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Building for Organizers - The People Layer

The most enduring social networks aren’t the prettiest or the most addictive – it’s the ones that empower organizers.

Building for Organizers - The People Layer

The most enduring social networks aren’t the prettiest or the most addictive – it’s the ones that empower organizers.

The European Social Stack · An open declaration

An open declaration: The European Social Stack. Open Social Platforms and Private Messaging.

Community by Design

Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.

A more social IndieWeb | Dominik Hofer

My entry for the IndieWeb Carnival of December 2025 about the IndieWeb in 2030.

We Need To Stop Calling Entertainers ‘Artists’

Expert in building reliable digital platforms and leading high-impact technical teams. 20+ years experience at the intersection of technology, teams, and learning.

Acorn

Your community deserves its own platform.

Sky Zoo

Assigns you a Bluesky animal based on your recent activity, find out when you joined the platform (in what what position, even if you didn't make the 10 million event), and how many people are on the platform. And many more things!

Blacksky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos

How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?

Leaflet — social publishing on the Atmosphere

A simple and powerful platform for social publishing — blogs, newsletters, and more!

Making the Case for Actionable Prosocial Design Research

Regulating harmful design is only half the equation — attention must also go toward how platforms can build prosocial design, and toward the research that shows them how.

npmx: converging communities

The story of the many people and communities that converged to build npmx together

Governing Online Speech: From 'Posts-As-Trumps' to Proportionality and Probability

Online speech governance stands at an inflexion point. Platforms are emerging from the state of emergency invoked during the pandemic and lawmakers are poised t

Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Read the free, open access editionBuy: Amazon, Bookshop, Narrow Gauge Book Co-op, UC Press