Episodes

  • An Update on diVine: Joyscrolling, AI Filtering, and Trust & Safety

    An Update on diVine: Joyscrolling, AI Filtering, and Trust & Safety
    Jan 24 2026
    Rabble and Alice Chan, Revolution.Social's host and executive producer, share an update on diVine, the new social video app that's bringing back the spirit of Vine and real human creativity (no AI content allowed!). "We're not anti-AI," Alice says. "We just believe that there is great power in human creativity and that humans have kind of had that power taken away from them involuntarily." Recording at the 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai, Rabble and Alice talk about how the diVine team is preparing to handle potentially millions of users, and how it’s partnering with trust and safety experts like Yoel Roth, and the team at Bluesky. They also discuss AI content detection, the forthcoming Android beta, and why we need to replace doomscrolling with “joyscrolling.” Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874 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/
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    12 mins
  • Open Source Safety Tools for Everyone (with Camille François)

    Open Source Safety Tools for Everyone (with Camille François)
    Jan 22 2026
    Camille François, assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, has spent her career at the frontlines of trust and safety, including as a principal researcher at Google and the Senior Director of Trust & Safety at Niantic; now the founding president of ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), she's working to make the safety tools used by big tech companies accessible to everyone. “What children face online right now, the state of the threat is so far ahead from the current state of the defenses,” Camille says. “We know the defenses are brittle. We know the defenses are hypercentralized. We know the defenses are not accessible to the people who want them. And open source is also a hack to build faster together.” Today on Revolution.Social, Camille and Rabble talk about how open source safety tools can strengthen our digital spaces, the impact of the AI moment, and why safety will look different across different platforms … and why that's desirable. Plus: Why “nudifying” apps, similar to the controversial Grok features that unleashed global outrage, have been able to proliferate on social media and app stores. ⁠⁠⁠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/
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    57 mins
  • Social Media Should Be Public Infrastructure (with Ben Cerveny)

    Social Media Should Be Public Infrastructure (with Ben Cerveny)
    Jan 15 2026
    "My thesis is that humans invent things all the time, and for the first 30 years, we call them technology," says Ben “Neb” Cerveny, president of the Foundation for Public Code. "And then if they work, we call them infrastructure." Ben was part of the original team that built one of the defining Web 2.0 platforms, Flickr, and he even gave Flickr its name. Currently, he is applying what he learned from building digital communities to the next wave of software, web services, and urban planning; Foundation for Public Code, he says, has helped convince most of Europe’s governments that tech solutions don’t need to be privately owned and controlled. Today on Revolution.Social, Ben and Rabble discuss the loss of human curation, which made early social media special; why software has just as much “terroir” as film or food; and how we might govern digital spaces by consensus. They also talk about the origins of Flickr, why Facebook is the fast food of social media, and how to build social platforms with civic intentionality. ⁠⁠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/
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    51 mins
  • AI Slop Is Killing the Joy of the Internet (with Bridget Todd)

    AI Slop Is Killing the Joy of the Internet (with Bridget Todd)
    Jan 8 2026
    Bridget Todd is the host of the podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, and a longtime commentator on how platforms shape culture. And she says the rise of AI-generated videos has turned her — an OG superfan of Vine — against short-form video altogether. "I can't trust that any of these are real cats doing cute things," Bridget says. "It's completely turned me off of a kind of content that I've been enjoying for decades." Today on Revolution.Social, Bridget and Rabble discuss what diVine needs to do to bring back the joy of Vine; how AI slop triggers real physiological responses, even when we know it's fake; the disconnect between Silicon Valley's AI enthusiasm and everyone else's horror; and why movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter might not be possible in today's algorithmic landscape. They also explore the moral panic around kids online, why legislation aimed at "protecting children" often harms them most, and what it would take to build an internet rooted in love and joy instead of extraction. ⁠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/
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • [Re-Air] What's Next for Jack Dorsey After Twitter and Bluesky

    [Re-Air] What's Next for Jack Dorsey After Twitter and Bluesky
    Jan 1 2026
    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/
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    49 mins
  • Decentralized Social Media for 40 Million+ Users (with Bluesky’s Jay Graber)

    Decentralized Social Media for 40 Million+ Users (with Bluesky’s Jay Graber)
    Dec 18 2025
    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/
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    42 mins
  • Team Human vs. Tech Monopolies (with Douglas Rushkoff)

    Team Human vs. Tech Monopolies (with Douglas Rushkoff)
    Dec 11 2025
    Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and host of the Team Human podcast, who has been advocating for human-centered technology since the early '90s. He believes venture capital turned social media into a strip mall, but that its fundamental values can be reclaimed and re-invented. “It was a wonderful chaotic thing,” Douglas says about Twitter. “It was not a mean, treacherous, troll-baiting, horrible thing … the bias was towards collaboration, cooperation, and certain social norms that emerged naturally. It didn't turn fucked-up and evil until the platform became about monetizing things." Today on Revolution.Social, Doug and Rabble discuss how the internet became an advertising-driven hellscape; what platform cooperatives could look like if workers owned the means of digital production; and why Mastodon failed where it should have succeeded. They also discuss te reo Maori Twitter, diVine’s anti-AI slop stance, AGI mythology, Peter Thiel’s craziest ideas, and why professional journalists are losing to professional liars. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:44 Renaissance vs. Simulation 00:08:29 Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus 00:12:29 Ev Williams' $4.3 Billion Problem 00:16:05 Jack Dorsey's Original Sin 00:19:43 Platform Co-ops 00:24:09 Interest-Bearing Currency and AGI 00:26:22 Peter Thiel's AI Monarchy 00:33:32 Do People Want Social Media to Be Social? 00:38:06 Te Reo Maori Twitter 00:40:40 diVine and Medium Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874 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/
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    49 mins
  • Defending Digital Rights in the Surveillance Era (with Jillian York)

    Defending Digital Rights in the Surveillance Era (with Jillian York)
    Dec 4 2025
    We need a more diverse approach to internet governance, says Jillian York, the director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). At the EFF, Jillian has studied the global impact of social media policies and advocated on behalf of global activists and others whose voices are often suppressed. Today on Revolution.Social, she and Rabble talk about the challenges of content moderation, the importance of end-to-end encryption, and the unintended consequences of age-verification legislation aimed at protecting minors on the internet. They also discuss the theft of copyrighted works that helped train AI large language models, and the necessity of grassroots activism to preserve digital freedoms. Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874 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/
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    58 mins