Most communities that want to leave Big Tech hit the same wall. The tools exist. The values are right. But someone has to install everything, keep it updated, wire the login together across a dozen apps, and be on call when something breaks — and for a volunteer-run association or a small collective, that someone usually does not exist.
Build Community Online with Decentralized Tools | Blacksky
Decentralized tools to build community online. The intercommunal net where communities govern, pool funds and stay safe on their own terms.
Build Community Online with Decentralized Tools | Blacksky
Decentralized tools to build community online. The intercommunal net where communities govern, pool funds and stay safe on their own terms.
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms
The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free?
Tired of relying on Big Tech to enable collaboration, peer-to-peer enthusiasts are creating a new model that cuts out the middleman. (That’s you, Google.)
Jake Lazaroff — Building more resilient local-first software with atproto
Assembling Community OS — Open Indie
I've previously written about the multi-app platform of my dreams as a community professional: The Community OS stack. While undeniably ...
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.
Strengthening Online Communities | Rise Against Big Tech Powerbase
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
Roomy and community organizing for system change
Roomy is a group messaging app that gives online communities tools for autonomous collaboration — designable spaces not just for chat, but for cultivating a web of shared understanding together. We show how cheap, user-controlled, interoperable data on ATProto can enable online communities to channel impassioned mobilizing into sustained organizing in the shadow of Big Tech's empire.
A New Wave of Peer-to-Peer Apps Heralds a Farm-to-Table Internet
This week, we discuss the local-first computing movement and its push to reduce our reliance on the corporate-owned, cloud-based software tools we use every day.
Keep Your Friends Close — Open Tech Strategies | Blog
One of the insider secrets of free and open source software (FOSS) is that most of the rules a project uses on a day-to-day basis are not found in the software’s license. There are contribution guidelines, which are enforced by the project only taking contributions that meet them. There are codes of conduct, which are a condition of community participation. There are endorsements, official membership, a voice in setting the project roadmap, and all kinds of other benefits that attach to varying types of community participation. In each case, entirely external to the license, there are official rules and unwritten norms that govern how participants gain the benefits of joining the civic life of a project.
Where Tech Companies Build Communities
The customizable, scalable community platform powering over 22,000 communities. Create knowledge through conversation.
Starting and Running a User Group
Join me as I look at what it takes to start and run a user group community.
Tack
A live, multiplayer whiteboard full of your real issues and pull requests. Plan together, and what you decide goes back to GitHub. Free, open source and self-hosted.
From Volunteer Gardening to Building Next-Gen Distributed Web Apps: My Journey to Holochain App…
A story about discovering community, a mind-warping internet paradigm and a global network of unconventional software engineers.
