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.
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.
Algorithmic Choice with Custom Feeds - Bluesky
Our implementation of algorithmic choice lets users customize one of the most important parts of their social media experience: their feed.
FediBoost Plugin — WordPress.com
FediBoost extends the ActivityPub plugin by automatically boosting your WordPress posts on your connected Mastodon accounts when they are published.
Discover AT Protocol Feeds - Flock
Discover AT Protocol feeds by describing what you're looking for. Natural-language search for custom Bluesky feeds.
third-party apis: community infrastructure on atproto - Keith's Thoughts
you can just build things from an open set of tools
As X shuts down Communities, Acorn debuts an alternative that puts creators in control | TechCrunch
techcrunch.comblacksky.community now determines trending topics for our app based on conversations within Blacksky’s community of users.
@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”
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
