Pluralism is great in cities and can turn toxic in digital spaces like Bluesky. This isn't a problem with pluralism, but with the structure of digital spaces. Fortunately, there's a pretty simple solution to keep the benefits of vast online communities while quieting their most toxic residents.
Social Media and Anti-Social Pluralism
www.aaronrosspowell.comSep 3, 2026 at 12:10 AM
Social Media and Anti-Social Pluralism - Aaron Ross Powell
Communities are different online and off, and pluralism that thrives in the real world can turn toxic in the digital world.
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:
Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.
Decentralized Social Media for 40 Million+ Users (with Bluesky’s Jay Graber)
Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.
Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.
Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026)
On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet" for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech.
Guide to Bluesky: Getting Started and Best Practices
With over 20 million users and growing, Bluesky offers transparency, control, and a breath of fresh air in the social media world. Are you ready to escape the toxicity and censorship of other platforms? Sign up now! #Bluesky 🚀🌐
Local Digital Spaces Are Essential Civic Infrastructure (SSIR)
With traditional community spaces underfunded and neglected, investing in the health of our online gathering places has become essential. <meta property=
Pluralistic: Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (04 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him:
Solidarity Social
Bluesky enhanced with Matrix for E2EE DMs and censorship resilience. Be yourself in your community on Bluesky, while building solidarity across communities for collective action.
I made another lexicon, this time for representing plurality
After success with the pronoun lexicon, I wanted to build on that with something to try to address something that’s been difficult for me (us) personally on social media particularly: did/plurality representation. Like when switching fronts, posting, interacting, etc, especially on bsky and other variants. Some plural systems use emojis to designate alters or members, and we’ve largely used those too. But it still felt limited in expression, and we believed there could be more for it, like avat...
Pluralistic: All laws are local (05 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
About halfway through Thomas Piketty's 2013 barnstorming Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go: the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes "eternal" in the popular consciousness:
Pluralistic: Defense (of the internet) (from billionaires) in depth (23 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The only way to truly billionaire-proof the internet is to a) abolish billionaires and b) abolish the system that allows people to become billionaires. Short of that, any levees we build will need constant tending, reinforcement, and re-evaluation.
Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.
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?
