Prosocial Media

Enterpreneur in Residence

A virtual residency for founders with bold ideas for the internet

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

Civic Health Project

Technology can connect or divide us. At Civic Health Project, we're dedicated to advancing massively scalable solutions to society's dangerous divisions.

Normsy App

Bulletin Board: Cloud Atlas, Portland, and Small AI

Links and updates from New_ Public

The case against efficiency: friction in social media

Social media platforms frequently prioritize efficiency to maximize ad revenue and user engagement, often sacrificing deliberation, trust, and reflective, purposeful cognitive engagement in the process. This manuscript examines the potential of friction—design choices that intentionally slow user interactions—as an alternate approach. We present a case against efficiency as the dominant paradigm on social media and advocate for a complex systems approach to understanding and analyzing friction. Drawing from interdisciplinary literature, real-world examples, and industry experiments, we highlight the potential for friction to mitigate issues like polarization, disinformation, and toxic content without resorting to censorship. We propose a state space representation of friction to establish a multidimensional framework and language for analyzing the diverse forms and functions through which friction can be implemented. Additionally, we propose several experimental designs to examine the impact of friction on system dynamics, user behavior, and information ecosystems, each designed with complex systems solutions and perspectives in mind. Our case against efficiency underscores the critical role of friction in shaping digital spaces, challenging the relentless pursuit of efficiency and exploring the potential of thoughtful slowing.

Bonsai: Intentional and Personalized Social Media Feeds

Social media feeds use predictive models to maximize engagement, often misaligning how people consume content with how they wish to. We introduce Bonsai, a system that enables people to build personalized and intentional feeds. Bonsai implements a platform-agnostic framework comprising Planning, Sourcing, Curating, and Ranking modules. This framework allows users to express their intent in natural language and exert fine-grained control over a procedurally transparent feed creation process. We evaluated the system with 15 Bluesky users in a two-phase, multi-week study. We find that participants successfully used our system to discover new content, filter out irrelevant or toxic posts, and disentangle engagement from intent, but curating intentional feeds required more effort than they are used to. Simultaneously, users sought system transparency mechanisms to effectively use (and trust) intentional, personalized feeds. Overall, our work highlights intentional feedbuilding as a viable path beyond engagement-based optimization.

blacksky-algorithms/assembly.blacksky.community

Blacksky People’s Assembly – a space for public deliberation and collective decision-making.

communitycheck/design at main · rosestt/communitycheck

A design specification for attaching representative public opinion data to viral social media posts — correcting the gap between what people think and what they think others think. - rosestt/commun...

The Noisy Room

Only 3% of social media users post toxic content — but Americans estimate 43%. An interactive essay.

Mu for democracy - Erlend’s notes

designing for social cohesion

Value and vulnerability: a framework for understanding the complexity of misinformation use

Why does misinformation influence some and not others? Vulnerability is often mischaracterized as personal weakness or deficiency, or as susceptibility to “infection” or “pollution”—dehumanizing descriptions that highlight supposed shortcomings of media consumers. We propose a broader perspective that focuses on the value of misinformation to persons, groups, and platforms that adopt or share it. The Vulnerability and Value (VV) framework conceptualizes vulnerability as arising from interconnected scales and systems of valuation. Using a complex adaptive systems framing, we describe how misinformation can generate value for individuals, groups, and platforms. When misinformation spreads successfully, it often does so because it serves purposes that extend beyond veracity. Its spread indicates something significant is at stake for those who believe or facilitate it. A key contribution of the VV framework is to formalize the tradeoff individuals face: whether to question and evaluate misinformation or to accept and share it.

social-protocols/jabble

Collaborative Fact Checking

Cofacts - Message reporting chatbot and crowd-sourced fact-checking community

Cofacts is a collaborative system connecting instant messages and fact-check reports or different opinions together. It's a grass-root effort fighting mis/disinformation in Taiwan.

iNaturalist

iNaturalist is a social network for naturalists! Record your observations of plants and animals, share them with friends and researchers, and learn about the natural world.

Solidarity Social

Bluesky enhanced with Matrix for E2EE DMs and censorship resilience. Be yourself in your community on Bluesky, while building solidarity across communities for collective action.

Fenc.es · fenc.es

Break an argument into statements. Rate each one for confidence and importance. The shape it takes is the map — and where your view splits from someone else's lies the crux.

Quality Scores – Prosocial Design Network

Increase engagement with high quality content