Apps - Social Media Lab

Social apps | at-store

Social-layer apps focused on posting, discovery, conversation, and relationship-building across the network.

What to Know About the E.U.’s New Age Verification App for Social Media

The E.U.’s new age verification app aims to address concerns raised by tech platforms around privacy and enforcement.

Open Social Network Cookbook

The Open Social Network Cookbook is the collective product of the Open Social Incubator, a cohort that MEDLab hosted from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025. At the heart of our work together was the question: How can the online communities that we participate in use tools that truly reflect our values?

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.

Regular exchange of issues between lab members to share research tasks

At the start of this project, we suggested that our graph-based "issue dashboards" would be used widely by members ...

Traditional Social Media as a Prison - What’s Happening on My Feed?

Social media apps have become a vehicle for community building, world news, and political campaigns. As app owners have enmeshed themselves more with the state, the carceral logics that haunt marginalized communities offline, became a part of their digital realities online.

Analytics on the Open Social Web • RocheBit

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about analytics on the open social web. I would love to hear how others approach this topic, and share my own perspective.

The promise of ATproto is social media without corporate overlords | The Web Dev Podcast Series 1

Developers building apps on ATproto, the technology behind social media apps like Bluesky and Leaflet, are promising us a future where we own our content and aren’t at the whims of a tiny handful of companies. Software engineer Zeu Capua talks to host Jason Lengstorf about the promise of social media where we can actually own our own data.

Skywalker - Apps on Google Play

App to explore ATProto based social media networks, e.g. Bluesky

The Astrosky Ecosystem: An independent online platform for science communication and social networking

While almost everything that astronomers study occurs in the vacuum of space, astronomy itself does not `happen in a vacuum'. Interactions between scientists, as well as outreach to members of the public, improve extensively from access to good communication tools. Social media has become a key tool for communication in astronomy, being widely used by individuals and organizations alike for networking, outreach, and more. However, traditional social media is reliant on benevolent corporations providing a free service without compromising on quality, and the recent takeover and decline of Twitter has shown how vulnerable these platforms can be. In this proceeding, we present The Astrosky Ecosystem, which is an initiative to develop open-source tools and integrations for social media, principally the Bluesky social network. We explain how our project enables the astronomy community to operate its own social media infrastructure, independent of for-profit corporations. We also discuss some of the project's technical aspects, including its use of the AT Protocol for social networking, before concluding with ideas for the future.