Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

Shirky: Situated Software

Clay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source

Shirky: In Praise of Evolvable Systems

Clay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source, and Genetics As Information Science

Semble — Make sense of the web, together

A place for mapping the web, connecting ideas, and building shared knowledge.

Decentralizing the Economic Power of the Web (A Reading List)

We recently hosted a panel discussion as part of our MozFest’s Dialogues & Debates series focused on interrogating the web’s reigning business model — d…

Reclaiming Social Spaces: Are Open Source Platforms a Path for More Human Connection?

What if social media platforms were built to serve their communities, not billionaires? Join us with the founders of Blacksky as we explore the potential of open source social media.

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

How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

Hypermedia

Welcome to the Hypermedia Protocol: a decentralized publishing and discussion network

The rise of community-curated knowledge networks

The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enabled billions of people to create content. At least 2.5…

Pluralistic: The (open) web is good, actually (13 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

Collective knowledge foraging in trail-based social networks beyond feeds

Sharing insights about moving beyond feeds from building Semble, a community knowledge garden built on the AT Protocol. The World Wide Web is called a web for good reason. We navigate this web of interconnected websites by clicking hyperlinks and opening new tabs in tools called browsers. This kind of browsing experience is defined by its open-endedness and interwoveness; every website we visit becomes a step along a path. With the rise of social media, we lost touch with this vast trail network. Rather than creating a social web where our trails got woven onto a shared map, they were instead paved over by information superhighways: the algorithmic feeds. Hyper-scaled social media platforms reduced the vast web of interconnected pages into a stripped down ad-ridden and attention-extracting monoculture. Our online experiences became reduced to the flick of a finger, the doom scroll. With the rise of open social protocols, like ATProto, we have an opportunity to leave these misaligned profit-driven and ad-based feeds behind and rediscover the magic of shared knowledge trails. what might that look like? In this lightning talk I’ll share insights and lessons my team and I have learned from building [Semble](https://semble.so/), a community knowledge garden built on ATProto. Semble is an open social network based on knowledge trails rather than feeds. I’ll explore what trail-based social networks of the future could look like, grounded in features and use-cases we’ve uncovered while building Semble. In the transition from feeds back to trails, we aim to co-create an open social web that centres the value of human attention and sparks a new era of collective wisdom. This lightning talk is an invitation to co-create this future together. It will similar to a prior [lightning talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptOMKK1lC4Q) we gave at ATmosphereConf 2026, adapted for DWeb Camp. Recorded at DWeb Camp 2026, Open Social Space, 2026-07-10. Schedule entry: https://talx.dod.ngo/dwebcamp-2026/talk/TA3NY7/

FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop, 2026/03/02

FediForum

FediForum: moving the Open Social Web forward