Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
AI, Agency and Protocols_ Power and Governance in Open Social Networks.pdf
W-Social: What does sovereignty mean for social media? – Open Future
The European Commission’s move to W-Social frames it as a European alternative to X, but its closed-source code and reliance on Bluesky’s infrastructure show that sovereign social media requires open infrastructure—not European ownership alone.
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
Where Does Community Live?
ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.
Why Online Democracies Fail - Eclectic Corvine Muses
A compendium to my upcoming proposal for community infrastructure within the AT Protocol
AT Protocol
The AT Protocol is a protocol and open standard for distributed social networking services. It is under development by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation originally created as an independent research group within Twitter, Inc. to investigate the possibility of decentralizing the service.
The Paradox of Open
Numerous organisations and initiatives have been launched with a belief in openness and free knowledge. Their proponents placed their bets on the combined power of networked information services and new governance models for the production and sharing of content and data. We – as members of this broad movement – were among those who believed it possible to leverage this combination of power and opportunity to build a more democratic society, unleashing the power of the internet to create universal access to knowledge and culture. For us, such openness meant not only freedom, but also presented a path to justice and equality.
Call for Participation: AT Protocol Ecosystem Action Research - Ecosystem Action
A pilot program to facilitate cooperative, research-led innovation in the AT Protocol ecosystem.
Mike Masnick on protocols for publishers
An interview with @masnick.com (of TechDirt), the author of the influential 2019 paper "Protocols, Not Platforms," reflecting on how his ideas apply to publishers in 2026.
The Internet Transition
The Internet is allowing us to build a richer, more complex society but the way in which we Internet today is failing to support the governance systems that a more complex world requires. I take a look at why these issues are related, try to develop an intuition for a way forward, and point at the emerging field that is coming together to build that future.
A Model for addressing privacy on ATproto
When I first got involved with Northsky social, we knew we would have to eventually address the elephant in the room. How do we proactively protect a community from outside influences without relying purely on moderation? And more importantly, how do we keep bad actors from simply pulling their data straight from a relay?
🇪🇺🌐 The future of social media may be decided in Europe
A survey of European AT Protocol projects, including 4 mini case-studies
In 2026, @bsky.app is focused on what’s next for open social: bringing together users for conversations around live events, creator and platform monetization, and private state, giving users truly private data while preserving ownership and portability at the protocol level.
