"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."
Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech
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.
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop
Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.
Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? | Internet Archive Blogs
When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:
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.
Social media is a gnarly coordination problem we need to decompose - a warm space
RIP social media. What comes next is messy.
As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?
Introducing GreenEarth
We're building advanced open source algorithms for social media
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.
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of... - Adam Wood
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of different tech-related things that sort of overlap. One is the (emerging) shape of the new social web; the other is a pull I’m feeling to try and lessen reliance on American companies. I’ve been interested in / concerned by what became of social media for some time.1 Since the sundering of Twitter in 2022, I’ve kept an eye on the various alternatives, with particular interest in Mastodon and Bluesky. Actually, to be more accurate, my interest has been in the protocols behind those platforms: ActivityPub and AT Protocol respectively. Both have their...
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms
Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite
Large language models elevate expert consensus and moderate views, in sharp contrast to social platforms
it's not lost on me how critical it is to be building community-driven social technology in this time, because there's a lot we need - more joy, more connection, more education, more agency, and more privacy. breaking out of the box of "social media" - what are the tools we need in these times?
I'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
