Another reason why it’s so important that we have open protocols for social media.
Kai Kupferschmidt
One of the issues that has come up again and again in my reporting on misinformation and social media is the massive influence social media companies have on research in the field. Last night a preprint dropped that tries to get at this with some numbers. My piece in @science.org (and 🧪🧵 coming):
Jan 19, 2026 at 5:51 PM
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop
Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.
Open Graph protocol
The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph.
FR#157 – Social Software Distribution
Open social protocols are expanding beyond social media into the infrastructure developers use to build, distribute, and discover software. Three recent launches show what that looks like in practice.
Bryan Newbold: Protocol engineering
A protocol engineer at the social-media platform Bluesky describes building an open protocol around a fast-growing social media platform.
Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech
The Atmosphere . Building the open social web
🇪🇺🌐 The future of social media may be decided in Europe
A survey of European AT Protocol projects, including 4 mini case-studies
Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols
Calls to decentralize feed-based social media have been driven by concerns about the concentrated power of centralized platforms and their societal impact. In response, numerous decentralized social media protocols have emerged, each interpreting “decentralization” in a different way. We analyze four such protocols (ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and Farcaster) drawing on protocol documentation, media coverage, direct usage, and semi-structured interviews with protocol developers and experts to situate each protocol within its socio-technical goals. To support this analysis, we develop a grounded lexicon that facilitates the description and comparison of analogous components across each protocol. With it, we show how each protocol distributes control over key components differently, shaping who holds power over critical aspects such as user identity, curation, and infrastructural ownership. By examining protocols as socio-technical artifacts, we show how they prioritize different values and make distinct trade-offs, providing CSCW researchers with a lens to more effectively evaluate and design future decentralized social media systems.
Check more about the concept on Open Social Media (and back to Open Web), and how it might be the future (hopefully) of the web.
Open Social Media (and back to Open Web)
www.ssp.shespecially social media built on open protocols #ignore_atproto_at_your_peril
jared
so jev should be really interesting for social media sensemaking/organizational type usecases right
Many people are talking about decentralized social media protocols like #ActivityPub and #ATProto and all the amazing things one can do with them. But do you actually know how they work? We thought we'd do something about this. Come to #FediForum next week if you are curious and like to find […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
