Rethinking my open social web setup after dealing with AI haters.

A deep dive into the origin story of W Social, an analysis of the strategic arguments they have been using to appeal to government officials, media companies and advertisers... and the discussion of conflicting signals they have been sending

If you want to overthrow Big Tech, you’ll need Section 230. The paradigm shift being built with the Open Social Web can put communities back in control of social media infrastructure, and finally end our dependency on enshittified corporate giants. But while these incumbents can overcome multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the small host revolution could be picked off […]

Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking through what services that cross the Atmosphere would look like. It’s led to a few experiments that are worth sharing, so here’s the first one.

Disperse is a website, bookmarklet, linkable service, and (soon) a browser extension that allows you to share in several different formats across the Atmosphere all at once. It uses the unique account and data…

Imaginez un réseau social où vous contrôlez vraiment vos données, vos flux et même votre identité, sans dépendre d’une seule entreprise géante. C’est le pari audacieux que fait Bluesky depuis plusieurs années, et l’annonce récente d’une levée de fonds massive vient renforcer cette vision ambitieuse. Avec plus de 43 millions d’utilisateurs aujourd’hui, la plateforme émerge […]

The post Bluesky…

Last weekend, I was at the second annual AtmosphereConf among 300-some-odd of the kindest people I think I’ve ever met in tech/tech-adjacent spaces. I wanted to capture some of my emotions as I left the space on Monday, so here’s a peek into my experience.

I’ve opted to keep people’s names out since this isn’t a transient post on the skyline. That said, I hope the references are clear and you…

We made it! augment has officially moved over to a self-hosted site, and I’m so excited to tell you all about it.

I’ve always wanted augment to be a space that I could write, but more importantly, I wanted to be a canvas where I could imagine what blogging can look like when it becomes a ==social space==. One where published posts don’t just sit to be seen, but commented on, interacted with…

Bluesky Social PBC have given a grant to Emelia Smith, an Invited Expert with the FedID Working Group, to work on FedCM with the goal of making FedCM really work for the decentralized web.

I’ve been thinking a lot about our accounts lately. We all have an ever-growing pile of digital identities scattered across the web, many forgotten after a brief stint with a random service we found in an app store.

It’s like second nature at this point: we check out a new service and fill in the usual suspects: first name, last name, email, username, password (better confirm it!), address…

20th Avenue NE Bridge (Ravenna Park Bridge), Seattle, WA, U.S., 1914, © Seattle Municipal Archives Back in November, I wrote an essay that explored the significance of services like Bridgy Fed, a protocol-level bridge that connects open social platforms. Since then, Ryan Barrett, the builder behind Bridgy Fed, and I have started A New Social: a nonprofit focused on building more cross-protocol…

© Roman Eisele / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons 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 platforms is that while they…