Social platforms are not neutral - Paul's Leaflets

Paul's Leaflets

There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere

Leaflet, standard.site, and open social publishing! - Leaflet Lab Notes

Lab Notes 021: launching a set of shared standards for social publishing, migrating Leaflet to use these new lexicons, and how we plan to grow publishing × open social together!

Starting from scale in the design of the AT Protocol - Paul's Leaflets

Bluesky was founded in 2022 to produce a protocol which Twitter could adopt. The product goals changed, but the requirements didn't.

My leaflets now show on my personal blog - Paul's Leaflets

Publish On PDS, Syndicate To Any Reader

Leaflet, Blogging, and How to Fix Social Media - Aaron Ross Powell

Decentralization, network overlap, and why we should all blog, too.

Leaflet — social publishing on the Atmosphere

A simple and powerful platform for social publishing — blogs, newsletters, and more!

W Social Isn't New. It Isn't Truly European. It Isn't Even Theirs. - Ewan’s Blog

Another rant on this “European” alternative

The Case for a Public Social Media Platform - JSTOR Daily

Artist and writer Joshua Citarella explores why corporate platforms corrode democracy—and what a postal-service-style digital commons could do differently.

Let's fund the open social web

A pro-social approach to building better platforms

Bridging Social Movements and the New Social Web (working draft) - Variable Context with @CaptainCalliope.blue

On connecting movements, media, and new protocol ecosystems to rebuild the civic, cultural, and technical foundations of a freer, more self-determining society.

It's working - Tynan's Leaflets

5 pieces of context on a single post, proving what the social web offers today

Community by Design

Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.