It's time to rethink what the feed is for.
From Feeds to Trails
To design the future of social media, rethink the interface before the algorithm.
New_ Public | After the Feed
What happens after the social media feed? A presentation on the future of conversation, community, and social connection, and how AI will affect the everyday lives of billions.
RSS Feed to Social Media | Fedica
Fedica's RSS Feed to Social Media auto-posts new articles, videos, or podcasts to 13 platforms via Pipeline, with auto-formatting and thread-splitting.
Custom Feeds Are Not Communities — A Design Theory of Feeds and Commons - Nightflight
Beginning I learned something from Hamakaze no Ryodan, who has deep expertise in creating Bluesky custom feeds. Feeds collect posts without the poster's co…
Custom Feeds Are Not Communities — A Design Theory of Feeds and Commons - Nightflight
Beginning I learned something from Hamakaze no Ryodan, who has deep expertise in creating Bluesky custom feeds. Feeds collect posts without the poster's co…
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....
How to Fix Social Media by Injecting A Chunk of the Blogosphere
Not all hour-long podcasts are worthwhile, but I found this one by The Atlantic’s Matt Thompson and Alexis Madrigal to be pretty compelling. The subject: how to
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
Free Our Feeds
Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.
People, Not Posts: Part II - Real Housewives of San Francisco
What comes after social media?
Social media algorithms don't allow us to understand or control what we see online and why... until now! Top scholars @jonathanstray.com and @noupside.bsky.social are sharing @mysky.social, a tool that allows users to adjust their feed’s priorities and explains why certain posts appear over others.
🎛️📲 Meet the algorithm you can actually control and understand
newpublic.substack.com🧵 On social media, we feel trapped in “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” Often, we see this as a problem with the algorithm. Our new essay argues the problem is the feed interface itself: it constrains our movement—all we can do is scroll. We lay out an alternative vision:
From Feeds to Trails
leaflet.pubpeople love the For You feed, and it shows in the numbers. it generates around 4% of post views inside feeds on Bluesky. that's amazing especially because it's operated by one dev, @spacecowboy17.bsky.social given its popularity, we've decided to give it a bump in visibility on the feeds page.
