Spritely and Veilid: Exciting Projects Building the Peer-to-Peer Web

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.

Mastodon - Decentralized social media

Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.

Introducing PeerSky | P2P Labs

After 3.5 years, #PeerSky v1.0.0 is finally here 🎉 Create information. Share it directly with peers. Access it anywhere. Even when the internet goes down. All power corrupts. Power should be distributed. PeerSky is more than a browser; it's a new foundation for the web. That's how we save the internet and build better societies, one peer at a time. Try it out! 👉 https://lnkd.in/d7qp_93B

Peersky (@peersky@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 video After 3.5 years, #PeerSky v1.0.0 is finally here 🎉 Create information. Share it directly with peers. Access it anywhere. Even when the internet goes down. All power corrupts. Power should be distributed. PeerSky is more than a browser; it's a new foundation for the web. That's how we save the internet and build better societies, one peer at a time. Try it out! 👉 https://peersky.p2plabs.xyz/

Peer Production

Peer production describes a unique form of global collaboration that is responsible for creating some of the most vital parts of the internet. Information ec...

The Decentralized Web: Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future? — MIT Digital Currency Initiative

In this report, we explore two important ways structurally decentralized systems could help address the risks of mega-platform consolidation: First, these systems can help users directly publish and discover content directly, without intermediaries, and thus without censorship. All of the systems we

Peer Production

How a unique form of working together has built—and is critical to sustain—our age of information. Peer production describes a unique form of global collaboration that is responsible for creating some of the most vital parts of the internet. Information ecosystem powerhouses like Wikipedia and the Linux operating system were founded on principles of open cooperation, and only exist today due to the contributions of thousands, and in some cases, millions of people. In Peer Production, Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold, and Aaron Shaw describe the central role that peer production plays in today’s information environment, and how it is a much broader phenomenon than the handful of famous projects that are now household names. The book offers three core ideas: peer production functions as a critical mode of collaborative knowledge production; represents a novel type of social collaboration; and has unique advantages over previous forms of collaboration. The authors show that peer production is not just the foundation of the internet as we know it, but also the engine driving the global digital economy to generative AI. Finally, the book also charts the uncertain future of peer production as it confronts new threats and a changing digital landscape.

Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky

The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users. These decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a prominent decentralized microblogging platform. In contrast to alternative approaches (e.g. Mastodon), Bluesky decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders. We collect a comprehensive dataset covering all the key elements of Bluesky, study user activity and assess the diversity of providers for each sub-components.

Peer-to-Peer Republic

A movement, open republic of humans building peer-to-peer systems that redistribute power and reimagine the internet as a public good, not a product a platform sells.

The fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can’t ignore - LSE Impact

Björn Brembs argues that learned societies should lead developments on federated social media platforms, such as Mastodon.

From Platforms to Protocols: The Problem With Decentralized Social Media — Saba Gul

Building social media is a human problem, before it is a technological one. A decentralized architecture introduces new problems without solving old ones.

Nobody cares about decentralization until they do

A recurring line in discussion of federated, decentralized social media is that no one cares about it. They just want their Twitter without the Nazis. Which is okay. But how it looks on the backend matters. When the illusion of a unified user experience breaks, how accessible the escape pod

How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub, and the answer is that I do have opinions, but I am usually head-down focused on building what I hope to be the next generation of decentralized (social) networking tech, and so I keep to myself about such things except in private channels.

European Commission (@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu)

Attached: 1 image A strong Europe needs independent digital spaces. We believe true digital sovereignty thrives on a competitive, contestable, open ecosystem where diverse platforms co-exist. Today, we’re expanding our presence to W, the new social media. By being on W, we want to boost alternatives and support all efforts toward a decentralised web. And we continue to invest into our presence on the Fediverse!