Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
The Purpose of Protocols
Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
AI, Agency and Protocols_ Power and Governance in Open Social Networks.pdf
Dangerous Protocols - Summer of Protocols
Protocols are frequently touted as the liberating alternative to walled technological gardens, but the historical purpose of protocols has always been to simplify decision-making and reduce human agency. How do we reconcile these two narratives? I explore the dangerous side of protocols, and how their ability to drive coordination means they also have
A Government Guide to Open Protocols
Public sector teams must go beyond the in-house or off-the-shelf dichotomy to take advantage of open protocols, which offer a unique way to manage both software costs and geopolitical exposure
Introducing the Protocol Institute
Building a field and community to steward the planetary-scale process of protocolization
Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale
The world is long overdue for a completely new system of governance. If there was ever a need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque authority, it has been removed by technology. Every political system we have tried has proven incapable of protecting human rights and dignity. Every political system we have tried has devolved into oligarchy. To effect the change we require immediately, to give individuals control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance, allow global collaboration and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.
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.
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media
Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.
Holographic consensus—part 1
Decentralized governance is the field of protocols that coordinate large number of agents into a collective action, implemented with smart…
How can open social protocols fail us in 2025 | shazow.net
Let’s compare the possible failure modes of various open social protocols: ActivityPub/Mastodon ATProto/Bluesky Farcaster/Warpcast Some scenarios I’d like to …
What ATProto Needs to Support Consentful Distributed Community Governance
Protocol Reader - Summer of Protocols
In the Fall of 2022, the word protocol was suddenly everywhere. The proximal cause was obvious: fueled, in part, by the highly visible and fractious change of ownership at Twitter, large numbers of people began heading for the exits. Most of them, of course, were just looking for
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):
