Digital Spaces Directory | New_ Public

As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field — a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who’s interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress.

We Need To Rewild The Internet

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech:

Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams

I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…

The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences

As brands look to hold onto the internet of the past, the term “community” will become a loaded word.

Art or tool?

The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn...

The Digital Life Collective

The Digital Life Collective is an enabler. If you think we should be doing something we're not currently doing, we're here to help you and your project make the change you want to see in the world.

Ecosystem Review

A review of decentralized social media ecosystems published by Twitter's "bluesky" team on the 21st January 2021

European Commission (@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu)

Attached: 1 image A strong Europe needs independent digital spaces. We believe true digital sovereignty thrives on a competitive, contestable, open ecosystem where diverse platforms co-exist. Today, we’re expanding our presence to W, the new social media. By being on W, we want to boost alternatives and support all efforts toward a decentralised web. And we continue to invest into our presence on the Fediverse!

RIP social media. What comes next is messy.

As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?

Home Page

We are an international community of communities bound by a common interest in persistent infrastructure. So far, we have welcomed agencies that manage communities spanning entertainment, standards, the built environment, natural history collections, scholarly communications, and research data.

A space to converse and connect.

An X/Twitter Spaces alternative for Bluesky and the open web. Creating good vibes in the friendly skies.

we were online

Turn the internet into a living, shared space with real-time traces of people browsing.

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.

No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior

Electronic media present us with a collage of experiences from everyplace. We eat dinner at home while watching starving children thousands of miles away reach out to us for food. From our easy chairs, we stare at blindfolded hostages, and coolly

Wholesome internet 🌱

I’m watering a “cursed websites” folder in my digital garden shed, but also a “wholesome websites” counterpart, like any reasonably sane person on the internet should do in this day and age. And that's that.