The decentralised internet

Mike Masnick wrote the paper that helped inspire Bluesky and now he sits on the Bluesky board. A long-time advocate of decentralised tech, Mike’s paper ‘Protocols not platforms’ outlined how a more open protocol-based system to social media would create a healthier social media ecosystem in which people were free to vote with their feet (or their mouse) and go elsewhere, without losing access to the community they’d built. In this wide ranging conversation, Mike and I discuss the future of social media, the internet’s trajectory from an open to a closed ecosystem, whether decentralisation can be a winning strategy in a capitalist economy, and much more.