Open vs. Closed: The Fight for a New Internet

A history told as an argument. In the early 1990s the closed portals, AOL and MSN, looked like the internet itself, until open standards (HTML, HTTP, the W3C) and well-designed products built on them (search engines from Archie in 1990 onward, then Netscape and Google) made the permissionless web win. Bill Gates’s “Internet Tidal Wave” memo of May 1995 stands in for the moment the incumbents noticed. The video’s claim is that today’s walled gardens no longer need closed pipes: network effects and ecosystem lock-in do the same job, and they are what let a platform degrade once its users cannot leave. It invokes Metcalfe’s law and says a network’s value grows “exponentially”; the law, as usually stated, has value growing with the square of the number of users, which is steep but not exponential.

The proposed answer is the fediverse. ActivityPub, a W3C standard, turns posts, likes and follows into shared objects, so a server works like an email provider: any client can read it and an account and its followers can move. At the time Mastodon had passed ten million registered accounts across roughly ten thousand servers, though registered accounts overstate use (monthly actives were closer to two million in mid-2023, by Wikipedia’s figures). The video gives five reasons Meta might federate Threads: regulatory pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act, offloading moderation, network effects that snowball, becoming the fediverse’s Google, or embrace-and-extinguish, as happened to XMPP and RSS. The case rests on interviews with Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg, Openvibe’s chief executive and several server admins.

It closes with the ways the bet could fail: federation is complicated to explain, some communities do not want it (Tumblr’s culture, Mastodon servers pre-emptively blocking Threads), volunteer admins carry moderation at scale, a deleted post can survive on thousands of servers, and there is no native way to get paid.

The video is from February 2024, and several of its forward-looking plans have moved since. Threads did federate, but as an opt-in beta: sharing opened in 2024, and by June 2025 opted-in users could follow fediverse accounts in a separate feed (TechCrunch). Tumblr’s move onto a WordPress backend, the route to its federation, was put on hold in June 2025, Mullenweg telling Decoder the company would focus on what users were asking for. Mozilla closed its Mastodon server, mozilla.social, in December 2024 (TechCrunch). And Rochko stepped down as Mastodon’s chief executive in November 2025 as the project moved under a non-profit (TechCrunch).