Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
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:
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.
Custodians of the Internet
A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...
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.
RIP social media. What comes next is messy.
As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?
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."
Traditional Social Media as a Prison - What’s Happening on My Feed?
Social media apps have become a vehicle for community building, world news, and political campaigns. As app owners have enmeshed themselves more with the state, the carceral logics that haunt marginalized communities offline, became a part of their digital realities online.
Directing the Herd
Social media platforms don’t produce a common public; they produce competing sub-publics, each with its own sense of what everyone knows.
Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech
Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem | NOEMA
There’s never been a better time to make social media what it always should have been: a tool to strengthen rather than strip-mine the social fabric.
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.
The future of social media is human
We cannot continue participating in social media platforms which do nothing to stop us being tricked by GenAI and the powerful people/governments that control them.
It's obvious why we hate social media
We need better internet platforms. We're already building them.
Bluesky COO Rose Wang On Building a Better Social Network
Public Service Social Media as a Democratic Safeguard | TechPolicy.Press
Christine Galvagna proposes an EU fund to support decentralized, public service focused social media networks to protect digital rights and democracy.
