Nobody cares about decentralization until they do

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:

Medsky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable

How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

Latinsky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

a federated autonomous zone

cozy anarchist social media for the coming days

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.

Practical Decentralization

The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.

Practical Decentralization

The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.

European Commission (@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu)

Attached: 1 image A strong Europe needs independent digital spaces. We believe true digital sovereignty thrives on a competitive, contestable, open ecosystem where diverse platforms co-exist. Today, we’re expanding our presence to W, the new social media. By being on W, we want to boost alternatives and support all efforts toward a decentralised web. And we continue to invest into our presence on the Fediverse!

Ecosystem Review

A review of decentralized social media ecosystems published by Twitter's "bluesky" team on the 21st January 2021

Mathieu Lefebvre — Product Designer

For several months now, I have been passionate about decentralized social networks. A federated social network is a platform composed of independent servers that communicate with each other using common protocols.

Blacksky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

Blacksky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

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.