Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? | Internet Archive Blogs

When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:

Free Our Feeds

Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.

The Feed is the Product: Why We Stay in Walled Gardens, and Why We Might Finally Leave for the Open Social Web - Zsolt's pckt blog

We have known this for years. We have known that the major platforms are bad for our attention, our sleep, our politics, our children, and our sense of reality....

Blue Skies Ahead: Social Media's Quiet User Revolution

In a digital landscape increasingly defined by user concerns over privacy and control, a quiet revolution is taking shape.

FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop

Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.

feeds.social — Minimalist Bluesky Client

A quick and dirty guide to making custom feeds on Bluesky

So, you’ve made it! The remnants of science twitter have at last begun to coalesce around a new microblogging platformed owned by questionable individuals with inadequate content moderation t…

Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)

SCOOP: #WSocial is doctoring metrics on its homepage, inflating the number of comments on posts by prominent people on its network. I suppose a more accurate tagline for them should be "Trust your feed?" My article about it: "W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data" 🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/ #blog #BigTech #EUBigTech #TEP #TrustedEuropeanPlatforms #TrustYourFeed

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

Understanding Decentralized Social Feed Curation on Mastodon

Amid rising concerns over moderation, algorithmic control, and platform governance on centralized social media, people are increasingly turning to decentralized alternatives like Mastodon to regain control over their feeds. This shift offers new opportunities to understand how people perceive and curate their feeds. We conducted a two-part study with 21 Mastodon users: first, interviews exploring how they perceive and manage their feeds; and second, a design probe study using BRAIDS.SOCIAL, a web-based feed curation prototype informed by the first part of our initial findings. We learned how seamful design can increase people's trust in algorithmic curation, and surfaced trade-offs people navigate between machine learning-based and rule-based filtering approaches. We also identify a core design tension in decentralized platforms: whether to support personalization through new applications or extensions layered atop existing ones.

RSS Feed to Social Media | Fedica

Fedica's RSS Feed to Social Media auto-posts new articles, videos, or podcasts to 13 platforms via Pipeline, with auto-formatting and thread-splitting.