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.
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.
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 and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.
Blogging on the open social web - and more exciting features - pckt - Dev Journal
ATmosphere — referring to the growing ecosystem of applications built on the AT Protocol, a federated protocol for open social platforms. Not to be confused ...
Leaflet, standard.site, and open social publishing! - Leaflet Lab Notes
Lab Notes 021: launching a set of shared standards for social publishing, migrating Leaflet to use these new lexicons, and how we plan to grow publishing × open social together!
Growing the Social Web
I'm going to be participating in the Growing the Open Social Web workshop at Fediforum on March 2, 2026. I'm excited to talk to other people who care about the Fediverse about ways to connect more people through ActivityPub. Fediforum invited attendees to publish position papers before the workshop. SWF has a number of hypotheses…
this week's news is about how @tangled.org @npmx.dev and @alt.store are using open social networking protocols to build, distribute, and discover software, and how the most important part is not the code but the community building part connectedplaces.online/reports/fr157-social-software…
FR#157 – Social Software Distribution
connectedplaces.onlineIn 2026, @bsky.app is focused on what’s next for open social: bringing together users for conversations around live events, creator and platform monetization, and private state, giving users truly private data while preserving ownership and portability at the protocol level.
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):
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.socialWe’re pleased to announce that we’ll be working with @eurosky.social to help to define and develop open social web infrastructure for the AT Protocol! igalia.com/2026/03/18/Advancing-the-AT-P…
Advancing the AT Protocol in Partnership with Eurosky | Igalia
www.igalia.com@mackinac.social, built by @whiteside.io, is an open social web client that's thinking multi-protocol and bridging-first! John's added a *ton* of unique features we've never seen before, so we wanted to outline a few of them in a thread 👇🏼 1/🧵
