some, some links, Doc, that we can include in the show notes for people who are interested in learning a little bit more and seeing those videos because I closed the tab and now I can’t remember where I saw them, but I’ll find them too. But if you can send me some information, we’ll go ahead and make sure they’ll show up in the show notes when this goes and gets published by the end of the week. So thank you all. Thank you, Doc. Thank you, everybody for being here. And we’ll see everybody next week on the next edition of the Post Status Happiness Hour.