We do development, design, organizing, policy campaigning, and more to make computing more useful, secure, and resilient. Our work is centered around software infrastructure projects such as GNOME, postmarketOS, p2panda, systemd, and the Linux kernel.
What is Modal? — Modal Collective
Introduction to the collective, giving some background on our motivations and what we’re trying to do.
Announcing the Modal Foundation - Updates from the Modal Foundation
We're a nonprofit dedicated to supporting decentralized social technologies that help people create, circulate and discover trustworthy information.
Modal Foundation
Supporting decentralized social tech and open standards to create trustworthy, public-interest social media alternatives and ensure access to vital information.
Open Gaming Collective | The Future of Linux Gaming
A collaborative working group building a unified set of gaming-focused components for the Linux ecosystem. Focused on upstream-first development.
third-party apis: community infrastructure on atproto - Keith's Thoughts
you can just build things from an open set of tools
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.
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.
FOSDEM 2025 - Spritely and a secure, collaborative, distributed future
Spritely's vision is a world where everyone can access secure collaboration tools without gatekeepers. This requires building a new technical foundation upon which decentralized systems naturally arise. And that's exactly what we're doing! This presentation is going to look at the roadmap of what we have now, what we want for our end-users, and how we're going to get there.
Incubating Aster - Updates from the Modal Foundation
We at the Modal Foundation are excited to share the news of our support for Aster.id, a new home for researchers on the open web. Aster grows out of the ATsc…
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
ModGov - Governance for online communities
A simple, flexible framework that helps online communities create shared rules, elect representative moderators, and ensure stability.
