Revolution.Social
A podcast about the future of social media and reclaiming our digital communities.Revolution.Social is hosted by technologist and community advocate Rabble, a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath — who was Twitter’s first employee and hired Jack Dorsey. In weekly interviews, Rabble will interview thought leaders, technologists, academics, and more about the need for a new social media "bill of rights." Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental protections from corporate control and surveillance capitalism. This is the start of a conversation about what developers are building, how they're building it, and...
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Decentralized Social Media for 40 Million+ Users (with Bluesky’s Jay Graber)
<p>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. </p> <p>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 prod...
Team Human vs. Tech Monopolies (with Douglas Rushkoff)
<p >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.</p><p >“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."</p><p >Today on Revolution.Social...
Defending Digital Rights in the Surveillance Era (with Jillian York)
<p >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).</p><p >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. </p><p >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 t...
Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (with Cory Doctorow at Web Summit)
<p >In this live interview recorded in November at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Cory Doctorow returns to Revolution.Social to talk about building alternatives to “enshittified” digital platforms. </p><p >"Apps are websites that are illegal to protect your privacy while you use them," Cory explains. "The reason companies are so horny to get you to use their apps is because they can't be modified in that way. No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app." </p><p >Cory and Rabble also discuss how Europe could export jailbreaking tools as industrial policy, why other countries should respond to Americ...
"Our Mission Is To Keep Flickr Pictures Visible for 100 Years" (with George Oates)
<p >Designer, community-builder, and Flickr co-creator George Oates is now the executive director of the Flickr Foundation, which is working to preserve the platform's 21 years of photos for the next 100 years. She helped create Flickr's community guidelines, designed its nested privacy controls, and launched the Flickr Commons program, which partners with more than 100 institutions to make publicly held photography collections more accessible.</p><p >“The Flickr community loved it, and actually would help the institutions by describing the photos, and in some cases identifying things like the location they were taken, who was in them, the events surrounding them, stuff li...
Vine Revisited and The Fight Against AI Slop
<p >Rabble and Alice Chan, Revolution.Social’s host and executive producer, talk about the launch and overwhelming reception to diVine, a new social video app that resurrects the six-second looping format of Vine and features archived original Vine content.</p><p ></p><p >This time, however, the app is built on open protocols and a promise to focus on real content made by real people, not AI. Within hours of announcing diVine at Web Summit in Lisbon, it had 10,000 signups on TestFlight, Apple’s developer testing app, and its beta program was full. Its early success is proof that new...
Building Human Rights Into the Social Web (with Mallory Knodel)
<p>Mallory Knodel is the executive director of the Social Web Foundation and former CTO of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Her roots go back to the activists, anarchists, and dreamers who built the open web, and then lost control of it to big business. “Especially in the smaller circles of digital human rights organizations and so on, [they] really understood that everything that they would work so hard for … could just be so easily undone from the top-down of a huge corporate,” Mallory says. “Nothing was durable at all.” Today on Revolution.Social, Mallory and Rabble talk about who controls W...
How to Overthrow Dictators Without Violence (with Srđa Popović)
<p>Political activist Srđa Popović led the movement that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in 2000. Since then, his organization, Canvas, has trained activists in over 50 countries how to build successful nonviolent movements—and he says most people misunderstand how change actually happens.</p> <p>“When we start working with them, they often say, ‘Oh, I'm too busy doing things, I don't have time for planning,’” Srđa says. “If I was given a dime every time I've heard that, I would probably have a private plane. Unfortunately I wasn't, so I drive a 2012 old Buick.”</p> <p>This week on Revolution...
Banning Kids From Social Media Isn’t the Answer (with Pamela Wisniewski)
<p>Pamela Wisniewski is one of the leading researchers on how social media affects teens, working at the UC Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute. In an era of moral panics around youth online safety, she believes the solution is to empower teens and teach them resilience, rather than restricting them. "We treat it as if our teens should know how to act online without any kind of training," Pamela says. "We don't give our 16-year-olds the keys to our car and just say, 'Hey, go at it.' But that's what we're doing with the internet." Today on Revolution.Social...
Jeff Jarvis on the Death of Mass Media, Twitter vs. UberMedia, and Section 230’s Brilliance
<p>In books like The Web We Weave and podcasts such as Intelligent Machines, journalist and educator Jeff Jarvis — formerly the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York — has traced the history of media from the Gutenberg press to AI. And he says that today’s attempts to clamp down on the internet are nothing new. "Whenever there's an explosion of speech, those who controlled speech resent it," Jeff explains. "They try to fight it, they try to control it, they launch into a moral panic about it." Today on Revolution.Social, Jeff a...
