Love this post from Nilay on the value of the open social web to media brands today:
“David: “I think the question here is essentially, what is sort of your current theory of the case about connecting The Verge to these broader open social protocols? "
Nilay: …“I think all great media brands grow up with their distribution. So the Verge is just like a good example. We’re like, we started in 2011. We started a giant desktop website. And like phones didn’t exist in the way that they exist now. Like we came up with distribution on the open web….
So when I say, if we were starting the Verge again today, what would we do? The…exercise in my brain is what is the distribution that’s on the way up that you would build a thing around?
And maybe for the last five years, the answer has only been YouTube. And then there was like a brief minute when the answer was TikTok. And I just think it’s hard to survive on those platforms…. I’m confident in this conversation. [What we need] is distribution that no one controls.
There’s no Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, literally with a knob being like, I don’t like you and turning you off, which is a thing that I try to run away from. And so Bluesky is like open distribution, Activitypub is open distribution and that’s why i keep saying that’s what we would start we would start a thing on the open distribution that no one controls and try to make our own way.
There’s like layers and layers of things to solve here, but it just seems obvious that we should connect to the next generation of distribution that no one controls. “Because that to me is, that’s always the thing, a media brand that’s on the rise, should be trying to do.”
🎙️ The Vergecast
📻 The Vergecast Vergecast, 2026 edition
👤 with David, Nilay, Helen Havlak
⏱️ 14:36–16:59