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.
Hypermedia
Welcome to the Hypermedia Protocol: a decentralized publishing and discussion network
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.
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.
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.
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
Cooperative Technologists Community Discourse Forum
The CoTech community Discourse forum is a UK based open discussion board for issues relating to co-operatives and technology.
Caterpillars: the feed
A web-of-trust discussion forum built on AT Protocol. Open to read, vouched to post.
Caterpillars: the feed
A web-of-trust discussion forum built on AT Protocol. Open to read, vouched to post.
Self-Hosting Guide to Alternatives: Notion
Self-hosted alternatives for the popular collaboration platform
