I see talk on here about the public being "platform brained", and a lot of that in my experience comes down to impatience. It's what you see when mainstream apps change layout. People have expectations about how apps are supposed to work, and learning something else is an imposed waste of effort.
jordan silver 🔵
My take on the "explaining atproto" discourse is that all the UX/filesystem/etc metaphors are still very verbose and that you can explain the same idea in a lot less words: It separates data from apps, so any app can use data from any other app. That fits in a tweet, with other sentences around it.
Jan 31, 2026 at 9:28 PM
Blacksky - Apps on Google Play
Discover communities, trending conversations, and social media built for you.
Traditional Social Media as a Prison - What’s Happening on My Feed?
Social media apps have become a vehicle for community building, world news, and political campaigns. As app owners have enmeshed themselves more with the state, the carceral logics that haunt marginalized communities offline, became a part of their digital realities online.
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper describes how U.S. social media use has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform reach declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans — especially the youngest and oldest cohorts — who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter/X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter/X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X lost ground, TikTok and Reddit grew modestly, consistent with a more fragmented digital public sphere. Platform audiences aged and became slightly more educated and racially diverse. Politically, most platforms shifted toward Republican users while remaining, on balance, Democratic-leaning. Twitter/X experienced the largest change: among posters, the partisan balance swung over 70 percentage points from Democrats to Republicans. Across platforms, political posting remains closely tied to affective polarization, as the most partisan respondents are also the most active. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme.
It's obvious why we hate social media
We need better internet platforms. We're already building them.
Reckoning: Frontend's Lost Decade | Alex Russell | performance.now() 2024
@pfrazee.com question. is there a technical reason why social-app forks are not able to quickly launch native apps? We have blacksky and mu and witchsky, yet no alternative social-app native apps. @rude1.blacksky.team I recall you putting out a request for development contributions to put out an app
Post-appitalism rejects the super-app as a meaningful alternative to todays app-based production of software. An app that becomes so big that it starts sucking in smaller apps perpetuates the same dynamics no matter how well integrated the smaller apps can be.
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post-appitalism post-appitalism.app
Don't want to start Discourse, but tbh it kinda annoys me when every time something is launched here, some people complain: meh, this is stupid, bad design, vibe coded, you can tell by the colors it's from Claude, it relies on app.bsky lexicons, still uses Bluesky AppView, not decentralized enough,
