I Don't Make Content - Fernando Gros

The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization

Sure, we have open source, federated replacements for Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube. How do we get creators to use this stuff? One consideration involves the ability to pay for things.

Content for Content’s Sake

Why are so many interactions online terrible now?

What happens when content creators and journalists come together?

Find out how journalists and content creators can work together, and why this collaboration is needed to improve information integrity.

The rise of community-curated knowledge networks

The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enabled billions of people to create content. At least 2.5…

Permissioned Data Shapes: Community-Moderated Content - Nick's Blog

A community can own spaces the way a person does: a club's members post to each other under a dedicated community DID, with a feed space for content, a moderation space for notes, a labels space for filtering, and a single app view as the only window into any of it.

Publishing apps | at-store

Writing, newsletters, blogging, and reader-growth tools built to help creators publish on the open web and keep direct relationships with their audience.

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.

Building Epistemically Healthier Platforms

When thinking about designing social media platforms, we often focus on factors such as usability, functionality, aesthetics, ethics, and so forth. Epistemic considerations have rarely been given the same level of attention in design discussions. This paper aims to rectify this neglect. We begin by arguing that there are epistemic norms that govern environments, including social media environments. Next, we provide a framework for applying these norms to the question of platform design. We then apply this framework to the real-world case of long-form informational content platforms. We argue that many current long-form informational content platforms are epistemically unhealthy. The good news? We provide concrete advice on how to take steps toward improving their health! Specifically, we argue that they should change how they verify and authenticate content creators and how this information is displayed to content consumers. We conclude by connecting this guidance to broader issues about the epistemic health of platforms.

Make It Work vs. Make It Good

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Making Space for a Handmade Web | Figma Blog

There’s a resurgence of small, handcrafted sites challenging the current trajectory of the internet. Joining the movement is as simple as making your own.

Seed Hypermedia

Publish documents, connect ideas, discuss them in context, and preserve verifiable authorship and collective memory over time.

Bonsai: Intentional and Personalized Social Media Feeds

Social media feeds use predictive models to maximize engagement, often misaligning how people consume content with how they wish to. We introduce Bonsai, a system that enables people to build personalized and intentional feeds. Bonsai implements a platform-agnostic framework comprising Planning, Sourcing, Curating, and Ranking modules. This framework allows users to express their intent in natural language and exert fine-grained control over a procedurally transparent feed creation process. We evaluated the system with 15 Bluesky users in a two-phase, multi-week study. We find that participants successfully used our system to discover new content, filter out irrelevant or toxic posts, and disentangle engagement from intent, but curating intentional feeds required more effort than they are used to. Simultaneously, users sought system transparency mechanisms to effectively use (and trust) intentional, personalized feeds. Overall, our work highlights intentional feedbuilding as a viable path beyond engagement-based optimization.

Introducing ATProtoFans: A New Way to Support Creators You Love - ATProtoFans Blog

Indiegraf: The Operating System Built for Independent Newsrooms

Manage, publish, monetize and grow with Indiegraf—supporting 180+ independent media outlets and covering all your publishing needs in one place.

Ecosystem or Echo-System? Exploring Content Sharing across Alternative Media Domains

Kate Starbird,Ahmer Arif,Tom Wilson,Katherine Van Koevering,Katya Yefimova,Daniel Scarnecchia