Attention slot machines, now with open protocols! What is the “fediverse” actually achieving?

Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is engagement casinos, attention slot machines and the fediverse rebels hustling for a social web no lone billionaire can own. 

90s Windows-style pop-up ad showing a casino, and a 2020 Ferrari, with a "loading" icon and a "play now" button.
I went to GifCities.org. I typed “casino” into the search box. I hit enter. I found this GIF advertising a “Windows Casino,” which ostensibly has nothing to do with the fediverse. Ostensibly. 

The thing is:

If you want to understand the discourses around the future of the social web, I regret to inform you that we need to use the term “interoperable protocols.” 

To understand that term, it helps to ponder what our cyber world without interoperable email protocols could have become. 

And to do that, the briefing becomes inarguably more fun if we describe this alternate timeline as one in which the dot-com bubble was primarily ruled by drag queen villainesses who hate open protocols — and do not sew any of their own looks.

This drag show opens in a corner office with Delu Shadel wearing a busty power blazer, rhinestone-encrusted rectangle glasses and red-heeled Louboutins. She recently ascended to the C-suite as chief executive officer at CYBER POST .COM, which has become the internet’s leading provider of Cyber Mailboxes. Millions of netizens log in daily to send Cyber Letters and Cyber Postcards to drag bar gig bosses and drag moms. To send a letter, you need to pay for a Cyber Pro membership: $69.69 a year. Postcards are free but contain advertisements (often for GLAMAZON .COM, the world's largest platform for glitter cosmetics).

It's January 1999, and the dot-com economy is drag central. Delu has her eyes laser-focused on Lizzy Lizard, her latest nemesis in the high-heeled race to disrupt the cyber mail category. Lizard is the techno-goth lizard girl with iridescent scales and an air of detached superiority. She’s also the co-founder at OUI MAIL .NET. 

In a recent Cyber News Network interview, Lizard repeated her origin story: Self-funded study abroad student in Paris. Paying rent working as a living statue (of a metallic salamander, of course) on the Champs-Élysées. She is about to send a Cyber Postcard home to her non-drag mother in Montana, who belongs to the Church of Eternal Matte, which believes glitter and other sparkly cosmetics are of demonic origin. Lizard could not afford therapy and was overtly worried about triggering her conservative mother, but she also could not afford to remove the GLAMAZON .COM ad as her humble earnings did not allow for such virtual luxuries as a Cyber Pro membership. Thus, the idea of OUI MAIL .NET was born — ostensibly on a mission to make it free for anyone to send a letter without ads

Most users do not go looking for receipts, but Delu does. She has learned OUI MAIL .NET is backed by Puppy Vulture Inc., owned by gazillionaire Cruella de Villa. De Villa has invested heavily in growing OUI MAIL .NET’s user base in a publicly stated quest to “democratize” the cyber mail vertical. Yet what the world doesn’t know is that de Villa was once Delu’s drag mom. After their relationship imploded, with Delu throwing a stiletto across the room at a party, de Villa began investing heavily into any startup by any weird queen who had the pitch-deck potential to absolutely crush CYBER POST .COM and its new CEO.

Of course, users of CYBER POST .COM cannot write to users of OUI MAIL .NET, and vice versa.

The girls are fighting and letter-writing netizens are paying the price.

Early internet GIF used as a section marker. The GIF depicts a slot machine landing on three-in-a-row hearts.

Silly? Yes! But strip out the camp and this is essentially what the internet would look like if email hadn't been built on open protocols like SMTP, POP3 and IMAP. 

Without interoperability — which is to say, the ability for Gmail users to email Yahoo users — our communications would be trapped in walled gardens dominated by a few companies. Companies would compete not on service value but on the size of their locked-in networks. The results would be a fragmented digital economy, stifled innovation and a few powerful owners controlling the flow of information ranging from “FW: FW: FW:” viral emails to political campaign news blasts. 

This is less an alternate history about email and more of an analogy to the current conundrum that the so-called “social web” is in, where most users remain locked inside walled garden platforms controlled by a few ultra-rich men. But unlike the drag show you just witnessed, there's a nerdy rebellion underway to counter these cyberspace empires. It's what’s known as the fediverse. 

The thing about that is:

Two significant developments in the federated web landed early this month, each promising to reshape how we think about social media ownership and control.

First came Ghost 6.0 on August 4. Among several big announcements, the open-source publishing platform’s latest major release integrates the ActivityPub protocol to let independent publishers reach audiences across the federated social web. (The integration was released in beta in April.) 

Ghost CEO John O’Nolan reflected on his nerves around the launch, and relief in the positive reception: “My biggest point of uncertainty about Ghost 6.0 was whether people were going to ‘get’ the social web integration,” he wrote on his personal Ghost site. 

Fediverse technology, O’Nolan acknowledged, is complex and jargony:

For many people, terms like ActivityPub, fediverse, bridge, protocol, server, toot, boost, and Webfinger are alienating and confusing. They subtly imply that unless you understand what all these words mean, this might not be the place for you; in the same way crypto terms—blockchain, web3, wallet, keypair, nonce—are a wall of jargon that scream ‘you don't belong here’ to normal people.

His team's challenge was abstracting away this complexity, making federation feel as natural as sending an email where “you don't need to know what SMTP, IMAP, POP, DKIM, SPF, or DMARC are.”

Ghost 6.0 comes at a crucial time where Substack is essentially becoming a social media platform, and independent publishers looking to grow outside that walled garden are looking for new ways to reach new audiences — the potential to be discovered by the right people has, after all, been the one gift that social media has given certain users (but as the social platform’s power grows, the role of the algorithm as kingmaker becomes more complicated). 

Secondly, on August 5, Bluesky celebrated reaching 38 million users (in January, Bluesky’s official page had celebrated an earlier milestone with dolphin illustrations and Lisa Frank aesthetics that had users joking about the platform becoming a retirement community for nostalgic millennials). The microblogging platform, built on the AT Protocol and spun out from Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, positioned itself as the anti-X — a place where no billionaire could capture the whole system.

These developments matter because they’re testing whether social media can work like email. That is, on open protocols. And if users care. Like Gmail and Yahoo coexisting, the fediverse promises a world where someone posting on Mastodon could also have followers on Pixelfed (the Instagram alternative), and Ghost publishers could reach readers on any of these ActivityPub-compatible platforms. Your social connections become portable; your audience truly yours; no single company controlling the conversation.

The technical momentum looks impressive at first glance. Even CMS giant WordPress enhanced its ActivityPub features. Meta's Threads continues testing ActivityPub integration. Dozens of new apps launched on AT Protocol including video platforms and messaging services.

Yet beyond these headlines, we get mixed signals about the momentum behind the fediverse from the general public. While Bluesky's user count climbed through summer, overall post volume has declined. Daily unique posters, for instance, peaked in mid-November 2024 at just under 1.5 million. It’s tumbled by almost two thirds since then to a bit over 600,000 in mid-August 2025. 

On top of this, there’s the general sense that Bluesky is the social media equivalent of moving to a bubble where more people are likely to agree with you, as researchers at the University of Zurich concluded in a research article published in February:

We analyze the hyperlinks shared by BlueSky’s users and find no evidence of polarization in terms of the political leaning of the news sources they share. They share predominantly left-center news sources and little to no links associated with questionable news sources.

You might think, that sounds nice to be on a platform where the majority of people agree with me and are not sharing misinformation, and you wouldn’t be alone. There’s clearly a growing, if niche, market for echo chambers as platforms; the social media equivalent of an independent coffee shop. And, indeed, the platform has become so politically homogeneous that dissenting viewpoints represent a minuscule percentage of posts on contentious topics.

This might also explain the declining post volume, as this homogeneity essentially eliminates the often-toxic friction, outrage bait and controversy content that sustains all that posting which in turn drives the business models of the bigger, closed social platforms.

A conventional reading of social media growth metrics might conclude that Bluesky isn’t growing in the right ways. People are motivated to create an account, but then most people don’t post. A lot of the activity on the app seems to come from a minority of users — for example: public figures, content creators, people who have a career interest or niche passion that gives them a reason to post regularly. 

But then, is it really a problem if the fediverse isn’t “growing” in the same manner as the venture-backed social unicorns that came before? After all, it’s only a problem if what they’re trying to build is the same kind of thing. With Ghost 6.0’s ActivityPub features, there’s a clear vision for an open social web that feels novel and fresh even if understandably esoteric. But with other fediverse projects, the focus so far is on cloning the closed giants. That’s not inherently bad; it is telling.

Early internet GIF used as a section marker. The GIF depicts a slot machine.

Where things get interesting:

Last November, during the post-U.S. election surge to Bluesky, Jason Koebler at 404 Media wrote an essay titled “The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet.” His optimism centered on watching independent journalists and creators actively choosing a platform not owned by oligarchs, where publications could theoretically own their audiences and port them elsewhere:

The active migration away from social media networks that are owned, controlled by, and distorted by the richest men and most powerful companies in the world is one of the more hopeful things to happen in what has largely been a bleak year.

Independent media makers have good reason for this hope, particularly newsletter writers who’ve discovered something remarkable about Bluesky: it doesn’t throttle traffic to external links. (One should add, “— yet.”)

In January, in the midst of another Bluesky surge coinciding with the presidential inauguration, I wrote here on ESC KEY .CO:

A public benefit corporation that currently does not have an advertising model, Bluesky’s recent growth is particularly interesting to journalists, academics and anyone working in communications. That’s because most other platforms are incentivized to keep people in their walled gardens. Bluesky doesn’t (yet) have an issue with sending traffic elsewhere, so it’s an intriguing place for writers and audiences to mingle. Social media optimism is once again wooing me, too.

While X suppresses posts with outside links and Threads is known to hide political content from feeds, Bluesky operates like the old Twitter — you share a link to your newsletter, your readers actually see it. For independent publishers monetizing through subscriptions rather than platform ad revenue, this difference matters enormously. 

Like it or not, social media has also become a primary way people discover news and form opinions, concentrating unprecedented power in platform owners’ hands. When Mark Zuckerberg tweaks an algorithm or Elon Musk reshapes verification, entire media ecosystems shift. The U.S. TikTok ban has further demonstrated how quickly creative careers built on single platforms could evaporate.

Federation suggests there could be an escape from this precarity. No single billionaire could buy the entire fediverse the way Musk bought Twitter. Different communities could establish their own moderation standards while remaining interconnected. Your audience becomes genuinely portable.

Yet an engagement casino full of attention slot machines built on open protocols remains an engagement casino full of attention slot machines. 

This phraseology isn’t a random buzzword salad. I dubbed the social media design status quo as “attention slot machines” here to refer to the individual’s experience on these platforms. Rather than the system-level view of the “attention economy” terminology, first theorized by Herbert A. Simon in 1971, “slot machine” evokes the specific psychological mechanisms of variable ratio reinforcement, which is a core concept in behavioral psychology — and an effective method for creating addictive habits. This randomness is key to creating a compulsion loop, which has been a design goal of social media platforms since the dawn of Web 2.0. The unpredictability of the reward keeps the user coming back for more, even when the rewards are scarce.

The current fediverse mostly replicates Twitter’s fundamental mechanics: short posts, follows, likes, reposts. These design patterns create the same dopamine loops, the same engagement-chasing behaviors, the same dynamics that fragment focus and flatten nuance into viral snippets. Open-source infrastructure doesn't change the basic games being played in the casino: it just means no single owner controls all the slot machines, which is good.

But it also raises questions, such as, can we think bigger than niche userbases that understand the keyword “interoperability”? Where are the platforms that leverage federation’s unique properties for genuinely new social patterns rather than recreating 2010s Twitter? These innovations remain largely theoretical while we're stuck with nostalgic reproductions, even as these reproductions come with considerable structural improvements to the underlying protocols. 

Right now, talking about the fediverse is kind of like talking about plumbing. And most people don’t want to talk about plumbing. They just want to flush the toilet a few times a day. They’d much rather talk about literally anything else. And as Ghost’s O’Nolan has written, that remains the challenge for any fediverse project.

Early internet GIF used as a section marker. The GIF depicts a slot machine spinning and a "play now!" pop-up.

The thing to talk about over your next power lunch:

If you care about a more open exchange of information, then the federated social web is inarguably a good thing. But it’s also worth asking, what we’re hoping the fediverse achieves?

The fediverse risks repeating the same techno-optimistic narratives that early social media founders sold us about democratizing discourse and empowering communities. Remember when Twitter was going to enable democracy movements worldwide? When Facebook would connect humanity? Where’d that get us?

That line of question is central to Katherine Cross’s 2024 book “Log Off,” in which she argues that social media excels at personal catharsis but fails at collective action. Social media “tricks us into thinking” we're organizing when we're really just generating content. Whether that content lives on Musk's servers or distributed across thousands of federated instances doesn't change its fundamental nature.

Federation solves real problems: platform lock-in, billionaire capture, censorship risks. These aren’t trivial. Newsletter writers, publishers, and creators benefit from portable audiences and open distribution. The protocols work. The technology keeps improving.

But federation doesn’t solve social media’s core contradictions. It doesn't fix how platforms fragment focus, polarize discourse or turn human connection into content for the machine. An open-source engagement farm still farms engagement. Decentralized slot machines still hijack our reward systems.

The question isn’t whether we should support federation. Rather it’s whether we’re honest about what the fediverse can and cannot achieve. 

Open protocols matter for the same reason email protocols matter: they prevent capture and enable competition. They ensure Delu Shadel and Lizzy Lizard can’t trap us in their competing walled gardens, ultra-rich bickering and hype-fueled venture-backed agendas. 

But the fediverse won’t save us from ourselves — or from the facts that it’s all still social media. Even if every platform ran on open protocols tomorrow, we’d still be pulling the levers on attention slot machines in the engagement casino.

And one long thing to read:

This briefing draws from my conversations in January with ESC KEY .CO's first interviewee, Katherine Cross, and the long-form reporting we published around her book, “Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix.” She argues we need to abandon the fantasy that posting — whether on closed or federated platforms — creates meaningful change. Social media’s structure promotes individual catharsis over collective action, regardless of who owns the servers. Read the full piece exploring how these dynamics play out across the fragmenting social web, where even the fediverse’s most promising experiments struggle against platform mechanics that turn solidarity into content:

The state of social media is dark and dour. So what’s an e-girl to do about it all?
The Xodous. The TikTok ban. The leftist netizens’ search for bluer skies on the “fediverse.” What’s the sanest way to approach this brave social world? Katherine Cross has the answer in her lucid first book, aptly titled “Log Off.”

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