The State of the Open Internet with Mallory Knodel

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond are joined by Mallory Knodel, executive director and founder of the Social Web Foundation, to talk about internet governance, open standards, and the future of the social web. Mallory shares how her work as an activist, systems administrator, and public interest technologist led her into the organizations and working groups that shape how the internet functions, including the IETF, W3C, ICANN, and ITU. The conversation explores how the internet shifted from a collection of open protocols toward a small number of dominant platforms, and what that centralization means for users, developers, and independent service providers. Mallory explains how decisions made at the protocol level can affect everything from email deliverability to identity, data portability, trust and safety, and the ability to move between platforms. We also discuss the Social Web Foundation, ActivityPub, the Fediverse, and the idea of building a more multipolar social web. Mallory also looks at what happens when AI agents, automated accounts, and algorithmic feeds enter open social ecosystems. She shares her perspective on privacy, usability, encrypted messaging, and designing technology around user needs rather than engagement alone. Key Topics Discussed What it means to be a public interest technologist How internet governance affects everyday software development The role of global internet standards organizations How the IETF and W3C develop technical standards Corporate influence inside internet governance and standards bodies The internet’s shift from protocols to centralized platforms Email deliverability and the hidden costs of centralization How platform control affects identity and user autonomy Why data portability remains difficult across social platforms The mission behind the Social Web Foundation How the Fediverse connects independent social platforms ActivityPub and Activity Streams as open web protocols AT Protocol, an alternative to ActivityPub How federated servers exchange content and user activity Why a multipolar web differs from decentralization What Meta’s ActivityPub adoption means for federation The embrace, extend, extinguish risk for open protocols Discoverability challenges across federated social networks Trust and safety for smaller platform operators How protocol decisions can affect human rights AI agents entering open social web ecosystems Whether federated platforms should block automated crawlers Designing algorithmic feeds around values and user choice Privacy-first principles for developers building social software Encrypted direct messaging for the open social web Elixir projects building across the Fediverse ecosystem Links Mentioned: Mallory’s Website https://malloryknodel.net/ Internet Protocol (IP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet\_Protocol Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) https://www.ietf.org/ International Communication Union https://www.itu.int/en/ Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) https://www.icann.org/ World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) https://www.w3.org/ Huawei https://www.huawei.com/en/ Cisco https://www.cisco.com/ Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M³AAWG) https://www.m3aawg.org/ Social Web Foundation https://socialwebfoundation.org/ ActivityPub https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ AT Protocol https://atproto.com/ MeWe Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DNSP) https://dsnp.org/about/MeWe-use-case.html BlueSky https://bsky.app/ Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org/ Internet Society https://www.internetsociety.org/ Fediverse https://fediverse.party/ NCSA Mosaic Browser https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/research/project-highlights/ncsa-mosaic/ Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://tags.pub/ Elixir projects: Pleroma https://pleroma.social/ Akkoma https://akkoma.social/ Bonfire Networks https://bonfirenetworks.org/ Mobilizon https://mobilizon.org/