“Mastodon’s developers — many of whom were queer and trans — did not enjoy the privilege of living the totally open life: they needed privacy and safety, means to protect themselves from harassment.” Which led to particular choices that were made for #ActivityPub. Good ones imho. 1/2

"these problems may be rooted in the very architecture of social media platforms: networks that grow through emotionally reactive sharing. If so, improving online discourse will require more than technical tweaks – it will demand rethinking the fundamental dynamics of interaction and visibility that define these environments." Fellow social media innovators: Should we accept the challenge from this paper? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03385

How big is the open social web, the #fediverse, #bluesky etc compared to the big commercial platforms? It's a bit sobering. From my recent talk "From millions to billions -- a plausible narrative for how to grow the open social web."

Got the newest #Fediverse book in the mail. Looking forward to reading it!!

Move Slowly and Build Bridges, by Robert W. Gehl

It's a great big miracle the entire internet hasn't collapsed (more) yet.

e-mail.wtf

Email is Easy

Everyone knows what an email address is, right?

Meta announced today that Threads now has reached 400 million monthly active users. Starting at about the same time with a similar product, Bluesky currently is at about 6 million MAUs. Mastodon and other Fediverse projects started earlier, and their numbers are even lower ... by some margin! None of them are growing much, while Threads is. This tells me

The choice between a traditional social media platform or the open social web seems to boil down to "do I want to control people to only do things my way" or "do I want to thrive by enabling people to make their own choices".

Done with the slides for my talk "From Millions to Billions -- a plausible narrative for growing the Open Social Web", to be (first?) given at #FediCon this Friday in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I expect this to be permanent work in progress, as this community / network / market / whatever it all is evolves, and I'm sure that some people will tell me it is not plausible or could be more plausible. Which would be the best outcome ... I love learning from my "audience" because it gets better that way.

Quite interesting conversation between @npub17lrp...294v and Jack Dorsey on the history of Twitter, why Jack left Bluesky, and what he thinks is needed in terms of a social media protocol and why. Agree or disagree, this first recorded episode in Rabble's new podcast revolution.social is worth listening to.

revolution.social - A Podcast About the Social Media Revolution

Join us as we explore the social media revolution and how we can build an open world for all.