The Purpose of Protocols
Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
✨🙌 AI that helps communities thrive on their own terms
Open protocols + AI-enabled coding = building what we need for ourselves
The Algorithm, Singular
A new European ruling on algorithmic amplification determines if an operator controls how content spreads on a platform. But applying it to open social networks turns out to be a problem.
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.
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.
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.
The Unsolvable Dilemma: Open Networks vs. Economic Sustainability - Nightflight
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how
"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."
Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object & Tool
Uses of advanced artificial intelligence are changing how societies organize labor, govern, produce knowledge, and make meaning. In light of these developments, this essay argues that AI models, tools, and systems pose three interrelated imperatives for social science: they demand renewed attention to social theories of how technology, human experience, and social order are entangled; they require study as objects of inquiry in their own right; and they offer capabilities that may transform—or upend—the practice of social investigation itself. From Weber’s analysis of rationalization to Du Bois’s study of technology and inequality to contemporary scholarship on algorithmic governance, the essay examines what social science distinctively offers: the capacity to historicize the apparently unprecedented, to trace connections across scales, and to center those most affected by technological change. It identifies how algorithmic systems are remaking the distribution of opportunity and risk as a central task of social inquiry and asks what futures social science might help bring into being.
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.
“Policy Without Tools Is Just Poetry” - AT Protocol
Juliet Shen from ROOST joins the show to talk through the Coop 1.0 release, what open-source trust and safety unlocks for new builders, and where AI actually belongs in moderation
The Arguments Against Open Source AI are Very Bad | Tom Bedor's Blog
The release of Kimi K3 has opened a fresh round of angst and confused discourse. There's a loud cohort of journalists, business leaders, and politicians arguing that open source AI is a dangerous threat. OpenAI's Dean Ball:
Why Online Democracies Fail - Eclectic Corvine Muses
A compendium to my upcoming proposal for community infrastructure within the AT Protocol
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.
