More from Nilay on the Verge and the #OpenSocialWeb:
“You can get some traffic and that’s great, and you can’t live or die in traffic, [as] the traffic can go away. The Yahoo algorithm cannot send you traffic to your links on the Yahoo homepage anymore, which is a real experience that we’ve had. Google can go away.
That’s just traffic. It just comes and goes and that’s great. The [real] goal is to turn the traffic into audience and have people come to you directly and care about your brand and your people…I don’t take that for granted at all.
Then the real goal is to turn the audience into a community, and we are very lucky that we have that too across platforms. So I just look at these open distribution protocols.
This is how I can go get a bigger community. We’re going to be where you are, and if you reply to us or like our posts or engage with us on BlueSky or Threads or Mastodon, we’ll get some value from that too.
And the people who are out on those platforms, we can curate that work in other.
…I’m not saying we’re going to get there tomorrow, but that is the vision, is to say our community exists in all these places in a way that is additive instead of constantly dividing our attention.”
From The Vergecast: The Vergecast Vergecast, 2026 edition, Apr 21, 2026