Jonathan Haidt Strikes Again + What You Vibecoded + An Update on the Forkiverse

Did you hear about the new vehicle that stole the show at CES this year?

What vehicle was that?

It was from our good friend will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas—

Oh, yeah.

—we interviewed once in a very, I would describe as, psychedelic experience.

An absolute fever dream of a day.

Well, he is out with a new electric, AI-powered brain on wheels. It is essentially an electric tricycle called Trinity, and it looks insane. Can I show you this?

Can I see this?

Okay.

Oh, my goodness. This looks like the head of the xenomorph in Alien has been decapitated and had wheels attached to it.

Yes. Yes, it looks insane. It's like a three-wheeled electric scooter with a top over it—very sleek, very aerodynamic. I personally would love to die in one of these. I would love to be absolutely demolished by an 18-wheeler in one of these.

Yeah. This actually does, just looking at this, seem to me like it would be will.i.am's favored mode of transportation. I can just imagine him: It's time to take the kids to school, and he's like, “Get in this thing, guys. We're gonna be 2000 and late.” That's a Black Eyed Peas joke.

Oh, let's get this party started.

1. The Grok Nudification Fallout

I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork.

This week, Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt returns to the show with new research on how social media is harming teens. Then, we asked you for your Claude code experiments and you blew us away. We'll share some of our favorites. And finally, it's a trip to the Forkiverse. Thousands of you have now joined our Fediverse experiment, and search engine host PJ Vogt is here to talk about what we've learned so far. Such as Vladimir Putin. He's a problem.

Not a good guy. Well, Casey, we got a big show this week, lots to talk about, but let's start with social media, because there's been a lot happening in that world.

Yeah. Last week, we talked about the nudification scandal over at Grok, and there's been a bunch more news about that this week. The U.S. Senate managed to pass a bill on Tuesday that would allow victims of these sorts of nonconsensual, sexually explicit images to sue over the creation of those images.

Yeah, and Grok also rolled back its image-generation feature for free users. You now have to be a paid user to use Grok to nudify people against their consent.

If you want to commit a crime, that's a premium feature now. It's behind the paywall.

Yes. So they are not rolling that back fully, of course, because it is generating a huge amount of engagement for them, but they do seem to acknowledge that some people were taking it too far.

That's right, Kevin, and it is really this exact sort of phenomenon happening on social media that has led our guest this week to lead a charge and say that, when it comes to younger people, we actually just need to keep them away from this stuff altogether.

This name, of our guest today, Jonathan Haidt, will be familiar to longtime Hard Fork listeners. He came on the show back in March 2024, when his book The Anxious Generation came out. Since that time, that book has become a megabestseller. Jonathan has become a leading advocate for things like phone bans in schools and social media restrictions like the one we talked about in Australia that just went into effect.

There's been a lot of discussion about Haidt's thesis that social media and widespread smartphone use are harming the mental health of kids and teens, and a lot of arguments about the science in that book—whether the studies that Haidt and others have cited as proof that social media is harming children are actually holding up under scrutiny.

And as a matter of fact, Kevin, Jonathan Haidt and his fellow researcher Zachary Rauch have new research out this week, which gave us an excuse to bring him back on the show.

Yes. This new research by Jonathan and Zachary Rauch is designed to address one of the primary criticisms that his book received, which was about the difference between correlation and causation. So we're going to talk about that research, and we're also going to talk about what's been happening since his book came out.

Yeah, as he has become the world's hater-in-chief of social media. So let's bring in Jonathan Haidt.

Jonathan Haidt, welcome back to Hard Fork.

Thank you, guys. Great to be back.

You've been a busy man. You joined us originally just as The Anxious Generation was going out into the world. The book has now spent 88 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. That's a lot of weeks. It sold a bunch of copies, led to discussions all around the world, and led to follow-on projects, like a book you and my friend Catherine Price just wrote called The Amazing Generation, which is aimed at kids and teens.

And now you are back with a new paper, or papers, about this issue of social media and mental health. You have a new post on your Substack called “Mountains of Evidence,” and you're here to talk about that today. So just give us the TL;DR here, Jonathan. What is the most important new finding in your research since your book came out?

2. Haidt Builds The Causality Case

When my book came out, I thought the main problem was mental health, and there's a big debate in the academic world: People who use social media more are more depressed, but is that correlation or is it causation? That has defined the scope of the debate, and it's gone on for a couple of years now. It's what Mark Zuckerberg says to defend himself: “Oh, there's no evidence of causation.”

Well, guess what? There is tons and tons of evidence of causation, and Meta did some of the best studies to show it. There are so many different kinds of evidence, including what the kids themselves say, what the parents say, and what the teachers say. Everybody sees it. That's evidence. And then there are experiments with random assignment that show that when you get off social media for at least a week, depression gets better.

I was collecting all that evidence for this big review paper, which is one of the 2 projects, and while we were working on that, there were additional dumps of studies from Meta that came out in the attorneys general's lawsuits against them. They post them online, and there's all kinds of information in the briefs. So we cataloged them at a new website we put up called Meta's Internal Research.org, and that includes a couple of true experiments.

The evidence for causality is now overwhelming. People have to stop saying, “Oh, it's just correlational.”

So when you say the evidence for causality is overwhelming, break that down for us a little bit. What is your understanding of the mechanisms by which social media is harmful to children?

3. Social Media’s Hidden Harms

Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower, brought out this survey that Meta did—the Bad Experiences and Encounters framework. Meta itself had done tons of research. They collected what kids were saying and what was happening to them. What they found is that they get very high rates of sexual harassment—around 15% each week. Each week, someone approaches them sexually.

They also get bullying. They see violence, and they see hardcore porn. The biggest, clearest one, I think, is sextortion. That one just stands out like a sore thumb. If you're on social media, you can get sextorted. If you're not, you can't really. The kids who get sextorted are deeply shamed. They shared a picture of themselves—these are usually teenage boys—and then their lives are ruined, and some of them commit suicide.

So I'm just saying there are so many different mechanisms by which kids are getting harmed. Depression and anxiety are just 2 of the pathways.

So you're saying that it's not any one thing. You're saying that the overall environment is so dangerous that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to use a social network like Instagram over an extended period of time and not have one, or likely multiple, of these harms hit you in some way.

That answer somewhat surprises me because I feel like the usual answers we hear are, “Well, it's negative social comparison,” right? It seems like my friends are living a more exciting life than I am, and now I'm upset. Or the algorithm has driven me into a rabbit hole: I started out a little curious about losing weight, and now I have an eating disorder.

So how has your understanding of the mechanisms of harm changed, if at all, since you wrote your book?

Sure. When I started the book, I thought the story was going to be that girls using social media get depressed, in part, by social comparison.

That’s what everyone was talking about five years ago. And that’s definitely one of the mechanisms. I didn’t know what the story was for boys when I started. By the end of the book, and especially since the book came out, what I’ve realized is that it’s the whole goddamn environment. It’s all the fishhooks dangled in front of boys. You want porn, gambling, vaping, sports betting—even crypto investing is gamified.

4. Product Safety Versus History

In this paper, you’ve tried to decouple two questions. One of them is what you call the historical population question, basically a restatement of the thesis of The Anxious Generation: an entire generation raised on social media is showing all these effects on their mental health from this technology. The other is just the product safety question: Are these products, as currently constituted, safe for children and teens?

What are you trying to do by decoupling these questions? I read that as, “Oh, Haidt is getting a little wobbly on one of the two prongs of his argument,” basically saying, “We may or may not be able to solve this historical population question, but when it comes to the question of product safety, we can answer that one now.” Am I reading that correctly?

Well, yes, you are, except I wouldn’t use the word “wobbly,” so let me explain that. My interest in separating the two questions came about because there was a report issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in late 2023. The report came out, and it had a chapter showing all these harms, all these ways that it’s harming kids. But in the summary of the report, there was this sentence. It says, quote, “Our review did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.”

So I read this and I’m like, “What the hell, guys? You have a whole chapter showing how it’s hurting kids. What does it mean at the population level?” What I realized by reading further is that what they mean is, “We’re not confident that this is what caused those big increases after 2012.”

And okay, they’re right, because how do you prove something happened in history? It’s very hard. You can’t run experiments. So I will grant that we can’t be 100% certain that what I said in The Anxious Generation is right. We can’t be 100% certain. I’d love to hear another hypothesis, but the historical question is very hard to settle.

But that’s not what people want to know. What parents want to know and what legislators want to know is: Is this consumer product, which all kids are consuming in massive quantities, hurting kids? That’s what they want to know. And guess what? We have 7 different lines of evidence saying, yes, it’s hurting kids. The kids say it, the teachers say it, the experiments say it, the correlational data say it, and Meta has—I mean, my God, the data they have on harm is astonishing.

In science and social science, we’re very careful about causality. We have to be certain about causality before we say X caused Y. And so I can’t say that I’m certain that social media caused the big increase in 2012, but I can say I am 99.9% confident at this point that social media’s hurting kids by the millions.

You’re understandably, and I think appropriately, very critical of the tech executives here, but I’d also note that parents gave kids these phones, schools allowed them, and regulators did nothing for a decade. So if we’re assigning blame for this situation, how much falls on everyone else involved?

I would say close to zero, for this reason.

Mm.

The whole key to solving this problem, the reason we didn’t solve it for so long, is that it’s a series of collective-action traps.

Mm.

I’m a social psychologist. What we do for a living is look at the ways that we influence each other, and there are certain situations where, yeah, I don’t want to give my 10-year-old a phone, but everyone else has one. She’s being left out.

So the phones and social media—all these things—they put us in a trap, and so we feel we have to give in. And since that’s the situation, I can’t blame the people. My rule as a social psychologist is: If one person does something really bad, that might be a bad person. If everybody in a situation is doing something bad, that’s guaranteed to be a bad situation.

So no, I don’t blame—I mean, look, of course, parents should stand up and parent, but so many of us are trying, and it’s really, really hard.

Yeah.

Everybody’s fighting all the time with their kids over this tech. We didn’t ask for these fights.

Mm.

So I don’t blame the parents, and I don’t blame the teachers.

Yeah.

I blame the companies.

5. Haidt Takes Up Advocacy

John, your life has changed quite a bit since we last talked to you. Your career has shifted from being more of a pure researcher and public intellectual to really being an activist on this issue. And I’m curious what that’s been like for you and what you’ve learned about advocacy in this new role of yours. What actually—

Yeah.

—seems to change people’s minds when they may be reluctant when they first encounter some of the ideas you’re pushing?

Well, thank you for that. Yeah, it’s true, my life has changed a lot. I’ve been a scholar and a researcher for a very long time, and I’ve started multiple organizations that try to translate findings from the behavioral sciences to help important institutions work better. That’s my mission statement as an academic.

So I’ve done some of that throughout my career, and when The Anxious Generation came out in March 2024, I thought I was going to promote it for a few months, take the summer off, recover, and then get back to work on the big book I’m supposed to write on democracy.

But because this whole thing blew up, and because mothers around the world stood up and started saying, “Where do we sign up? Let’s go. Let’s change. We’ve got to save our kids,” so many people are coming to me saying, “How can I help? What can we do?” Legislators were calling me. Governors were calling me.

Because here’s the thing: If you’re a parent, you’ve seen it. Everybody has seen the problem, and nobody really knew what to do about it because it’s a collective-action trap. And since the book proposed 4 norms to get out of the trap—no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world—I proposed these 4 norms, and people are adopting them all around, in other countries that I haven’t even been to.

So I realized I’m 62. God knows how many years I have left with a brain that’s still functioning. I can’t count on more than 10. So how am I going to spend those remaining good years? I could write another book on democracy, which will be out of date by the time it comes out because, my God, things are changing fast, or I could devote myself to pushing for phone-free schools and raising the age.

Yeah, I’m curious. I know you probably can’t tell us about all of the private meetings you’re having with lawmakers, heads of state, and tech executives, but just give us the flavor of one meeting with someone important or influential as you’ve been—

Mm.

—schlepping all over, hawking your book, and talking about this message.

Yeah, sure. The surprise for me has been how easy this has been, that everywhere I go, I’m pushing on open doors because everyone who’s a parent has seen it. It’s very popular among voters.

And so the—I think the best example of an answer to your question is this: I did a quick trip to Paris, Amsterdam, and London back in April of last year, and I worked with More in Common, a wonderful group that does all kinds of pro-democracy work. They set up a dinner party for me to talk to members of French society and psychiatrists. It was really interesting.

One of the people there was in the French Parliament, and he said, “Oh, you should talk to Macron.” I said, “Oh, I’d love to, but I’m leaving in 2 days.” He said, “I’ll call him.” The next day, I got a call from Macron’s office: “Can you come in tomorrow?”

So I had a half-hour meeting with Macron in which I showed him the data, because I was told in advance that he loves data. You can show him evidence. So I went through it with him and said, “Look, here’s what’s happening. Here’s what we know.”

He thought about it, and as he was saying goodbye to me, he said, “We will act.” And he sure did. He’s really been pushing. What he said to me then was, “I’m going to push it. This should be an EU thing, and if we can’t get it through the EU, then I’ll do it in France.”

That was the most spectacular one. I was really surprised by that. But that’s what I’m getting at: Everyone sees it, everyone cares about this.

Jonathan, there's now this group of plaintiffs' lawyers and law firms—I'm sure you know many of them and have worked with them before—who go around the country looking for evidence of social media harms, especially against children. They bring these big lawsuits, these class-action suits. They sue the tech companies and try to get these huge settlements out of them.

I'm curious what your thoughts on that system are. It's largely grown up since you published your book, and a lot of them cite your work as evidence that these companies should be held liable through the courts and should be forced to pay out huge settlements to the families of the victims here. Are you comfortable with that as sort of a makeshift solution—

Mm.

—until regulators get their act together? Does that feel like an optimal way of addressing these harms?

Well, I think it seems to be the only way that we have. Let's imagine that there was a new consumer product introduced, some new toy or a new kind of candy bar with some new ingredient, and if we knew from internal reports from the companies that they deliberately designed it to be addictive, they put something addictive in it, and then a couple of years after introduction, 90% of kids are eating 10 candy bars a day, and diabetes is going up.

They're not eating healthy food, and we see rates rising around the world. At some point, there might be somebody who says, "Maybe this is not a safe consumer product. Maybe this company should be held liable for the harm it's inflicting on literally hundreds of millions of kids"—literally hundreds of millions, because social media is used by almost all kids.

I mean, there are some countries where it's not, but in medium- to high-income countries, it's almost universal. We all know someone who has a kid who's been hospitalized, has an eating disorder, or suicide. We all know people. It is everywhere, and these companies have never faced a jury, ever.

No one has succeeded in holding them responsible for what they did to their kids. So this is an outrage. And these lawyers who are taking these cases, yeah, they're heroes.

You know, there's this other dimension to it, too, Jonathan, which is that your book understandably focuses on the crisis with children, but adults are very much living their own version of this, right? I was having coffee with some friends around New Year. Two of them are product managers in tech, and I asked them, "Hey, what do you want your 2026 to be about?" And they said, "I need to change my relationship with my phone."

They have implemented so many different tricks. They're putting it in black and white. They're setting screen-time limits. They're leaving it in another room an hour before they go to bed. The systems that people are having to devise just to try to reclaim their own time and attention are getting ever more sophisticated, and this is among the people who are building the things on the phones, right?

So I'm curious how you think about bringing some of these same arguments out of childhood and into adulthood, because it seems to me like this goes well beyond what is happening to kids under 18.

Yeah. No, you're absolutely right, and I think that's why we're winning. That's why it's so easy to get laws to protect kids all over the world—

Mm.

—because we all see it. We adults are all overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed. I can't read a book anymore. There's too much other stuff—

Yeah.

—coming in. I haven't focused on adults only because I don't want to legislate for adults.

Yeah.

I don't want to tell adults what to do. But damn it, I don't want the companies sucking my children into toxic spaces without my knowledge or permission.

6. Australia Tests The Theory

To speak a little bit about Australia, this week, Meta shut down about 550,000 accounts belonging to teens under this new Australian law that just went into effect, banning social media for kids under 16. Jonathan, I'm so curious if you have a prediction about what is about to happen in Australia. Because it seems like—

Mm.

—we have this great natural experiment now. What are you looking for, and how confident are you that—

Um.

—that your own view that if you simply remove phones and social media from schools, kids' mental health will improve?

Well, removing phones from schools, we know—I will know soon. Removing the whole deal from schools seems to immediately greatly improve attention. Friendship improves, and discipline problems go down. So on phone-free schools, the data is pouring in. I've never heard of a school that was unhappy about it or that reversed it.

I'm sure we're going to see that learning improves, friendship improves, and fun in school improves, which means that truancy will go down. I think that will have a measurable impact on mental health. That's in the schools.

Now, what Australia did is even bolder, which is they said, "We're going to put it on the companies. We're going to say that you have to be 16 to open an account where you sign a contract to give away your data, your rights, without your parents' knowledge or permission. You can't do that till you're 16. At 16, you can do whatever you want. But before 16, you can't do that."

And so here's the question: What percentage of Australia's kids will actually be off social media? We don't know. If the Australian bill is effective at getting social media use down below, say, 20%, then I think we will see, over time, kids have to sort of remember how to do other things other than scroll.

I think we will see benefits, especially if the Australians do the full program, which is, "Hey, go out and play," which is what the prime minister keeps saying. "Go out on the footy field," he says. So if we can succeed in restoring a play-based childhood, then we're going to see, I think, big benefits to mental health.

How long should we let that natural experiment run? If 5 years from now there's been no significant improvement in mental health among young people in Australia, would you conclude that this was a wrong hypothesis of yours—

Mm.

—that we just didn't let it run for long enough? When should we—

Mm-hmm.

—judge the success or failure of this intervention?

Yeah. First of all, tell me when we get to, say, 60% or 70% of kids actually being off, so the effectiveness matters. This is a cat-and-mouse game, so the companies are going to have to up their game. We'll see.

But once we get to, say, 70% of kids actually being off, now we've broken the collective-action trap. Now kids can be off. Now parents can say no more easily. And once we get there, I think within a year we're going to start seeing lots of reports of different behavior.

Will that show up in the national statistics? Not for a couple of years. It takes a couple of years before it'll start to show up in these big national surveys we have. But 5 years—if we don't see anything budge in 5 years, I would then have to conclude that I was wrong in thinking that reducing social media use would improve mental health.

But here's the thing: This whole debate has been framed around mental health. And so if it doesn't improve mental health, does that mean we should undo it? I would say no. I would say, tell me how many kids have been sex-trafficked. Tell me how many kids have died from drug overdoses. Let's look at all the other ancillary harms, and then we can decide whether it was a good policy.

You know, Jonathan, over time, I have to say, I have become more sympathetic to your point of view. I started this debate very much from the viewpoint of free expression, wanting to let kids express themselves online, wanting them to be able to explore their interests and connect with people like them.

Over time, I have just become more persuaded by the product-safety argument. I have read the internal documents. I have talked to the people who work at these companies. I do not believe that they care or are investing in protecting kids the way they should be.

And to me, that argument is just starting to carry the day. But I was having a conversation with my sister-in-law about this stuff over Thanksgiving. We were talking about some of these issues, and she let me know that she took issue with a comment I'd made on a previous episode where I said, "You know, the one argument that you never hear anybody making is that Instagram is really good for kids."

Yeah. I haven't heard it.

Which I still basically believe.

Yeah.

Yeah. But you've heard it from some. And my sister-in-law made a version of this argument to me, which is that, for my nephew, he has an Instagram account. He's 13, and he is able to explore his interests, which include gymnastics and cooking. And so when she—

Mm-hmm.

—looks at his usage of Instagram—

Mm.

—she says, "This basically seems okay to me." My question is, what avenues do you hope that children use to explore their interests in a world where we do just yank that away from them?

Yeah. So I think last time I was on, we talked about a related topic, and I said, "You've got to separate the internet from social media." Social media's a part of the internet. It's one of the worst parts. It's the one that's hurting kids the most.

But look, all of us on this call are old enough to remember the '90s, when we first got a look at the internet. It was amazing. If you're LGBTQ in rural areas, suddenly you can find information. You can find people. I mean, it was amazing, the way it brought people together.

So I would never take that away. I would never say, “Kids shouldn’t be on the internet.” Do they also need platforms that use algorithms to force-feed them whatever content was most upvoted by people based on the extremity of its emotions or expressions? Does your nephew benefit from having Instagram pick what he sees, as opposed to having him type in what he’s looking for? If you take away social media from kids, I don’t see any loss.

7. AI Companions Raise Stakes

Yeah, I’m curious because, like Casey, I am also pretty hype-pilled at this moment in time. I am pretty convinced of the arguments you’re making. But I would say the one criticism I might have is that, to me, it feels a little bit like you are fighting the last war, because when I go to schools now and meet high school students, they tell me, “We are talking with AI companions now. That is the thing that we are doing.”

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And I have this sort of fear in the back of my mind that you will succeed at getting social media banned for under-16s all over the world, and then it will be like there’s this new threat that we weren’t even paying attention to.

Mm-hmm.

And we will pine for the days when teens were using social media. At least they were communicating with other people—

Yeah.

—and not these AI companions.

Right.

So do you worry at all that you have sort of not kept pace with the state of the technology?

No. This is a strategic move, for this reason: AI is so new, and it’s morphing so fast. In the research community, it takes us 5, 10, 20 years to figure anything out. So we’ve been arguing about social media for a long time. I think we’ve got it. I think I’m going to win on this issue.

Now, it’s a normal academic debate. There are researchers who look at the data, and they see something different. But here’s the way I’m thinking about it: If we can’t win on social media, if we can’t get consensus that this is bad and that government should do something, if we can’t win on that, then I just give up on AI. Just say, “It’s game over. Our kids are gone. We’re never going to see them again. The boys are going to have sexy chatbots their whole lives. They’re never going to reproduce.”

So if we can’t win on social media, then we definitely can’t win on AI. And since we are winning on social media, and since governments around the world are waking up to the fact that they have an obligation to protect kids—a lot of them have never done anything, especially our federal government, which has never done a single thing, never ever, to protect kids on the internet—governments are waking up.

The faster we can win on social media, delay phones, get more play, and have phone-free schools, then we have a chance. A chance. At least we can try to make the case: Just get it out of elementary school. Don’t let kids be talking to chatbots when they’re little.

Mm-hmm. Do you miss your obscure academic life at all? Does it bother you to be a public intellectual and advocate—a man of mystery, a man on a mission?

Yes, in that I’m working all the time now, and I really want to just take the summer off. I want to try reading books. I think if I read physical books, maybe I’ll be able to finish one.

But I have had a feeling of efficacy, a feeling that I’ve been working on this for a long time, and I feel like now I’ve been gifted the chance to actually make a difference in the world. It’s a kind of satisfaction beyond anything I’ve known in my life. So I do miss a lot, but I’m actually really energized, and I’m actually pretty happy these days.

That’s great.

Amazing.

You know what? I’ll tell you this story. When I was pitching my book early last year, I was going around to different publishers, and you know you’ve made it when the only pitch they wanted was, like, “The Anxious Generation, but for AI.”

Every publisher was like—

I was like, “No, that’s not really what I’m working on. It’s going to be more of a history thing.”

And they’re like, “Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to write The Anxious Generation, but for AI?”

I was like, “Yes, I’m sure. I’m pretty sure Jonathan’s going to do that.”

But anyway, you have made a splash. And if you have any tips on selling a book, I’ll use them this fall.

Okay. I’d be happy to read your book if you want someone to read an advance copy.

Please.

Because I am moving on. That’s my next question: What the hell are we going to do with AI?

But you just told me you can’t read a book anymore, so I don’t trust you on this.

Next summer, I’ll try to read it. Send it to me electronically, and I’ll feed it into ChatGPT, and it’ll give me a chapter-by-chapter summary.

Good. Good. That’s great.

That’s what I do now.

That’s what I’m going for.

I hate it. Ah.

Change starts at home.

I have to say, it’s actually very comforting to me that even Jonathan Haidt is having ChatGPT read books for him.

Yeah.

Because obviously I do that as well, but I feel bad about it.

Right.

But now, with him, now I feel fine.

This is the thing. No one has read a book since 2021, and they’re just lying about it.

The people are reading one kind of book—

Mm-hmm.

—which is romantasy.

Yes.

So if I ever wrote a social-science treatise, I would try to put it in a world where dark fairies were having sex with each other.

Yeah, yeah.

Have you thought about that, Jonathan?

Something to consider.

Yeah. Actually, we did. That is actually the way we open up our children’s book. Okay, it’s not sex, but it is. It actually does open with a story about dark fairies—

Look at that.

—evil wizards.

Okay. Well—

By the way, I love the pandering of the adults. It’s The Anxious Generation, but when you want to talk directly to the kids, all of a sudden they’re amazing.

Yeah. For the kids, you better hold out some hope.

That’s true.

Yeah.

That’s true.

Yeah. All right, Jonathan. Thanks so much.

All right. Thanks, Jonathan.

All right, guys. Thanks so much for having me back.

Take care. When we come back, is Claude Code a new ChatGPT moment? We’ll talk about what you all have been vibe-coding, including a website for door handles.

How are we going to handle that?

8. Claude Code Goes Mainstream

Well, Casey, it’s been another big week for Claude and Claude Code, which I think seems to be having kind of a ChatGPT moment.

You know, I texted you earlier this week and I said, “Is it crazy to say that Claude Code feels like the most important thing that has happened in AI since ChatGPT?” I realize that may sound crazy to some of our listeners, but I feel like we can make the case.

I think so, too. I think this is a big, big moment, especially for people who are sort of code-inclined or code-curious. We’ve continued to see many, many posts on social media about people’s experiments with Claude Code.

It seems like it is actually creating something of an infrastructure crisis for Anthropic, which is also something that happened to OpenAI during their original ChatGPT moment. They just could not keep up with the demand, and the site kept going down.

But I would say the larger thing that has been going on is that non-coders are starting to experiment with this tool. Anthropic also released a version of Claude Code for non-coders this week called Cowork, which sort of sits in the Claude desktop app and allows you to attempt various tasks using the same sort of agent-like framework that Claude Code uses, but in a way that’s slightly less intimidating than opening up a terminal app.

Yeah, and if you think about what the ChatGPT moment was, it was a time when millions and millions of people realized simultaneously that you can ask questions and get pretty good answers, and you can generate text for many useful purposes. The Claude Code moment, I feel like, is the next evolution, where people are saying, “I can now build something that is useful to me even though I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

Whereas maybe 6 months ago the results I would have gotten were pretty bad or would have required a lot of technical know-how, I can now come in, type in a box, and get basically exactly what I want. And that is actually huge.

It’s huge, and I had a version of that experience myself in the past week, too. The read-it-later app that I built, Stash—we talked about my vibe-coding experiment last week—I got so many responses from people saying, “Hey, can I use this thing? Are you going to distribute this and put it in the App Store?” that I decided, you know what? I’m going to do it. I’m going to release Stash to the world.

I had Claude Code go in and prepare a version of this for the public and build me a little landing page. You can now download it and try it for yourself at kevinroose.com/stash. It is working better than I ever expected, and it remains incredible to me that I did all of this as an idiot who does not know how to code. I was able, in a matter of hours, to build and release a working software product.

First of all, congratulations for the launch of Stash.

Thank you.

People have been really excited about this. My absolute favorite was when you posted about this on X and somebody responded, “Will it parse my X bookmark graveyard?” And you responded, “I have honestly no idea what it will do.” I laughed so hard when I read that. I thought, finally, an honest software developer who just admits that we don’t know how any of this stuff works.

I have no idea how any of this works. I have no idea if it works. It works for me, but I am very delighted that I was able to vibe-launch this software product into the world with honestly not that much work. It was not that hard. I did not use any special prompting tricks. I’m not even that good at using Claude Code, and yet I was able to conduct an act of software engineering that now other people are downloading and using for themselves.

I did have one incident that I want to tell you about, which is that I accidentally had what I believe is my first AI security breach. When I launched the public version of the Stash app that I was open-sourcing, it inadvertently revealed my credentials on several of the sites that I use. So I had to go back to Claude and be like, “Hey, could you scrub my personal information out of there?”

Oh.

That’s interesting. I didn’t know you had any credentials to do what you do.

9. Listeners Start Vibe Coding

We wanted to talk about a few different things with Claude Code this week, and we want to begin with listener responses. Last week, we asked you, “Hey, what are you building?” And we were absolutely delighted with the response. We have gotten so many messages from you all over the past few days, to our email, of course, but also in the Forkiverse, the Fediverse server that we set up that we’re going to be talking about a little bit later in the show.

We just wanted to highlight a few of our favorites, because I think they speak to the breadth of what people are able to build and also how little experience folks had before they started trying these things.

Yes, and I think this is more than just a show-and-tell segment, because for me, there is something different about trying to do this stuff yourself versus just listening to us talk about it on our podcast. I really think that our listeners who listened to our episode last week and then went out and tried to vibe-code things for themselves were shocked by how easy it was and by how good the results were.

I was joking with you over text this week that it seemed like you were feeling the AGI in a way that maybe you hadn’t before. So I think for our listeners, maybe this past week has been an experience of starting to feel that, feel the progress, feel the capabilities improving, and feel that things that were impossible even a few months ago are now becoming possible.

Absolutely. So as we get into what we heard from listeners, it is important that I make the following disclosure: My boyfriend works at Anthropic. I would go a step further and say, if you are feeling like this is edging into shill territory, I really do think you could probably do a lot of similar things with Codex, which is OpenAI’s sort of Claude Code equivalent.

I’m told Google has one as well, but due to the ongoing disaster of Google marketing, I truly cannot remember what it’s called. Maybe you could Google it.

It’s called Integrality.

Perfect. So maybe try that. The point is, these tools are now available, and they’re really good. We want to get into it and talk about what you all are building.

And that’s a good chance to make my disclosure, too, which is that I work for The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations related to the training of AI models.

Okay, so first up, we got some great examples from our listeners of websites that they have been building. We talked on the show last week about how we had each redesigned our own websites using these tools. One of those came from our listener Gina, who had never vibe-coded before but, after last week’s episode, told us that she had gone out and designed her own website.

She says it took her about 2½ to 3 hours, and I’m going to look at it right now. Looks great, Gina. It’s got some nice animations. She even told us that it has an Easter egg: If you hit Control-M, it pulls up what looks like a MySpace profile from the ’90s. Very cool. Congrats on your new website, Gina.

Super fun. Love the Easter egg there.

Another website that we got came in from Sarah Haggard. She built a book site for book recommendations. It turns out that, over the winter break, she wanted to catalog her books so that she could give her husband a list of books she had already read and he wouldn’t accidentally buy her a duplicate.

She was able to do that, but then went a lot further and now has a website where you, the listener, can go to sarahsbooks.com—S-A-R-A-H-S books.com—and she will make a book recommendation depending on what mood you’re in, if you want a beach read, if you want a story about women’s empowerment, or if you want one of many other categories. You can create your own account. It is a full-featured web app.

I guess after she put it up, she got in touch with the founder of Goodreads, and now they’re going to get together and have a fun conversation. So this is someone else who does not have a lot of technical experience, built something to scratch her own itch, and it is super cool.

I’ll just say, there’s something very romantic about vibe-coding for your partner.

Yeah.

A lot of alpha there.

Absolutely. Go to your partner today and say, “What would you like me to build you, sweetheart?” Then just see if you can whip it up.

All right, one more website. We heard from a listener who turned his family’s Christmas letter into an ’80s text adventure inspired by the video game Zork. This is from listener David Phillips. He asked us not to read out the name of the website since it’s got information about his kids on it, but I’m looking at it right now. It looks very cool. Very good idea for the annual holiday letter.

It’s got green text on a black screen. It’s very much conjuring an ’80s CRT monitor. And a really fun detail that he puts on the website is that his stepfather actually worked on the original Zork game.

Hmm.

So this is actually kind of a family tribute as much as it is a vibe-coding project, and I just love that aspect of it.

Yes. We also heard from several small-business owners who told us that Claude Code and other agentic coding tools were allowing them to build tools that they otherwise would have had to pay a lot of money for someone else to build.

My favorite of these was from Joe. He is a welder—a great AI-proof job of the future, by the way—and he said that he has no experience programming. But over the past few months, Joe told us that he has been teaching himself to build tools for his business.

He said, quote, “I built an MCP server that has turned my Claude chat window into a personal assistant.” He said it’s able to track jobs, help him create estimates, and organize PDFs and contracts. He’s even connected Claude to the 3D-modeling program that he uses, which has helped him build complex programs for CNC, the computerized cutting and etching technology that many builders use.

He says he’s used Claude Code to make agents to search for potential work in his area and write a weekly lead generator for him. I thought this was a really interesting example of what might seem like a low-technology business that is actually able to go out there and build software that helps him get more business.

He ended his email in a way that really affected me. He said, “I really want people in my demographic to understand that this isn’t ‘I asked ChatGPT to write an email’ or ‘Can you generate an image that has the correct spelling?’ This is, to me, ‘I built my own business infrastructure from scratch with an AI pair programmer despite having zero formal training and a high school education.’”

Totally.

Pretty cool.

Another example we got was from Faye Bell, a listener who runs her own business selling wallpaper to interior designers. She told us about a special tool that she has been creating called the Wallpaper Calculator, which we can look at over here. It is at her website, and it basically allows a potential client—an interior designer, maybe—to calculate exactly how much wallpaper they need to cover a particular wall. This tool also generates a layout diagram so that clients can visualize what the wallpaper will look like in their space.

She said this is something that she has always been doing by hand using tools like Photoshop or InDesign, but now clients can do it themselves and save themselves time. Faye wanted to let us know that she had no previous coding experience, and she loves that she can do this without having to pay any hosting costs. She does not have to buy this software from some third-party provider. Those can be really expensive services, and she just did it for her damn self.

One more that caught our attention came from a dad who made a web app to track a hilariously specific chore he had asked his kids to complete. Simon wrote that it was the week before Christmas, and he and his wife decided that their kitchen needed a tune-up, so they ordered new handles for the doors and drawers in their kitchen. It was 70 handles in all. To motivate their children to help them with this project, Kevin, they offered the kids a dollar per handle changed.

He had noticed that in the past they had quickly lost interest, believe it or not, when given the handle-replacement task. So this time, he spun up a web app to log their efforts. We pulled up this web app, and the first thing it tells you when you open it is that the project is now complete and all 70 handles were replaced, so this was a success. Basically, there is a leaderboard for his 4 children, and you can see who made the most money.

They were able to cash out their winnings via Apple Cash to the bank or via chocolates, which I love. It was Ben who came in number 1, with 44 handles replaced. Vic came in at 0, so I guess Vic was holding out for a higher wage to get involved in the knob-replacement business. Again, this is so wacky and fun. Was this necessary? Absolutely not.

But what I love about this project is that it speaks to a theme that I felt in so many of the things that listeners sent us, which is the joy of creation. It is fun to make things. It is fun to have a dream and be able to quickly realize it. So, yeah, I just love this one.

What excites me is less about the products themselves. It is that people, I think, are starting to understand the pace and trajectory of AI progress through using these tools. A year ago, you could not type into a box, “Make me a website for my family’s handle-replacement project,” or, “Make me a tool for my small business that allows people to estimate the wallpaper needs of their project,” and now you can. Unless you have really spent time—even a couple of minutes—using one of these tools, you really do not understand the state of the art.

I think a lot of people, unfortunately, are in the same position that we were in back when ChatGPT came out in 2022, which is that they are opining on a technology that they do not actually understand because they have not experienced it for themselves. For the listeners out there who are listening to this and saying, “Okay, well, these projects sound great, but what does this have to do with me or my life?” I would just say there is no better way right now, in 2026, to get a handle on what the frontier of AI progress looks like than to come up with a project, no matter how silly or trivial-seeming, give it to one of these AI coding agents, and watch what it does.

I agree with that. You know what I would say, Kevin? To me, this stuff is the flip side of slop. This is anti-slop, right? If slop is about a world where every surface online seems like it is being taken over by these digital creations that you did not ask for, that you find confusing, that blur the line between reality and fiction, and that just sort of make you feel hypnotized and gross, this is the reverse of that. This is real people saying, “I have a need in my life, and I am going to go make it with my own hands.”

We have always talked about AI as a dual-use technology. We do spend a lot of time on the show talking about its many downsides, which are huge, real, and scary, but there is also an upside here, which is that, at least in this moment, this can be an empowering tool. To me, I think one reason why I was so delighted to see all of these listener responses was that they spoke to the way that technology tools can still empower us.

Yes, and it also gave me an experience that I had not had before: I now understand how annoying it is to build and release software products in the world, only to have users tell you everything that is wrong with them. Five minutes after I made my Stash app public and put it up on GitHub so that people could download it and use it themselves, I started getting feature requests. It was like, “Are you not impressed by the app that I have made and released to you for free?”

Already, I understand in a more visceral and embodied way the pain of our listeners who are product managers at big tech companies. Yes, but you also now just have a perfect thing you can say back to them, which is, “Just fork it and make the version yourself,” right? “Go vibe-code your own feature.” Take it up with Claude.

So, Casey, when you were texting me and talking about how amazed and impressed you were by this technology, how this felt like a ChatGPT moment, what has been the most surprising thing for you since our segment last week about your experience with these tools?

Well, I just keep having new ideas for stuff to build. I assumed that I would run out after coming up with 1 or 2 things, but every time I have an idea and I can just make it, it gives me the confidence to go out and build 3 or 4 new things. I am moving away from thinking of this as a fun little proof-of-concept demo and thinking of it more as a tool that I have now. If I have some sort of itch when it comes to software, my default assumption now is that I can probably quickly build some version of it.

Yeah, I am finding that I am having to retrain myself or rewire my brain a little bit, because my impulse when I encounter something annoying or a problem that I am having in my life is not to go build a piece of software to address it. That is just not part of how I live my life. But now I am finding that more and more times a day, that sort of bell is going off in my head: “Oh, I could probably build something,” or, “Claude could probably build something to help me with this.”

Hmm. So we are actually going to be doing a demo of how we vibe code with Claude Code. We're going to be doing that on our YouTube channel. You'll be able to see that next week. But if you are someone who has been maybe curious about this, maybe we've piqued your curiosity a little bit, but you're still a little bit intimidated by it, hopefully that will give you the tools you need to get started.

When we come back, we're forking around in the Forkiverse with our friend PJ Vogt. Our co-founder, PJ Vogt. Get it right.

10. The Forkiverse Goes Live

Well, Casey, listeners to the Hard Fork podcast will know that we released an extra episode this week detailing our experiment with PJ Vogt of the great Search Engine podcast and the new social network that we started, the Forkiverse.

That is right. The Forkiverse has been up and running for just about a week now, as of this podcast episode, and I have to say, Kevin, the response has been overwhelming.

Truly wild. One of the wildest things I have ever experienced in my career.

When you had this idea to run this experiment, the maximum number of people that you could imagine wanting to join us in this federated server that we set up was about 2,000 people. Today, we can report here on the Hard Fork show that more than 4,000 souls have now joined us within the Forkiverse, threatening to overwhelm and perhaps destroy it.

Yes. And we've already had our first content moderation scandal, some of our first technical hiccups. We're speed-running the life of a social media company in the year 2026. And so today we wanted to give some updates on how the Forkiverse is going, so we've invited back our third co-founder with us. PJ Vogt from Search Engine is here. He's here virtually.

Thank you for having me. I've been called a lot of things, but never founder.

How does it feel?

Honestly, I'm surprised at how much I'm already learning about the internet by being a person who cares about even maintaining a very small community on it. I've only ever been a community member, not a community architect. It's strange. It's very strange.

Well, let's talk about the flavor of the Forkiverse so far. It can be a mistake to start any kind of social product and not give people an idea of what to do. And I think one of the smart things that PJ did as we were setting up the Forkiverse was to give people a prompt. He said, “Hey, something you could do, if you want, is just post a picture of where you're listening to this podcast episode from.”

And so when I logged on to the Forkiverse, a lot of what I saw was just people posting really fun photos. I think it contributed to this sense of, “Hey, we are not here to be super serious. We are not here to solve the great issues of the world. We just want to hang out and meet each other.” And so I have actually been delighted at the flavor of the Forkiverse, because it really has seemed like a bunch of people who like the same podcast coming together and saying hello to each other.

Yes. And I think because, PJ, you posted your version of the episode a couple of days before we did, at first the people who were trickling in were mostly Search Engine fans. So I got to observe some things about your audience, which is that many of your listeners live these bucolic lives on farms in British Columbia, where they're just listening to podcasts while they work in their woodworking studios. Your listeners really seem to be having a good time out there.

I learned the same thing about my listeners. It was so cool. The amount of people who were like, “I'm in a cabin somewhere far away working on my ceramics,” and I was like, “That's so cool. I had no idea.”

And it solved for me one of the things that I don't like about podcasting, which is that it's so one-way. I'm someone who's sometimes suspicious of online community, that it actually can feel like community, and I will say that in week 1 of the Forkiverse, meeting both Search Engine listeners and Hard Fork listeners, to me it does feel like community.

It feels like a bunch of strangers politely, friendly, jokily just being like, “Here's who I am. Here's who I am.” I've really liked it.

I noticed over the past week that people were using it to talk to Kevin and me about the most recent episode of the show. We heard a lot about people's vibe-coding projects, which is something we had talked about in last week's episode. And so that was something else that was fun for me. When I got to visit the site, I just got to see a lot of people saying, “Hey, check out this website that I made,” and it was really nice.

Yeah, I think for a lot of people, those sort of prompts, or at least collective topics, can serve the function that alcohol serves at a party, which is just the social lubricant that makes everyone more likely to hang out and have a good time. So we should do more of that.

Yeah. So that's the fun stuff. Let's talk about the tedious, sweaty, behind-the-scenes work that goes into making the Fediverse possible. So, Kevin, in the first few days of people joining the network, you were getting a notification every single time somebody requested to join. Have you figured out how to turn that off?

No, I still get them, but now I've just filtered them out of my inbox, because they were arriving at a rate of several per minute. And I was just like—one thing that I like about the Forkiverse and the way that it was set up, I cannot claim any credit for this, because this is just part of the hosting service that we use, but it makes people write a little blurb about why they want to join.

And so it was actually kind of delightful to have those blurbs. I accepted every single request, even when they didn't write anything in that box, but I did like it when they did.

Well, give us some flavor of what sort of things people were saying. Why did they say they wanted to join the Forkiverse, and how disappointed do you think they've been with what they found waiting there?

Some people just said, “I'm a fan of the show, and I heard about it on the podcast, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.” A lot of people were expressing how burned out and exhausted they were by other social media experiences.

A sort of typical comment that I got just 11 minutes ago said, “Just wanted to thank you for this platform, because I'm 1 day in and already having a civil discussion about gen AI art, whereas on Reddit, Bluesky, and even Hacker News, I would probably be immediately shouted down.”

Hmm.

So it does seem like people are grateful for just a new place to type that has a slightly different vibe to it.

Yeah. As you say, Kevin, we have had many hundreds, probably thousands, of people logging on to have a good time. But the server is federated, which means that people can interact with us even if they have not joined the Forkiverse, right? People can follow us in the Forkiverse. I'm Casey at theforkiverse.com. If you have an account on Mastodon or some other spot in the Fediverse, you can just follow me. And so we can hear from other people. I would say that that has resulted in some content moderation issues.

I was just surprised how quickly the bad guys showed up.

Mm.

I was looking at the moderation reports. I think I took a screenshot of this one. There's a user who showed up from another server. This person wasn't a Forkiversian, but they were causing trouble here. They sent the following messages in quick succession, all to accounts that seem like they are held by women:

“Hello, how are you doing today? Hello, my beautiful lady. How are you doing today? Hello, my beautiful lady, how are you doing? Hello, my beautiful lady. How are you doing? And a nice meeting you on here.”

Wow. So somebody who really wanted to connect and meet new people in the Fediverse.

A real sort of Don Juan.

Yeah.

He was bothering users. There was also a virulently racist person. He was using all of the slurs right away. And I was just like, “How did you find us? We're a community for sweet people.”

Yeah. It is amazing. I received the reports as well, and I saw one and I thought, “Yeah, I've got a moment. Let me see if I can take care of this.” It was somebody who had used just one slur, but I'd say it was one of the bad ones. So I had to block them.

But I had sort of the same reaction that you did, PJ, which is like, truly, why would you spend any time on this? It's like the idea that you would use part of your one wild and precious life to come into the Forkiverse and say these things to our users. What's going on with you?

Now, I am curious whether either of you felt the sort of power of the so-called ban hammer. Did you feel like you became drunk with authority, banning these users with no process for appeals?

Honestly, yes. I think there are certain places where you want to have a very rigid, principles-based content moderation system, like most of the big platforms that we would use. I would say Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit—you want them to have those kinds of systems.

When it comes to a fun experiment that some friends put together to see what would happen, I feel no attachment to that idea whatsoever. So it's like, if I don't like the vibe of your post and it bothered somebody else, by default you are just going to be gone, and there are not going to be appeals. Is that bad?

I mean, I agree with you, so I don't think it's bad. I just feel like this clubhouse is small enough that we can be arbitrary as long as we're arbitrarily following some non-arbitrary rules.

I had a moment where someone showed up from another instance, like another part of the Fediverse, a different Mastodon server. Do I have the technical nomenclature right?

Yeah.

Ish. Sure. And they were like, “No one should go to the Forkiverse because PJ's problematic. He's bad. This isn't even a real federated whatever.”

And it was a real moment where I was like, “Oh, my God, this person's not being very nice to me. I could ban them from the entire internet we've created.”

Hell yeah.

And I was proud. All I did was block them from my account. I was like, “You know what? There's nothing in the rules that says that you can't be mean to me. You can be mean to me.” But I felt the—

The little whisper of the demon that has driven Elon Musk into planets unknown.

Well, that is very principled of you to not ban him. I don't know that I would've been so kind. Now, listen, we've been avoiding the elephant in the room for too long.

Kevin, tell us about the Russian disinformation campaign that The Forkiverse has been a part of.

Yes. Our 1-week-old social network has already become entangled with a Russian disinformation campaign. This was an email I got from the Fediverse Trust and Safety team, which is sort of a group of people who oversee trust and safety in a decentralized way for the entire fediverse, not just our server.

They’re doing the Lord’s work over there.

They truly are. The executive director of IFTS, whose name is Jas, wanted to alert us to the fact that The Forkiverse is what’s called an open-registration service, one where anyone can sign up and register. They said that open-registration services, especially on the fediverse, are being targeted by a pro-Russia propaganda network that they are calling—and this is the most delightful part—Portal Combat.

Portal Combat?

Portal Combat? Yes, Portal Combat. This is what they have called a Russian network that is creating hundreds of accounts on servers, including Bluesky and Mastodon. According to IFTS and the French government, this network’s main aim seems to be to get onto these open-registration platforms and start spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine, along with criticism of Western governments.

They were flagging this to us as a courtesy because our Mastodon server was growing very quickly, and they wanted to say, “Hey, just FYI, this is happening to a bunch of other servers.” Have you guys noticed, in your moderation, any posts or users that seem suspiciously pro-Kremlin?

I haven’t, but I don’t follow all 4,000 people in The Forkiverse. That’s a challenge of running a big server like this: You typically aren’t seeing even a fraction of the content that is on the server. You’re relying on user reports. Unless a bunch of users said, “Hey, we’re seeing a bunch of suspiciously pro-Russian propaganda in our feeds,” we might be unaware of a problem like this. So that’s a legitimate problem.

I have a question for you guys.

Yeah, let’s hear it.

I’m curious. To me, the place where this has exceeded my modest expectations is that it’s just a website, and I’m surprised by how much I’m enjoying checking it. I honestly did not think we would clear that bar. I’m curious if it clears that bar for you guys—if you’re liking it as users.

It has, and for this reason. I spend most of my time on social networks these days on Bluesky and Threads. Bluesky is a very politics-dominant network, so whatever the political story of the day is there, it feels like everyone I follow only wants to talk about that. That’s despite the fact that I’ve sought out people who are mostly posting about tech news.

Threads, which some people call the gas-leak social network, is a series of completely disconnected posts from people who just lost their husband, or put on a dress for the first time in 30 years and wanted to take a picture of it, and then occasionally posts from TechCrunch. I happen to enjoy the insanity of Threads, but I can’t always say I know what to do when I show up there.

When I go to The Forkiverse, I truly feel like I’m interacting with people who like podcasts. I feel freer to share silly little jokes that might not feel welcome in some of the other places I’m online. The other day—I think it was this weekend—I was taking a look at how many people had signed up, and I posted, “Good morning, The Forkiverse. Another 200 people or so joined us overnight, and now the fire marshal is here. He’s doing a sexy little dance. Wait a minute, does this guy even work at the fire department?”

Here’s my point: I couldn’t have posted that on Bluesky. No one would have even understood what that meant. But it felt really good to post in The Forkiverse.

I love that we’ve progressed to the phase where our podcast is just us reading a series of Forkiverse posts out loud.

Well, I’ve got news for you. Most content is just people reading the equivalent of tweets.

Yeah. PJ, did you post anything on The Forkiverse this week that you’re especially proud of? Oh, I see—you posted the dress? I posted the dress. I was trying to juice engagement, so I posted the viral dress from 2014 that was either blue and black or white and gold, and I pretended like I had just discovered it. I asked people to tell me what color it was.

Wow. So you—I thought I was going to be our resident growth goblin, but it turns out that you are actually our growth goblin.

Oh, absolutely. It turns out I also got in trouble because I had a post where I said, “Make this go viral,” which I was kind of joking about, but then people were jokingly boosting it. A Fediversian showed up to tell me that the point of the fediverse is not virality, and it’s not attention. If I’m trying to go viral, I’m misunderstanding the entire reason for being at the place where I found myself. Honestly, it was fun to be scolded.

That brings us to an important part of the conversation today: people who have been on the fediverse for a long time and have opinions about how we should be doing the fediverse.

I got us embroiled in a bit of a controversy over the past day because one of these folks who’s been in the fediverse for a long time sent me a post that I didn’t appreciate. It was basically saying, “You guys are being very irresponsible with the server. You have now brought 4,000 people onto the fediverse, but you have said that you’re just basically doing this as an experiment. Someday, there might not be funding for The Forkiverse, and it might go away, and these 4,000 people are going to be left high and dry. So you need to lay out your plan to fund The Forkiverse until the heat death of the universe, or shame on you.” That was basically the vibe I was getting.

I’m reading this and losing my mind. I’m saying, “The thing is 4 days old.” Also, do you know what’s really easy to do? Create a new account on the fediverse. It’ll take you 5 minutes. The worst-case scenario is really not that bad.

Yeah.

Now, I’m sure some people are going to wonder: We just spoke to Jonathan Haidt about the dangers of social media, and here we are promoting this social media platform for other people to use. So I guess, Kevin, PJ, what is our feeling? If you’re 16 or younger, should you be allowed to access The Forkiverse?

No. In fact, when we were setting up the server, there was a thing in there that said, “What is the minimum age for people on your server?” I set it to 18 because I’m a responsible person.

Now, am I doing anything to verify that? Absolutely not. Have we installed any of these Australian-style, AI-powered age-determination tools? No, we have not. We’re working on the honor system, but if I see you posting about your Labubus, your Minecraft server, and your middle school math homework, I’m kicking you off, junior.

All right. So you heard it here first: You do not access The Forkiverse if you’re under 18. Do not access it from school. Do your homework. Listen to your parents.

Yeah. No phones till you’re 30.

No phones till you’re 30. You heard it here first.

You have to have a 401(k) before you can have a phone.

If you don’t have lower-back pain when you wake up in the morning, stay the hell off The Forkiverse.

All right, let’s move right along here. We’ve had our first content-moderation scandal. There’s, of course, the Russian influence campaign, and the dress is generating a lot of discourse. I think the question now is: What next, fellas? We accidentally got 4,000 people in a room. What do we want to do with them?

You can tell they’ve thought a lot about it from the blank expressions on their faces.

Just a dog staring out the window.

I really hope you’re watching this on YouTube just so you can see the dull stare.

I was waiting for PJ to respond.

I wasn’t even going to respond.

PJ’s our growth goblin. PJ, what next?

Okay, so I’m looking for—are you guys familiar with the concept of a scissor statement?

Yes. A statement that neatly separates one group from another.

Yeah. It’s a divisive piece of content that immediately makes everyone take a side. Obviously, we live in a country that is constantly producing things that are like scissor statements.

Yeah.

What I’m looking for this week, personally, are things like the dress—benign questions such as, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” Almost corny, millennial-era stuff. I’m just trying to generate conversation that people want to participate in, that goes beyond, “Hey, I’m here. Who are you?”

Yeah.

I’m trying to get people into discussions, but not discussions about the vast and intractable problems of the republic. I’m just trying to get a little past small talk to fun talk.

Yes.

I think we should do a thing that’s sort of like, “Search Engine listeners are like this, and Hard Fork listeners are like that.”

Do you think we need beef between the shows?

I don't even know if it has to be a beef. It just has to be stereotypes about the listeners, you know? What kind of clothes do they wear, what kind of cars do they drive, and that sort of thing.

Yeah, I like that.

You like that idea?

I like that.

Well, we've already learned that Search Engine listeners categorically live in the woods and on farms, whereas I think the Hard Fork listeners have a little bit more of an urban flavor to them.

Yeah, part of the laptop class.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Here's a question: Have we achieved our goals with the Forkiverse, or is there another goal yet to reach?

I want more growth.

Yeah.

I want this to become a place that is beyond just—I think we've already succeeded past goal 1, which is: It exists, people enjoy it, I enjoy going there, and you guys enjoy going there.

Yeah.

I think goal 2 is: Can this be more than a public community board for 2 podcasts? Even if it just means a public community board for 3 podcasts.

Yeah. We would take The Joe Rogan Show listeners if they want to sign up.

I want to hear about their meat-smoking tips. I want to hear about how they're bow-hunting elk. I want to know their peptide stack.

Yeah. What are you injecting—

Yeah.

Well, speaking of that, one of the most frequent questions that we get over on the Forkiverse is how many people can fit on the server before it explodes. We had originally told them we thought there could only be 2,000. There are now 4,000. What is our answer to that question?

So I dug into this a little bit because, as the site was growing, we saw the dashboards keep ticking up, and it looked like we were approaching our limits. I reached out to Hugo, the very nice man who runs the Masto.host hosting platform that the Forkiverse uses, and I said, “Hey, looks like we're growing faster than we anticipated. Are we going to have to upgrade our plan soon?”

He basically said, “No, it's not like a hard cap, but if you exceed that number of active users for some sustained period of time, we will have to talk about upgrading your plan.” So we are not yet at the point of having to shell out for an even bigger bespoke plan.

I will say that our users on the Forkiverse are being very nice and courteous. Some of them heard what we said about the maximum file-upload storage size that we have, and they have been uploading very grainy, low-resolution photos.

This is my favorite norm in the Fediverse: people uploading downscaled black-and-white images to try to help us stay under our storage cap. Truly, every single person who has done that, you are a hero of the Forkiverse.

That's true.

Yeah.

Can I offer maybe a little bit of a downer note on what has otherwise been a very exciting week for the Forkiverse?

Sure.

Please.

All of this growth scares me.

Really?

I see people showing up to this website and having a great time, and I just think we are going to invariably let these people down. I do not want people entrusting any part of their daily fulfillment and routine to our little stupid hobby project because we are not devoting our entire lives to this.

I worry that somebody, somewhere is going to be let down or hurt because of something that we have done, or more likely failed to do.

I think that's a fair point. I would also say, Kevin, you and I have now been letting people down for over 3 years on this podcast. They're used to it.

If you're running a small business and you're thinking about maybe putting your Forkiverse handle on a business card or painting it onto the shop window, maybe give it a year and see if it's still around. Don't rush into anything.

This absolutely is an experiment. Things could go wrong. I think we can commit that, if we decide to wind it down, we will have some kind of offboarding plan. We will explain to you how you can transfer your account onto another server. We will try to be responsible in that regard.

But I personally think that if this is a fun throwaway thing that I do for a year and then never look back, maybe that was just a good use of my time online.

Yeah. I mean, it does make me feel a little bit of sympathy for the sort of social media barons that we have covered and talked to over the years, who I think live in fear of their most active and invested users revolting against them.

We've seen this with YouTube. We've seen this with Instagram. We've seen so many communities grow so large and so fundamental to people's lives and businesses that any time they make a little change—even if it's a couple of pixels here, a couple of pixels there—it sets off this cascading chain reaction of failures for everyone who depends on this as vital infrastructure.

For the moment, I am glad that we are not vital infrastructure for anyone, and I'm a little nervous if we ever start to edge in that direction for anyone, even if it's as simple as this is a place I like to go every day while I have my coffee in British Columbia.

Do you worry that visiting the Forkiverse a lot could radicalize teenagers into listening to podcasts? God, I hope so.

I hope so too.

All right. We will have further updates on the Forkiverse as events continue to transpire. But PJ, I want to thank you so much for helping us put this project together and for making such a great episode about it. If you haven't listened to it yet, go listen to the Search Engine episode that they did. You can actually find a version of it right here in our feed.

We will be back at you at some point in the future. Once the Russians successfully conquer the Forkiverse, you'll hear about it here. You will hear about it here.

One more thing before we go. For any of our LA listeners, we wanted to let you know that on Tuesday, January 20th, Times Opinion is holding a live event on the first year of Trump's second term. The editor of New York Time's Opinion, Katie Kingsbury, and columnists Jamelle Bouie and Ross Douthat will be taking stock of the administration's biggest actions and what it all means for the country and the world as we know it. So we'll be including a link to the event in the show notes.