Mbin: a federated content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform
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A federated content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform(By the community, for the community)
Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky
The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users. These decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a prominent decentralized microblogging platform. In contrast to alternative approaches (e.g. Mastodon), Bluesky decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders. We collect a comprehensive dataset covering all the key elements of Bluesky, study user activity and assess the diversity of providers for each sub-components.
Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.
Middleware for Feed Recommendation in Practice: How Feed Creators Build, Maintain, and Sustain Custom Feeds on Bluesky
Scholars have long proposed third-party middleware as an alternative to centralized algorithmic feeds: feeds built and distributed by independent feed creators. This vision saw no large-scale instantiation until Bluesky, a decentralized microblogging platform, introduced custom feeds in 2023. Although central to the middleware ecosystem, we know little about how feed creators understand their role, build feeds, and sustain them. Through interviews with n = 26 feed creators and third-party developers of feed-building tools, and analysis of n = 88,302 custom feeds, we identify two creator orientations---utility-providing and community-building. Additionally, creators struggle to maintain feeds that fully realize middleware ideals: they lack granular interaction data, receive little feedback, and lack technical expertise to act on either. Finally, creators sustain their feeds as unpaid hobbyists with little platform support and are divided on whether to monetize beyond covering costs. We conclude with design and policy implications for strengthening the middleware feed ecosystem.
maegul (@maegul@hachyderm.io)
I think the #Ghost and #Wordpress federations pose interesting questions about what #fediverse platforms can and should be. Do we actually want blogs and feeds of blogs folded into a mastodon/microblog social feed? Do we want to read and comment on blogs on mastodon? Do we want all the diversity of the fediverse fed into a single platform's UI and hope that it works well? Are we worried that some choices by our platform or instance admin might hinder this process? I'm rather skeptical. 1/
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.
Spritely and Veilid: Exciting Projects Building the Peer-to-Peer Web
While there is a surge in federated social media sites, like Bluesky and Mastodon, some technologists are hoping to take things further than this model of decentralization with fully peer-to-peer
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.
The fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can’t ignore - LSE Impact
Björn Brembs argues that learned societies should lead developments on federated social media platforms, such as Mastodon.
Micro.blog Surpasses Kickstarter Funding Goal, Set to Launch New Social Network for Independent Microblogs
Developer Manton Reece is on a mission to take back short form content for the open web by providing better tools for independent microblogging. Most short form content today is posted through cent…
The Astrosky Ecosystem: An independent online platform for science communication and social networking
While almost everything that astronomers study occurs in the vacuum of space, astronomy itself does not `happen in a vacuum'. Interactions between scientists, as well as outreach to members of the public, improve extensively from access to good communication tools. Social media has become a key tool for communication in astronomy, being widely used by individuals and organizations alike for networking, outreach, and more. However, traditional social media is reliant on benevolent corporations providing a free service without compromising on quality, and the recent takeover and decline of Twitter has shown how vulnerable these platforms can be. In this proceeding, we present The Astrosky Ecosystem, which is an initiative to develop open-source tools and integrations for social media, principally the Bluesky social network. We explain how our project enables the astronomy community to operate its own social media infrastructure, independent of for-profit corporations. We also discuss some of the project's technical aspects, including its use of the AT Protocol for social networking, before concluding with ideas for the future.
One thing I left out of my The Everything Account piece was a whole section on Bridgy Fed. Short version: As Bridgy Fed adds more lexicons, it makes the Atmosphere the most versatile and data-owning Fediverse instance in the open social web. Perhaps in a future piece 😉
Anuj Ahooja
I wrote about what I've been calling "The Everything Account" If you're familiar with The Atmosphere, you already know how to get one, and this should hopefully help you explain it to others. For those of you who aren't, you'll be surprised to know you already have one; here's how you use it: