Revolution.Social

Happy new year to all! Today, we're re-airing the first episode of Revolution.Social, an interview with Jack Dorsey. We'll be back next week with a new interview about the future of social media. Twitter never should have been a traditional tech company, says Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Instead, it should have been designed as a protocol — like email, or podcasting. “That was the pure expression of it from day one,” Dorsey says. “And it was never really allowed to be that because it was on this fast track to becoming a public company.” Today on Revolution.Social, Dorsey explains why it’s still possible to build a successful business on top of open protocols and decentralized social platforms like Nostr. He and Rabble also discuss why Jack doesn’t regret encouraging Elon Musk to buy Twitter; why he left Bluesky; the problem with centralized AI firms; and the evolution of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. ⁠Follow Rabble on Bluesky⁠ ⁠Follow the podcast⁠ This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from ⁠LightningPod⁠, and executive produced by Alice Chan from ⁠Flock Marketing⁠. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit ⁠⁠https://revolution.social/

When Bluesky hit its millionth user, it had fewer than 10 employees; today, it has more than 40 million users, but only 30 workers; that means that “everyone on the team wears a lot of hats,” says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. It also makes it much harder to comply with regulations like the new wave of age verification laws, which have been designed for Meta-sized social media companies. “There's a whole patchwork of legislation [in different jurisdictions] … these massive nation state-sized corporations are just going to throw 10,000 people at it and comply,” Jay says. “And we have a tiny team of five product devs trying to comply, and that means in some cases we just can't.” Today on Revolution.Social, she and Rabble talk about the unique benefits of the AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky; permissionless social media and the right to exit; vibe coding social apps in a day; and why pluralistic democracy requires pluralistic communication systems. Follow Rabble on Bluesky Follow the podcast This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit ⁠https://revolution.social/

Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and advocate for human-centered technology, discusses the commercialization of the internet and how the early idealism deteriorated into an advertising-driven nightmare. He explores the concept of platform cooperatives, where users own the means of production, and critiques the monopolization in tech. Douglas highlights the importance of community norms in digital spaces like te reo Maori Twitter and warns against the dangers of centralized AI. He also argues for the necessity of professional journalism in combating misinformation.

Jillian York, Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of Silicon Values, dives deep into digital rights challenges. She highlights the urgent need for diverse internet governance and warns against the harms of age-verification laws. York emphasizes the critical role of end-to-end encryption in protecting activists and marginalized groups. She critiques overreliance on AI for content moderation and discusses the complexities of copyright in the age of AI, advocating for a human-centered approach to technology.

In this live interview recorded in November at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Cory Doctorow returns to Revolution.Social to talk about building alternatives to “enshittified” digital platforms. "Apps are websites that are illegal to protect your privacy while you use them," Cory explains. "The reason companies are so horny to get you to use their apps is because they can't be modified in that way. No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app." Cory and Rabble also discuss how Europe could export jailbreaking tools as industrial policy, why other countries should respond to American tariffs with a targeted strike against the tech industry, and why tech workers should have unionized when they had leverage.Chapters:00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:06 Anticircumvention Laws & GDPR 00:06:54 Apple and Google's DRM Controls 00:09:14 Chokepoint Capitalism and the EuroStack 00:11:10 Adversarial Interoperability 00:14:09 Printer Ink vs. Stallion Semen 00:15:38 The AI Bubble Will Pop 00:18:48 Tech Bosses Aren't Afraid of Their WorkersRead Cory’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It https://bookshop.org/p/books/enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it-cory-doctorow/d3f8483b158906ceFollow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nzFollow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/

Designer, community-builder, and Flickr co-creator George Oates is now the executive director of the Flickr Foundation, which is working to preserve the platform's 21 years of photos for the next 100 years. She helped create Flickr's community guidelines, designed its nested privacy controls, and launched the Flickr Commons program, which partners with more than 100 institutions to make publicly held photography collections more accessible.“The Flickr community loved it, and actually would help the institutions by describing the photos, and in some cases identifying things like the location they were taken, who was in them, the events surrounding them, stuff like that,” George says. “This really important contextual metadata about these historic photos.”Today on Revolution.Social, George and Rabble talk about how the online multiplayer Game Neverending evolved into Flickr; the groundbreaking ways the site approached content moderation and avoiding context collapse; and why the sort of hypergrowth that makes Silicon Valley tick is “the antithesis of building a healthy, happy community.” Plus: The plan to save all of Flickr’s photos, no matter what happens.Follow Rabble on BlueskyFollow the podcastThis episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/

Rabble and Alice Chan, Revolution.Social’s host and executive producer, talk about the launch and overwhelming reception to diVine, a new social video app that resurrects the six-second looping format of Vine and features archived original Vine content.This time, however, the app is built on open protocols and a promise to focus on real content made by real people, not AI. Within hours of announcing diVine at Web Summit in Lisbon, it had 10,000 signups on TestFlight, Apple’s developer testing app, and its beta program was full. Its early success is proof that new social apps can be built on the Social Media Bill of Rights and that consumers want better ways to connect and share online."We accept that one person controls Instagram and one person controls Twitter, one person controls TikTok,” Rabble says. “That is a dystopian nightmare. And so diVine isn't just fun videos, but also shows us a future of social media where power is shared."You can join the diVine mobile app waitlist and preview the videos people are creating at https://divine.video/Follow Rabble on BlueskyFollow the podcastThis episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/

Mallory Knodel, executive director of the Social Web Foundation, is a digital human rights advocate and former CTO at the Center for Democracy & Technology. In this discussion, she delves into the power dynamics of Web 2.0 and the promise of decentralized protocols like ActivityPub. Mallory argues for contextual moderation and the importance of designing platforms for marginalized communities. She highlights the impact of Edward Snowden on internet standards and explores sustainable business models for open-source projects, envisioning a cooperative social web.

Srđa Popović, a key figure in the movement that toppled Slobodan Milošević, shares his insights from the nonviolent revolution and his work with CANVAS to empower activists globally. He argues that mere viral videos won't suffice for change, emphasizing the necessity of strategic planning and coalition-building. Srđa highlights the power of humor in activism and discusses modern authoritarian tactics that exploit apathy. He also offers creative protest strategies, including playful tactics that disrupt oppressive narratives and engage communities.

Pamela Wisniewski is one of the leading researchers on how social media affects teens, working at the UC Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute. In an era of moral panics around youth online safety, she believes the solution is to empower teens and teach them resilience, rather than restricting them. "We treat it as if our teens should know how to act online without any kind of training," Pamela says. "We don't give our 16-year-olds the keys to our car and just say, 'Hey, go at it.' But that's what we're doing with the internet." Today on Revolution.Social, Pamela and Rabble talk about why parental control apps fail teens; what her research into private Instagram DMs revealed about self-harm language and peer support; and why age verification bans push kids into more dangerous spaces. They also discuss the problems with addiction narratives and shame-based approaches, why anonymity is vital for vulnerable youth, and what teens themselves are telling us they want from digital governance. Teenovate Learn about the STIR Lab Pamela's Research: It’s Still Complicated Teen Talk Safety by Design Towards Resilience and Autonomy-based Approaches Follow Rabble on Bluesky Follow the podcast This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing. To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/