“I’ve Never Been More Optimistic” (Flipboard’s Mike McCue On the Open Social Web)

2026-02-12

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Mike McCue has seen a lot of changes over the years to the open web. He was an executive at Netscape, which helped liberate the web from AOL's walled garden; he served on the board of Twitter but wasn’t able to prevent it from abandoning its open API ecosystem; and now, as the CEO of Flipboard, he's building towards a more open future. “I've never been more optimistic than I am now about how the internet is going to develop and how the social media world and ecosystem is going to develop into a much more open, connected exp...

“I've never been more optimistic than I am now about how the internet is going to develop and how the social media world and ecosystem is going to develop into a much more open, connected experience for people, independent of app, independent of platform,” McCue says.

But there are still big problems to fix, and today on Revolution.Social, Mike and Rabble talk about most of them, including the devaluation of follower counts, how rage bait economics poison platform incentives, and how AI-generated content lacks soul. As a board member at Patreon, McCue says he’s seeing a renewed demand for authentic human craft & niche communities; at this perilous and promising moment, which vision of the future will win?

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction

5:14 From Netscape to the Fediverse

8:49 Elon, Zuckerberg, and the push toward alternatives

14:22 The shutdown of Twitter’s API and the birth of the AT Protocol

19:38 Follower counts don’t matter

22:12 Rage bait economics and platform incentives

25:51 Bluesky and Mastodon

27:50 Niche communities vs. the global town square

30:57 The craft of being human in an AI world

38:09 How to explain the open web to regular users

43:33 Surf and open protocols for social media