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.

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

A growing number of people are creating individualized, creative sites that eschew the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media

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

Reclaiming Social Spaces: Are Open Source Platforms a Path for More Human Connection?

What if social media platforms were built to serve their communities, not billionaires? Join us with the founders of Blacksky as we explore the potential of open source social media.

Digital Locality | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Decentralized Social Media | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness

Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosys…

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!

Digital Locality

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~10 minute read | Published: Nov 21, 2024 | Updated: Aug 3, 2026

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?