Watching the old web die a painful death as something new is being born from the ashes.

I want to tell you a story about how I, a marketer with a small social media following, accidentally blew up Mastodon with some war reporting. And then I will show you what that experience, together with some recent developments on other social networks, can tell us about this weird moment we're living through and what the internet might look like on the other side of it.

Mastodon and the Fediverse are a microcosm of a massive, fundamental transformation that the internet is experiencing in the year 2023. The internet we knew from the previous 15 years, dominated by a handful of large corporations and their social media apps, is dead. Twitter, Reddit, Meta, even Google... old internet giants are convulsing while taking their final breaths. Even if their businesses survive, they will take on radically different shapes.