Social media algorithms don't allow us to understand or control what we see online and why... until now! Top scholars @jonathanstray.com and @noupside.bsky.social are sharing @mysky.social, a tool that allows users to adjust their feed’s priorities and explains why certain posts appear over others.
🎛️📲 Meet the algorithm you can actually control and understand
newpublic.substack.comSep 21, 2026 at 4:49 PM
Collective Social | Track what you love. Share what matters.
Curate lists, track your progress, and share recommendations across books, movies, TV shows, and more — all on the open social web.
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.
The Astrosky Ecosystem: An independent online platform for science communication and social networking
While almost everything that astronomers study occurs in the vacuum of space, astronomy itself does not `happen in a vacuum'. Interactions between scientists, as well as outreach to members of the public, improve extensively from access to good communication tools. Social media has become a key tool for communication in astronomy, being widely used by individuals and organizations alike for networking, outreach, and more. However, traditional social media is reliant on benevolent corporations providing a free service without compromising on quality, and the recent takeover and decline of Twitter has shown how vulnerable these platforms can be. In this proceeding, we present The Astrosky Ecosystem, which is an initiative to develop open-source tools and integrations for social media, principally the Bluesky social network. We explain how our project enables the astronomy community to operate its own social media infrastructure, independent of for-profit corporations. We also discuss some of the project's technical aspects, including its use of the AT Protocol for social networking, before concluding with ideas for the future.
Shreya Shankar on Twitter / X
This problem has gotten significantly worse. As Twitter and other social media have become primary channels for sharing research, academics are now expected to make the same ideas legible and appealing to both the general public (to go "viral") and senior scholars (to get the… https://t.co/zPF3tKzbVa— Shreya Shankar (@sh_reya) July 25, 2026
Algorithmic choice - Bluesky
Your attention is an invaluable resource. We want a future where you control what you see on social media.
Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky
Synopsis Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For the past decade, Twitter has been a primary home of scientists on social media. In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform, causing many scientists to seek alternatives. Bluesky has been suggested as a good alternative to Twitter, but the phenomenon of academics switching social media platforms has not previously been studied. Here we report on the results of a survey distributed to scientists on Twitter and Bluesky (n = 813). Results overwhelmingly confirm that changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant, and that many scientists have abandoned it in favor of Bluesky. Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter.
From Feeds to Trails
To design the future of social media, rethink the interface before the algorithm.
Paper Skygest: Personalized Academic Recommendations on Bluesky
We build, deploy, and evaluate Paper Skygest, a custom personalized social feed for scientific content posted by a user's network on Bluesky and the AT Protocol. We leverage a new capability on emerging decentralized social media platforms: the ability for anyone to build and deploy feeds for other users, to use just as they would a native platform-built feed. To our knowledge, Paper Skygest is the first and largest such continuously deployed personalized social media feed by academics, with over 50,000 weekly uses by over 1,000 daily active users, all organically acquired. First, we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate Paper Skygest usage, showing that it has sustained usage and satisfies users; we further show adoption of Paper Skygest increases a user's interactions with posts about research, and how interaction rates change as a function of post order. Second, we share our full code and describe our system architecture, to support other academics in building and deploying such feeds sustainably. Third, we overview the potential of custom feeds such as Paper Skygest for studying algorithm designs, building for user agency, and running recommender system experiments with organic users without partnering with a centralized platform.
MySky Social | Jonathan Stray | Substack
Open-source AI-driven Social Media Feeds for Everyone. Click to read MySky Social, by Jonathan Stray, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.
Social Media Feed Ranking Algorithms: Guide to Field Experiments
IC2S2'26 Tutorial | Social Media Feed Ranking Algorithms: Guide to Field Experiments
Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how
"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."
Introducing GreenEarth
We're building advanced open source algorithms for social media
Do our social media algorithms correctly reflect our values? Our new article published today in @pnas.org shows that the answer is often not, and that the content that gets promoted into their ranked feeds is often actively counter to our values.
Do our social media algorithms correctly reflect our values? Our new article published today in @pnas.org shows that the answer is often not, and that the content that gets promoted into their ranked feeds is often actively counter to our values.
🧵 On social media, we feel trapped in “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” Often, we see this as a problem with the algorithm. Our new essay argues the problem is the feed interface itself: it constrains our movement—all we can do is scroll. We lay out an alternative vision:
From Feeds to Trails
leaflet.pubGod I know people find this site slightly annoying or whatever but this is the pinnacle of social media to me. This whole feed is running on someone's CPU serving thousands of users in a decentralised manner. Absolutely lovely. Thank you space cowboy
spacecowboy
The For You feed is going to be down while I'm upgrading the CPU from AMD 7900 (12 core) to AMD 9950X3D (16 core). This should increase how many users it can serve by ~50%-100%. If all goes well it should be back up in an hour or two.
