A New Social

Our mission is to liberate people's networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.

A New Social

Our mission is to liberate people's networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.

Rewilding the internet with ATProto

So far, many of the projects in the ATProtocol ecosystem have focused on bringing parity—making projects that replicate our existing tools and platforms, but with the affordances of the protocol instead. That's cool and we need to do that, but I think we can go much farther, and take this opportunity to challenge some of the biggest assumptions of what the modern internet is for, who builds it, and how we interact with it. This talk is in conversation with several of the talks from last year, and in I'll argue that we'll never get away from skeuomorphism until we've fundamentally changed the definition of what "the social internet" means in the first place.

Collective knowledge foraging in trail-based social networks beyond feeds

Sharing insights about moving beyond feeds from building Semble, a community knowledge garden built on the AT Protocol. The World Wide Web is called a web for good reason. We navigate this web of interconnected websites by clicking hyperlinks and opening new tabs in tools called browsers. This kind of browsing experience is defined by its open-endedness and interwoveness; every website we visit becomes a step along a path. With the rise of social media, we lost touch with this vast trail network. Rather than creating a social web where our trails got woven onto a shared map, they were instead paved over by information superhighways: the algorithmic feeds. Hyper-scaled social media platforms reduced the vast web of interconnected pages into a stripped down ad-ridden and attention-extracting monoculture. Our online experiences became reduced to the flick of a finger, the doom scroll. With the rise of open social protocols, like ATProto, we have an opportunity to leave these misaligned profit-driven and ad-based feeds behind and rediscover the magic of shared knowledge trails. what might that look like? In this lightning talk I’ll share insights and lessons my team and I have learned from building [Semble](https://semble.so/), a community knowledge garden built on ATProto. Semble is an open social network based on knowledge trails rather than feeds. I’ll explore what trail-based social networks of the future could look like, grounded in features and use-cases we’ve uncovered while building Semble. In the transition from feeds back to trails, we aim to co-create an open social web that centres the value of human attention and sparks a new era of collective wisdom. This lightning talk is an invitation to co-create this future together. It will similar to a prior [lightning talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptOMKK1lC4Q) we gave at ATmosphereConf 2026, adapted for DWeb Camp. Recorded at DWeb Camp 2026, Open Social Space, 2026-07-10. Schedule entry: https://talx.dod.ngo/dwebcamp-2026/talk/TA3NY7/

Why I'm betting on ATProto (and why you should, too)

Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you're a scientist, journalist, or just someone who wants the internet to feel human again, I think ATProto matters for you too.

Open Social

Community management infrastructure for ATProto applications.

A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub

If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? And what would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?

cosmik-network/semble: v0.1.0

A social knowledge tool for research trails, built on ATProto