Tags decentralized and democratized the organization of information. What became of "social tagging?"
The year social networks were no longer social | TechCrunch
The term “social network” has become a meaningless association of words. Pair those two words and it becomes a tech category, the equivalent of a single
Decentralized Social Media | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Models of collaborative tagging
Collaborative tagging, also known as social tagging or folksonomy, allows users to apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. It has been argued that these tagging systems can provide navigational cues or "way-finders" for other users to explore information.[1][2] The notion is that given that social tags are labels users create to represent topics extracted from online documents, the interpretation of these tags should allow other users to predict the contents of different documents efficiently. Social tags are arguably more important in exploratory search, in which the users may engage in iterative cycles of goal refinement and exploration of new information (as opposed to simple fact-retrievals), and interpretation of information contents by others will provide useful cues for people to discover topics that are relevant.
Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how
"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."
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:
Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop, 2026/03/02
Medsky
Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.
Social Media | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media
Social media companies make important decisions about what counts as “problematic” content and how they will remove it. Some choose to moderate hashtags, blocking the results for certain tag searches and issuing public service announcements (PSAs) when users search for troubling terms. The hashtag has thus become an indicator of where problematic content can be found, but this has produced limited understandings of how such content actually circulates. Using pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) communities as a case study, this article explores the practices of circumventing hashtag moderation in online pro-ED communities. It shows how (1) untagged pro-ED content can be found without using the hashtag as a search mechanism; (2) users are evading hashtag and other forms of platform policing, devising signals to identify themselves as “pro-ED”; and (3) platforms’ recommendation systems recirculate pro-ED content, revealing the limitations of hashtag logics in social media content moderation.
Latinsky
Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.
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.
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
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.socialwrote an analysis of @moja.blue's Mezzanine — an information networking method using meaningless cashtags as durable connectors on Bluesky. why opaque tags can't rot, how it differs from hashtags/communities/feeds, and why it's genuinely novel. $cT7aZ astral100.leaflet.pub/3mg7ov3rh672o
Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6nue7_v1 preprint w/ Richard Rogers
