Evan Prodromou on “Search Engine”

A few months back, we posted about the new Fediverse instance called “the Forkiverse“. This is a Mastodon instance started by the hosts of the Search Engine podcast and the Hard Fork podcast. The site has picked up tens of thousands of users, with a distinctive local culture, and is a nice part of the Fediverse.

The hosts are planning to shut down the server on Dec 31, 2026. They go over the reasons in an episode of the Search Engine podcast, Vladimir Putin’s Forkiverse. The reasons are pretty understandable — the cost of the hosting and the effort needed to moderate and manage the Forkiverse instance isn’t offset by their own enjoyment of the platform or a sense of mission.

I (Evan) am interviewed as part of this episode. It was a tough interview to do — I never want to talk about servers shutting down. But it’s part of the work that we are concentrating on here at the Social Web Foundation — in particular, the study of Fediverse server sustainability that is partly funded by our grant from the Interledger Foundation. Understanding what it means when instances shut down is important.

The interview was one of several that I’ve done with the Search Engine folks. We talked for several hours back in 2024, when my ActivityPub book had just come out, and when the SWF was just starting. We had follow up interviews in the intervening years. It’s been a good relationship, actually.

Search Engine has a new episode that includes excerpts from those interviews on its premium feed today. The episode is available on a few platforms — I found it on Spotify at Thirty-three minutes of hopefulness for a better internet . I was worried that it was going to be kind of saccharine — here’s this idealist, fighting for hopeless cause — but I think it actually is a pretty good listen. I got to be human, instead of a caricature, which was nice.

It’s been nice to stay connected to the Search Engine team, including PJ Vogt, during this time. I’m glad that he and the other people involved in the Forkiverse are giving the site a long enough time to wind down that the users there can move to other instances. And I’m glad that they’re going to stay connected to the Fediverse from their accounts on Threads, Bluesky, or elsewhere.

I remain hopeful for the Fediverse, and I hope you are, too. We’re doing something important together.