Everyone at NovaFuture is a massive Sense8 fan. Partly because it’s a brilliantly crafted show, but mostly because it lines up perfectly with a whole bunch of our values. That said, this article isn’t only about that. Not even close! I honestly have no idea how things ended up going this far off-script, but somehow this piece manages to draw a line between Sense8 and ActivityPub. Bold move? Complete nonsense? I’m not sure… Read it through to the end and tell me whether it’s a disaster or not 😉

Sense8 is a show that literally transcends human connection

We’re in 2015. Netflix is only just starting to establish itself as a credible alternative to traditional television. That’s the context in which the Wachowski sisters, who reshaped science fiction with The Matrix, show up with a project that has nothing in common with what the platform usually puts out. Their first series, Sense8, carries everything that made them great in cinema: visual ambition, philosophical depth, and a flat refusal to compromise. The result is a genuine triumph.

The premise is easy to summarize and nearly impossible to fully explain. Eight people, eight cities, scattered across the planet. Nairobi, Mumbai, Chicago, Berlin, Seoul, Mexico City, London, and Reykjavik. Lives that have absolutely no reason to ever intersect. Will, a Chicago cop haunted by an unsolved murder. Sun, the daughter of a powerful Seoul businessman who practices Kwan Ki Do. Nomi, a hacker from San Francisco. Kala, a Mumbai pharmacist engaged to a man she doesn’t love. Riley, a DJ from Reykjavik with a troubled past. Wolfgang, a Berlin safecracker with a tangled family history. Lito, a Mexican action film actor hiding his homosexuality. Capheus, a matatu driver from Nairobi trying to get medication for his mother.

One day, with no explanation and no instruction manual, these eight people start to perceive each other. Not seeing each other on a screen, but actually feeling each other. One person’s emotions bleed into another. One person’s pain becomes everyone’s pain. Joy too. Fear too. A cluster, in the show’s vocabulary. Eight individuals who suddenly form something that looks like a single mind spread across multiple continents.

What strikes you immediately, and what sets Sense8 radically apart from everything else at the time, is its absolute refusal of the easy way out. The Wachowskis actually shoot in Nairobi. Actually in Seoul. Actually in Mumbai. Not on a California soundstage, not in a cardboard set with two extras and some atmospheric music meant to pass for local color. Every character exists fully within their culture, their language, and their daily reality. The show breathes the world. You can smell the Berlin asphalt and feel the Nairobi heat and the density of Mumbai. Across sixteen cities and thirteen countries, they built something that looks like a genuinely honest gaze at human diversity. Not diversity as a marketing argument. Not diversity as a quota to fill to keep critics quiet. Just diversity as a fact of life, as raw richness, as the raw material of a story that couldn’t exist any other way.

And then there’s what the show says without ever saying it outright. The Wachowskis are trans. They know what it’s like to live inside an identity the world refuses to recognize, inside a body that society would rather erase or fix or simply silence for good. Sense8 is shot through with that experience from beginning to end. Not only through Nomi, a trans woman whose journey is central to the story, but in the very architecture of the show itself. These eight people who have everything pushing them apart and who find themselves connected against their will, who learn to inhabit an existence larger than the one their environment had assigned them, are a metaphor for identity, for what it actually costs to be yourself in a world that would prefer you were someone else.

In Sense8, empathy becomes a devastating political weapon

Sense8 doesn’t do politics in the preachy sense of the word. No speeches. No manifesto. No character explaining to the audience what to think. The Wachowskis are way too smart for that.

What they do is infinitely more subversive. They show you what happens when human beings stop seeing themselves as separate individuals and start genuinely feeling each other’s reality. Physically. Viscerally. When someone’s pain in Nairobi becomes your pain in Berlin. When someone’s fear in Seoul wakes you up in Mexico City. Empathy is no longer an abstract value you wave around in a speech. It’s a concrete experience, and therefore impossible to deny.

And that’s where the show becomes dangerous for the established order. Because someone who can truly feel the emotions of all of humanity becomes very hard to manipulate. Because racism, nationalism, and hatred of the other only thrive on one single condition: never actually feeling what the other person feels. And Sense8 pulls off the remarkable feat of destroying that condition at its root.

In the end, the cluster doesn’t survive because it’s ideologically aligned. On the contrary, it survives because it’s radically diverse, and that diversity is its entire strength. Everyone brings what the others don’t have. Will, the Chicago cop, brings his sense of duty. Sun, the Seoul fighter, brings her discipline and her strength. Nomi, the San Francisco hacker, brings her intelligence and her cunning. Capheus, the Nairobi driver, brings his courage and his optimism. Riley, the Icelandic DJ, brings her empathy. Wolfgang, the Berlin thief, brings cold brutality when it’s needed. Lito, the Mexican actor, brings his ability to play any role. Kala, the Mumbai pharmacist, brings her scientific precision. Together they’re unstoppable. Apart they’re vulnerable. That’s a political lesson most textbooks never teach.

Netflix and the art of not respecting its users

Without any warning, on June 1st 2017, Netflix cancelled Sense8 without even leaving room for a proper closing season. And yet the show was killing it! The reason is as simple as it is pathetic. At 9 million dollars per episode, it was supposedly too expensive for the audience it was generating. In the platform’s capitalist logic, quality doesn’t matter, impact doesn’t matter, and the worldwide community that had built itself around the show doesn’t matter either. Better to produce ten garbage series for the same price. Too bad about the three remaining seasons! Because Straczynski and the Wachowskis had planned five seasons to properly unfold the full story. The actors’ contracts were even signed for five seasons. But everything was sacrificed on the altar of spreadsheets made by people who understand nothing about art.

What happened next is extraordinarily rare. Fans flat-out refused to accept the decision. In under a month, more than 500,000 people signed a petition. Social media was on fire. Fans from every corner of the world were organizing screenings and writing open letters to call Netflix out directly. Getting a multinational to back down is almost unheard of. But on June 29th 2017, barely a month after the cancellation, Lana Wachowski announced that Netflix had agreed to produce a two-hour finale. It aired on June 8th 2018.

Lana Wachowski then wrote to the fans: “In this world, it is easy to believe that you cannot make a difference. That when a company makes a decision it is irreversible. But in an improbable and unexpected way, your love has brought Sense8 back to life.”

It wasn’t the ending anyone had dreamed of. Just the bare minimum to grieve the show a little more peacefully. Lana had a very clear five-season vision, and a two-hour episode could never replace three full seasons. But it’s at least an ending. So let’s call it half a win.

What if Sense8 were an allegory for the Fediverse?

On one side, you have a fictional story about eight individuals who have everything keeping them apart. Language. Continent. Culture. Social class. Gender. Sexual orientation. People who in real life would never have had the slightest reason to cross paths. Because a Nairobi cop doesn’t spontaneously call a San Francisco hacker to check in. A Korean martial artist doesn’t share breakfast with a Berlin criminal. These are normally airtight worlds. Hermetic bubbles. Parallel lives that never touch. And yet something happens. A connection. Brutal. Unexpected. Unchosen. Nobody asked to join this cluster. Nobody clicked “sign up.” Nobody checked a box saying “I want to feel the pain and joy of a stranger on the other side of the world.” It just happened.

On the other side you have the Fediverse… Doesn’t that ring a bell? People from every corner of the planet. Different languages. Different cultures. Different skills. A decentralized infrastructure that belongs to no one and everyone at the same time. On paper it’s exactly the same cluster. Exactly the same promise. Exactly the same potential. The only difference is that everyone here chose to be interconnected. So why doesn’t it play out like Sense8 when all the conditions are already in place?

The Fediverse: a perfect tool that doesn’t push us hard enough

Let’s ask ourselves that question calmly, among friends. We’re not here to stir up drama, we’re here to move forward. Technically speaking, the Fediverse has everything it needs to bring progressive initiatives together. No Big Tech. No manipulative algorithm. No ads. No billionaire boss deciding what you see and what you don’t. Instances run by people who look like you. An open protocol that anyone can implement. On paper it’s beautiful. And in practice it’s genuinely great on many levels.

So why do we still end up with infinite scrolling that doesn’t lead anywhere? Why do we end up chasing boosts and favorites just like on corporate social networks? Why does trending always push the same big accounts? Why do most users passively consume instead of creating, sharing, and exchanging?

Compared to the show at the center of this article, the sensates didn’t choose their cluster. Lana Wachowski connected them at random. Without that, they would never have taken the initiative to follow people completely outside their world. And it’s precisely that initial chaos that triggered everything. It forced them out of their comfort zone. It made them discover that in their very difference, a total stranger had exactly what they were missing.

On the Fediverse, who do you follow? People who think like you. Maybe your friends. And the big accounts that trending shoved in your face. In other words, you built your bubble on a free infrastructure the exact same way people do on commercial networks. And the result is that things mostly run in closed loops. So to get out of that, it seems to me there are two important questions to ask. Is the problem the tool? Or is the problem us?

The Fediverse: how do you break out of your bubble without a manipulable algorithm or AI?

The Fediverse has trending. That’s good, knowing what’s trending matters. You find solid stuff there. But trending is the opposite of random. Trending on its own only amplifies what already exists. It only surfaces people who already have a big audience. It’s basically a star system. Benevolent maybe? Sometimes quality-driven. But a star system all the same.

And beyond that? Nothing. Thousands of extraordinary small accounts posting into the void. A developer in Senegal. An activist in Vietnam. A Ukrainian farmer documenting his life under bombardment. A Brazilian hacker building open-source tools. Your future cluster doesn’t exactly have ideal conditions to emerge.

And yet the tools are right there. Many instances already have discovery systems. The problem isn’t technical. It’s a UI problem that degrades the UX. In other words, the features exist but they’re buried, poorly surfaced, and therefore ignored.

Meanwhile small accounts settle into a spectator role. They wait. They hope. And when nothing comes they get discouraged. They go elsewhere. Or worse, they quit entirely. And yet they’re the ones who keep a network alive. Big accounts attract. Small accounts build. A network without active small accounts is a stage with no audience. A cluster without new members is Sense8 without seasons 3, 4, and 5.

So why not actively encourage users to step outside their bubble? For example by visibly suggesting 3 random accounts to discover every day. Not buried in a menu. Not tucked away as an advanced option, but right there in the feed as a dedicated message. Can it be done carelessly? No. Nobody wants to be shown accounts that don’t meet basic community standards. A minimal trust score is therefore essential.

The solution isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s not a sophisticated algorithm. Just a basic function. Pure random with a minimum of common sense. You click. You land on someone you would never have encountered otherwise. Maybe it doesn’t grab you. You click again. Maybe this time it’s the start of something…

And beyond that, couldn’t we imagine other tools to energize the network? It’s just a question. And a debate we’d genuinely love to be part of in a constructive way.

From the generous indie web to the individualist web

The further I get into writing this article, the more I wonder how I ended up going from Sense8 to the Fediverse. Let’s rule out the drugs hypothesis 🙂 To really understand what’s going on here, I think I need to share a few personal experiences. From the very beginning I was heavily invested in the Indymedia adventure. It was a genuinely incredible time. Some colleagues and I had even created a local chapter with weekly open public meetings IRL to get people involved. We moderated, we published. Sometimes locally, sometimes globally.

But above all, it was a time when we’d regularly check the online agenda for upcoming events and think nothing of taking a train or driving hours to get to a no borders gathering. On top of that it was dead easy to organize something like a Linux install workshop or really anything connected to alternative practices. And on top of all that, questions of gender or sexuality were almost a non-issue between us. That went on for a few years, and then on my end I needed a break from Western society, so I went to live in Africa for a long stretch. I was completely absorbed in what I was doing there, so I’d essentially let go of the web to focus entirely on physical alternatives. That was made even easier by the fact that the internet connection there was painfully slow.

And then I came back to Europe. And I didn’t understand what had happened during those years away. Even before Indymedia I was already in the indie web. That was basically all I knew. For one simple reason: I saw the alternative web as an excellent way to free ourselves from capitalism. I’ll even admit that I spent countless hours daydreaming about what the web would look like in 10 years. With all these people connected across the globe and all the technological progress coming down the line, I was genuinely convinced it was only a matter of time before we could shift toward a society worth living in. But instead, when I came back, I felt like the main character in Idiocracy. I was in a world I no longer recognized. Everything had regressed. So I tried to piece it back together and figure out what had gone wrong. I didn’t have to look very hard. Brilliant people I had loved reading on independent media or their blogs had been reduced to posting 140-character messages on Twitter. Others thought they were improving the world through Facebook groups. And me in all of this? I thought to myself, what the hell is this? How did we end up here? But I also wondered whether maybe I was just out of step with the times. So I went back to Africa for a few more years, and during that time I still had no desire to dive back into the web.

Until I came back to Europe and realized things had gotten even worse. There’s no point lying to yourself: Big Tech has essentially destroyed everything that made the intellectual richness of the web. So I asked myself, what can you actually do at your modest level? Fight the enemy head-on? Pointless. Fight the enemy from the inside on its own turf? Ridiculous. Build an alternative? Now that was the right idea! Except times had changed. The era when Google and the rest behaved like normal companies was over. In this new web, the space to grow an alternative was about as wide as a mouse hole. But was Big Tech really the core problem, or had mindsets changed?

It didn’t take me long to understand the real problem. It was mostly the mindsets that had shifted. Big Tech had done its dirty work very thoroughly. The culture of likes had beaten out genuine exchange by a landslide. And when it came to the indie web, more and more people were acting like passive consumers instead of participants. For example, if you do volunteer support for open-source software you end up getting yelled at! You didn’t respond fast enough? Your answer wasn’t clear enough for them? You get yelled at! You publish something on an independent media platform and people come at you with feedback about the style. Hard to keep your cool! Because damn it, all of this takes time, it takes resources… It’s not nothing! And despite all that, rarely a thank you. And on top of everything, fewer and fewer people willing to commit to open-source projects. Unless it’s making mainstream headlines or it’s the hot new thing, getting a project off the ground is extremely hard. So the problem is clearly identified: the collective is broken. Because we’ve clearly entered the era of triumphant individualism. It’s sad to say, but that’s just how it is.

Why such a lack of creativity?

Apart from fascists, I enjoy spending time with people from all walks of life. So not necessarily from alternative circles. And sometimes, out of nowhere in a conversation, we end up talking about social networks. So I mention Mastodon. Most people have never heard of it. So as honestly as I can, I describe it as a slightly uglier version of Twitter. You can see where this is going, right? Coming from a movement that created the WWW, that created Linux, that created free software, that once built genuinely powerful media outlets… you’d expect a lot better than a pale copy of Twitter with Mastodon. A pale copy of Reddit with Lemmy and its toxic downvote system. A pale copy of Facebook with Friendica. Where did the creativity go on the alternative side? That’s the real question to ask. And the other question worth asking is: as a user, do you come to a Mastodon instance to read mainstream trending media, or do you come to discover collectives and worthwhile initiatives? As for the rest, I say this with absolutely no hostility, but if it’s just about endlessly scrolling through memes and cat photos, what’s the point? What’s the actual difference between that and going on a Big Tech platform with a good ad blocker? I genuinely struggle to see one. Am I saying memes and cat photos should be banned? No. My point is simply to ask why an alternative network ends up looking so much like a corporate network in the way it functions. And above all, why isn’t it playing its essential role as a connector and a generator of real human exchange?

I’m all the more surprised because the ActivityPub protocol is genuinely very malleable material. And yet the majority of sites that use it tend to look like copy-paste jobs. On our end, we chose a different path. I don’t know if we’re right or wrong. Time will tell. In the meantime the most important thing is that we’re enjoying ourselves following our own road.

We went in the opposite direction from the current trend. Probably the punk side coming out 🙂 We started by imagining the social network that would best fit what we actually wanted. A small network with a family feel that encourages real exchange. Then we worked on something we’ll call our secret sauce for now. And we’ve just reached the point where we’re going to connect to the Fediverse. And hey, if you’re a developer and you can give us a hand, we’d genuinely welcome it 😉

But let’s be clear: at no point is anyone saying a free network has to look like this or that. It’s practically the opposite. The point is simply that in the words “social network” there is the word social. And when it comes to progressive forces, now more than ever, we genuinely need tools suited to different situations that give us back real social connection. Which brings me back to Sense8 🙂 If that show could be a source of inspiration for developers, it would be a genuine game changer.

Conclusion: All for one, one for all!

I’ve been around long enough to know from experience that this kind of open invitation to debate always draws a few underhanded critics. So let me get ahead of it and make everything clear. At NovaFuture we have a Mastodon account and overall we’re pretty happy with how it’s going. We have followers who share our content and sometimes leave us nice messages. We also had a French-language Mastodon account that we had to put on hold because we ran out of time to manage it. If someone wants to help us keep it going, you’re more than welcome 🙂 And we have a Lemmy account as a proper alternative to that dumpster fire Reddit. But same deal, we don’t really have the time to invest in it the way we’d like. Personally, outside of NovaFlow, I don’t have accounts on social networks anymore because I find them either too toxic or a waste of time. And as for the rest of the NovaFuture team, absolutely nobody here is chasing any kind of fame. We just made the choice to build this NovaFuture project and go all in on it. It’s a huge challenge, it’s genuinely a lot of work, you need nerves of steel to stay motivated, but we’re fully committed.

On our end, for now, lacking the resources to shift into a higher gear, we’re focusing on opening up constructive debates and proposing alternatives to capitalism. On that front, we can go a lot further than just passively existing on the web. How? What if you started by sharing this article? That’s a cool move, it widens the debate and it takes less than 10 seconds of your time. And then why not find your place here? Or somewhere else, in another collective project that fits you? And while you’re at it, what if you actually asked yourself what it would take to stop just consuming the network and start being a real actor in it… The world would change, wouldn’t it?

Beyond all that, we have enormous respect for everyone who creates or uses alternatives. Free and open-source culture is in our DNA. Which means we’re never the last ones to support projects one way or another. Now that we’ve covered the full picture, how do we actually build another possible world?

Because we all have our talent, our own small individual power. But alone, with a character limit to communicate, with the fear of dislikes, the fear of judgment, without the tools to find the right people… What are we? What do we actually do?… So let’s reach out to each other, friends, and keep moving forward 🙂 We all have our flaws but hope brings us together. So looking forward to meeting you, and see you soon for new adventures.