In a world obsessed with moats, the open social web drops drawbridges
Storming Reddit's Moat
A Guide to Reddit, Its Key Competitive Advantages, and How to Unbundle It
Bridges & The Last Network Effect
We're in an exciting moment for the open social web. As Elon makes one bad decision after another on X, we've seen waves of users leave the platform for alternatives. Three obvious beneficiaries of these, ahem, lapses of judgment are Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. What's particularly interesting about these three
Federated Webrings
In the glory days of web 1.0, social websites would prominently link out to their digital neighbors via lists known as webrings; magical doorways to an expansive hinterland of digital villages.
Winning back the Open Web
Walled gardens dominate because their massive data collection lets them deliver superior user experiences. To win back the open web, we need to build alternatives that respect users, embrace open standards, and still feel unmistakably better to use.
Vaulting Out of Walled Gardens with Fancy Links – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog
Have you ever noticed that in Twitter, Facebook, Google and Pinterest some links are displayed quite fancily, with preview images, descriptive text summaries and other information? These ...
Building At The Edges
Technology Podcast · Updated Weekly · In Building At The Edges, Jess Sloss, instigator at Seed Club, holds intimate conversations with top innovators building irresistible web3 communities. We surface insights from DAO experiments and dig…
The Atmosphere . Building the open social web
The Case for Open Sovereignty in a Fragmenting Internet
Once, the Internet promised to dissolve borders. It was humanity’s great experiment in connection — a place where ideas, innovation, and communities could move freely, unburdened by geography or...
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.
The Feed is the Product: Why We Stay in Walled Gardens, and Why We Might Finally Leave for the Open Social Web - Zsolt's pckt blog
We have known this for years. We have known that the major platforms are bad for our attention, our sleep, our politics, our children, and our sense of reality....
Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
On fun simple social building blocks… - Scraps!
Replying to Jared's thoughts on decomposing social media experiences into building blocks (identities, data, interfaces) with some building blocks I'd like to explore in Leaflet!
Maybe the real moats are the drawbridges we'll build along the way? In my latest augment piece, I re-think "moats" for the open social web by seeing what @standard.site, @blackskyweb.xyz's Acorn, and bridges like @ap.brid.gy + @wafrn.net have done for the ecosystem.
Moats & Drawbridges
www.augment.inkMany builders in the Open Social Web are discouraged by the lack of funding in the ecosystem, slow pace of feature development (e.g. private accounts), and “low” adoption relative to incumbents like Meta. In my keynote I emphasized multi-generational struggle & movement building. People who faced…
