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Leaving the City of Big Social, with Fediverse Enthusiast Chris Trottier
Episode 17

Leaving the City of Big Social, with Fediverse Enthusiast Chris Trottier

Chris is an early adopter 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.

Dot Social · Chris Trottier, Mike McCue

March 4, 202546m 38s

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Show Notes

When you’re building 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:

  • Why he’s rallied around ActivityPub
  • The promise of social and the promise of the fediverse
  • Self-hosting an instance
  • Interesting apps and products built on top of ActivityPub
  • Adopting a survivability mindset (as VCs, developers)

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 @[email protected]

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at @[email protected] or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the fediverse, at @[email protected]

💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon