This week, the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.
FR#167 – Change
On coordination in a decentralised network, and the European Social Stack declaration.
FR#160 – Everyone Wants Servers And Nobody Wants Servers
What makes a social network resilient?
Designing decentralized moderation
In decentralized social networks, moderation decisions are made locally by users, servers, or other network entities. This basic…
Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? | Internet Archive Blogs
When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:
Decentralised content moderation — Martin Kleppmann’s blog
Who is doing interesting work on decentralised content moderation?
Latinsky
Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.
Medsky
Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.
More notes on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism on decentralized social networks
Part 3 of a series. See If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next and Notes (and thoughts) on organizing in the fediverses and the ATmosphere for previous installments and a reading list. "Mutual aid. Organizing. Sharing, contextualizing, and making meaning
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.
‘Blueskyism’, Political Violence, and Open Social Networks Under Authoritarianism
After Kirk's murder, calls for censorship and the crackdown on political places started to include Bluesky. Open social networks must now fight political suppression as well as platform monopolies.
Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky
The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users. These decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a prominent decentralized microblogging platform. In contrast to alternative approaches (e.g. Mastodon), Bluesky decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders. We collect a comprehensive dataset covering all the key elements of Bluesky, study user activity and assess the diversity of providers for each sub-components.
Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
A design pattern to reduce centralized control and change incentives in social networks.
Nobody cares about decentralization until they do
A recurring line in discussion of federated, decentralized social media is that no one cares about it. They just want their Twitter without the Nazis. Which is okay. But how it looks on the backend matters. When the illusion of a unified user experience breaks, how accessible the escape pod
Practical Decentralization
The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.
Practical Decentralization
The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.