This document exists to lay out some general principles of running a small social network site that have worked for me. These principles are related to community building more than they are related to specific technologies.
A New Social
Our mission is to liberate people's networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.
A New Social
Our mission is to liberate people's networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.
SocialWeb.Network - Your Gateway to Decentralized Social
Comprehensive resources for decentralized social web protocols including ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and more.
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop
Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.
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.
Open Villages - Community-run social networks: rest of the world
Growing the Social Web
I'm going to be participating in the Growing the Open Social Web workshop at Fediforum on March 2, 2026. I'm excited to talk to other people who care about the Fediverse about ways to connect more people through ActivityPub. Fediforum invited attendees to publish position papers before the workshop. SWF has a number of hypotheses…
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.
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms
atproto academy
Your resource for learning the decentralized social networking protocol powering the future of social media.
co/infra
Free, public infrastructure for the open social web, run as a community cooperative. - co/infra
FR#157 – Social Software Distribution
Open social protocols are expanding beyond social media into the infrastructure developers use to build, distribute, and discover software. Three recent launches show what that looks like in practice.
ActivityPub
Connect your site to the Open Social Web and let millions of users follow, share, and interact with your content from Mastodon, Pixelfed, and more.
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!
Social Networking Utopia — Matt
In discussing the network topology of social networks — whether centralized like Facebook or federated like ActivityPub — I think the ult...
Open Social