Got Ideas For Growing The Open Social Web? Bring Them.
from the time-to-grow dept
Register here for our Growing the Open Social Web Un-Workshop.
For over three years now, since Elon Musk decided to spend $44 billion turning Twitter into his personal playground, we’ve been watching the open social web slowly, sometimes painfully, come into its own. Bluesky. Mastodon. The broader ATmosphere and fediverse along with a few other experiments (nostr! farcaster!). These aren’t just tech experiments anymore—they’re real alternatives that millions of people use every day.
And yet.
While these open social systems are working, and working well, tons of people are still choosing to stay in closed, proprietary, billionaire-controlled systems, where they have no control, no say in how they work, and no real agency. We’ve heard various excuses. We’ve heard about the pull of inertia. We’ve even heard the complaints that people haven’t found communities they like… or that they actively dislike some of the communities that have formed.
So instead of just writing another post about why that matters (I’ve written plenty), Johannes Ernst from FediForum and I are doing something about it. On March 2nd, we’re hosting an online “un-workshop” focused on one question: how do we actually grow the open social web even more?
And, yes, I’m on the board of Bluesky, but this isn’t Bluesky specific. We want an open discussion and brainstorming on growing the wider open social web.
This isn’t your standard conference where you sit through presentations and nod politely. It’s a participatory event built around the FediForum unconference model, though modified to be more of an ongoing brainstorming workshop (not unlike the Greenhouse events we’ve run here in the past).
Before the event, participants can submit short position papers—your experiences, your ideas, your proposals for what might actually work to engage more people on open social systems. We’ll cluster those into topics and spend the actual event discussing them and brainstorming around them, not just listening to people talk at you.
Here’s the thing: we want people who have real ideas and experience. People who have tried (and maybe failed) to get their friends onto the open social web and learned something useful from it. People who have had success convincing entire communities. People running organizations who are trying to figure out how to make the jump. Builders who want more users. Advocates who have done actual research with actual humans about what’s working and what isn’t.
What we don’t need are more cynical hot takes about why the open social web will never work. If you’ve already decided it’s a lost cause, this isn’t the event for you. Go post about it on Threads or whatever. We also don’t need hot takes about how you’re glad most people don’t use the open social web. That’s great for you open social hipsters, but some of us think it’s important to get more people to recognize the power of open social.
So, for everyone else—the people who believe this matters and want to figure out how to make it happen—we want to hear from you.
The event will run from 8am to noon Pacific (which means Europeans can actually attend without setting an alarm for 3am), and registration is open now. The event will be run online, using Remo, a tool we’ve used in the past for online events, that is conducive to small group discussions and brainstorming.
Position paper submissions are due by February 16th, and while they’re not required, they’re strongly encouraged (you can submit them during the registration process). The whole point is to come prepared to engage, not just spectate.
Look, I’ve been writing about the importance of protocols over platforms for years now. The open social web represents one of the few genuine shots we have at building online spaces that aren’t controlled by a handful of companies (or their billionaire owners) making decisions based on whatever serves their interests that week. But potential doesn’t matter if we can’t translate it into much wider adoption.
So if you’ve got ideas—real ideas, not just complaints—about how to get there, come share them.
Filed Under: fediforum, open social web, un-workshop
Companies: bluesky, mastodon
Comments on “Got Ideas For Growing The Open Social Web? Bring Them.”
No sure that a signification growth would ever happen without a large amount of money.
Because outside Facebook-owned services, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and Twitter, which spend billions in advertising, there is a bunch of niche social networks, open or not, that nearly nobody has ever heard of and where users are happy as it. So maybe the growth, just for the sake of it (and get more advertisers), is not in everyone mind.
i have no experience and no paper, but one way to attract people might be to have instances that are locality-based. People seem to have no issue adopting new groups or apps of any quantity if they can use them for neighborhood gossip and complaining. Or even good stuff, i am sure that exists, but you hear about it less.
Reclaiming Discovery: Why the Next Social Protocol Must Prioritize Interest Over Outrage
It’s a familiar cycle. Every decade or so, we collectively groan about social media. The noise, the polarization, the feeling that our feeds are hostile to our actual curiosity. We’re in that moment again, but this time, the push for decentralized, protocol-based networks offers a real chance to fix a core flaw: the algorithm.
Current platforms have brilliantly optimized for one thing: reactive engagement. They scan our extended networks—people we barely know—for the most inflammatory, shocking, or emotionally charged tidbits and inject them into our daily view. The goal isn’t to inform or connect us meaningfully; it’s to capture a reaction, a click, a comment driven by outrage or impulse.
This betrays a fundamental human truth, often forgotten in the chase for scale: We are not built to “friend” thousands. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested our cognitive limit for stable relationships is around 150. Even with daily pressures, truly engaging with 300-500 people is a monumental task. Our real-world social circles are necessarily limited.
Social networks, at their best, were meant to be the antidote to that limitation. They were tools to grow beyond our immediate circles—to occasionally discover a new idea, a niche hobby, a cultural event, or a perspective from outside our own echo chamber. They were meant for curated discovery, not networked reactivity.
The algorithm flips this. Instead of using the network’s breadth to expand our horizons, it uses it as a fishing pond for the most potent bait within our extended graph. It assumes the most popular thing in our periphery (by engagement metrics) is the most relevant thing for us. It isn’t. It’s just the loudest.
That’s why the next wave—the protocol-based social web—must be built on a different principle: respect for declared interest.
A user should be able to signal, “Here is what I want to learn about, explore, or see updates on.” The protocol’s job isn’t to psychoanalyze my clicks to sell ads, but to faithfully surface content matching those stated priorities—from across the entire network, not just my reactive social periphery. It’s about intentional discovery, not ambient reaction.
This shifts the power. My feed becomes less about what strategically rippled through my “friends of friends” and more about the fascinating project, the quiet essay, the local event, or the technical discussion that aligns with my genuine curiosity, even if it comes from someone I’ve never met.
The dream of social media wasn’t to digitize gossip or amplify outrage. It was to build a larger, richer public square for human connection and knowledge. The next protocol can get us there, but only if it remembers that our networks are for growing from, not just reacting to. The priority must be what we are interested in, not simply what is popular in our shadow network. It’s time to build for curiosity, not just clicks.
Self-curating to improve the social media experience
As a scientist, I use social media (originally Twitter, now Bluesky) to engage with others, both scientists and non-scientists. I have learned a lot over the years from these engagements, but I share many of the same frustrations that you describe.
Commercial social media, for obvious reasons, prioritizes algorithms that help drive revenue rather than truly benefit the user. The open protocols avoid such algorithms, but there is no clear alternative option to curate your feeds. The “firehose” approach of seeing all posts of your followees does not scale well. As you note, it is hard to engage effectively with many hundreds of followees.
I am currently trying to develop a tool that allows me to curate my own feed organically so that I see more of what I think is beneficial and less of what is not. This will allow me to engage with many more people, while still limiting the total number of posts I view every day. It is a work in progress and not yet usable by others, but I hope to complete it soon.
The original attempt is described here.
The current code (in progress) is here.
The fediverse et al shoot themselves in the foot by overmoderating and downranking contentious content. In their zeal to avoid the perceived toxicity of mainstream social media, they create boring, sterile environments. The mainstream model is attractive because it’s fun – humans are apes, after all – and because it feels dynamic. You need to help people find their tribe and give them opportunities to battle other tribes. Avoiding toxicity has nothing to do with avoiding this contentiousness; you just have to put users on a level playing field and provide them the capacity to filter their own experiences and bow out of unwanted interactions.
Another issue is nobody actually cares about privacy. They say they do but their actions prove otherwise. Privacy will never be a selling point for normal users, no matter how much they claim to want it.
Neither will data portability. They don’t think ahead and they don’t understand protocols. They think in terms of “apps”. If you want to get them to use decentralized infrastructure, you have to abstract it away and trick them into it.