Vladimir Putin's Forkiverse

In January, three podcast hosts launched their own social network, a small piece of the federated internet called the Fediverse. They named it the Forkiverse. Within weeks, nearly 10,000 people joined. Then the founders stopped posting. Then the hosting bill landed on a personal credit card. Then came the email from a trust and safety expert: the Forkiverse had been seeded with accounts linked to a Russian disinformation operation known as Portal Combat. By the time they met to discuss it, the network was a ghost town with a propaganda problem.

The fork that became a ghost town

The Forkiverse was born from a specific frustration. After Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, many users were fed up with billionaires and algorithmic feeds, and one proposed alternative was the Fediverse — a network of interconnected social media servers, each run by different people or groups, that could talk to each other. The hosts wanted to build their own piece of it. They opened registration to any internet stranger, and the response was warm: people posted pictures of forks, shared where they listened to the show, and offered genuine compliments.