Understanding Decentralized Social Feed Curation on Mastodon
Amid rising concerns over moderation, algorithmic control, and platform governance on centralized social media, people are increasingly turning to decentralized alternatives like Mastodon to regain control over their feeds. This shift offers new opportunities to understand how people perceive and curate their feeds. We conducted a two-part study with 21 Mastodon users: first, interviews exploring how they perceive and manage their feeds; and second, a design probe study using BRAIDS.SOCIAL, a web-based feed curation prototype informed by the first part of our initial findings. We learned how seamful design can increase people's trust in algorithmic curation, and surfaced trade-offs people navigate between machine learning-based and rule-based filtering approaches. We also identify a core design tension in decentralized platforms: whether to support personalization through new applications or extensions layered atop existing ones.
Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization
Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field ...
An internet of many autonomous communities
What if communities were built into the protocol? Delegated moderation, verification badges, and reciprocity systems for autonomous online communities.
Home - LogiVote
Complete Solutions for a Campaign Management System and for Digital or Online Voting
The State of the Open Social Web
A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.
Mastodon - Decentralized social media
Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.
Bluesky Custom Feeds - Built By You
Design, deploy, and grow custom feeds of any complexity on Bluesky with Graze.social.
Bluesky Custom Feeds - Built By You
Design, deploy, and grow custom feeds of any complexity on Bluesky with Graze.social.
The Algorithm, Apparently Chronological
A German court has explicitly named Mastodon and Bluesky as positive examples of social networks that could retain hosting protection. It gets Bluesky’s feeds wrong, but its reasoning about user control might be more useful than it realises.
Middleware for Feed Recommendation in Practice: How Feed Creators Build, Maintain, and Sustain Custom Feeds on Bluesky
Scholars have long proposed third-party middleware as an alternative to centralized algorithmic feeds: feeds built and distributed by independent feed creators. This vision saw no large-scale instantiation until Bluesky, a decentralized microblogging platform, introduced custom feeds in 2023. Although central to the middleware ecosystem, we know little about how feed creators understand their role, build feeds, and sustain them. Through interviews with n = 26 feed creators and third-party developers of feed-building tools, and analysis of n = 88,302 custom feeds, we identify two creator orientations---utility-providing and community-building. Additionally, creators struggle to maintain feeds that fully realize middleware ideals: they lack granular interaction data, receive little feedback, and lack technical expertise to act on either. Finally, creators sustain their feeds as unpaid hobbyists with little platform support and are divided on whether to monetize beyond covering costs. We conclude with design and policy implications for strengthening the middleware feed ecosystem.
@toni.bsky.team @alexbenzer.com i think yall need to wrestle with the fact that the app’s most distinctive feature (“custom feeds”) is something only (relative) nerds use and benefit from. normal people won’t swipe between many algorithms or whatever. have a look at past designs for “communities”
blacksky.community now determines trending topics for our app based on conversations within Blacksky’s community of users.
The blacksky.community web application now uses our own API servers to load posts, timelines and profiles. When data is missing (accounts on the edges of the network, outside of our primary community, etc) we leverage @microcosm.blue
Blacksky
blacksky.community
As X shuts down Communities, Acorn debuts an alternative that puts creators in control | TechCrunch
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