Overview: Social Media Strategy

"the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conducted a workshop with eighteen experts to explore governance challenges to defederation... on decentralized social media [which] offers new possibilities for online governance. Experts consider how it can be used responsibly, in a way that balances speech and safety".A good example of how the dis…

How Graze raised funding for NPR and PBS "while also learning more about the future of sponsored content on ATProto".Results: "The Graze.social NPR/PBS donation campaign's 168% ROAS is exceptional performance in the nonprofit digital advertising landscape. Industry benchmarks from M+R show that typical Facebook/Meta campaigns achieve only 48% retu…

Misinformation is "a problem, but not the most important one. The fundamental problem... is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings".while democracy "is a profoundly collective enterprise", we see it as the sum of individuals' knowledge and decis…

The always good Laurens on the ActivityPub-ATproto open letter: "There is a large group of people who are actively moving the space forward, and who have signed the open letter that calls for mutual respect and working together for a better open social web. The number of people who voiced objections and concerns is minimal, but by focusing on proc…

"The first thing I noticed is how strange it felt to use... strange and empty, every interaction felt like it took an eternity... any interaction with others to require multiple levels of intentional actions".After acclimatising, however, "I began to feel comfortable ... very calming... [then] I ran out of stamina" - the site ceased 'working', so …

An account from a conference session describing and exploring "a new class of digital democracy tools is helping people dialogue, deliberate, and make decisions together... greater legitimacy to policymaking, build trust in governance processes, and help the public appreciate policy tradeoffs... a democracy tech stack could supercharge public part…

When this was written there were 23m Bluesky users: "Some publishers report traffic and conversion rates three to four times higher compared with platforms like Threads and X, despite Bluesky’s smaller user base.... EUobserver received 3,800 unique visitors from Bluesky (with 3,300 followers) compared to 1,320 from X (with 203,000 followers)...Fo…

"decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist... we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky... [which] decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders".The intros of Fediverse and Nostr provide a useful spectr…

This study examines:"the shift in the scientific community from X to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics", following the Academic Twitter migration. Is there "evidence of a community shift", and if so "examine the differences in values and indicators..."? "provide valuable insights into whether Blue…

This preprint "looks at the dynamics of this migration" from X to Mastodon of academics: using "publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period... gathered follower-followee relationships ... finding that the subset of academics ... were well-connected. However, this strong intern…

"Horizontal connections and membership community have kept subscriber churn for the English-language publication under 2%". The focus is community: "weekly behind-the-scenes missives (like how journalists keep working through air raids) to members... near-superhuman levels of responsiveness... a lot of human connection".But their strategy focuses …

"the online world seem so toxic ... [because of] a small number of divisive accounts", according to a researcher in "topics such as intergroup conflict, misinformation, technology and climate change", who found that "what we’re seeing online is a warped image created by a very small group of highly active users".SOcial media is "a funhouse mirror.…

"Europe’s systemic dependency on Big Tech’s social-media platforms threatens the continent’s digital sovereignty" - perhaps nothing new, but well argued nevertheless:"Just as the European Union seeks to reduce its reliance on external providers for semiconductors... it must do the same for social media. dominant platforms extract value from Europe…

"the next era of social media—built in Europe, run on our cloud, ruled by our laws... Social media is critical infrastructure, and a vital piece of the European tech sovereignty agenda... we need to build infrastructure ... on the AT Protocol... We have a plan for immediate action that can begin having an impact in 2025".Part of Free Our Feeds, …

Mike Masnick notes, as the "Bluesky is dying" discourse moves into it's 3rd? week, that it's "a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can’t stop writing about it". But the premise of these critiques is wrong as they "fundamentally misunderstand what people want from social media and who gets to decide what constitu…

A deep dive into the April 2025 "censorship" on Turkish Bluesky illustrates that government censorship on ATmosphere apps is limited and will become even less effective as more people exploit its decentralised nature.Context in brief:March 2025, the Turkish "government ordered X to restrict access to various X accounts ... associated with the prot…

The go-to article you need when you want to show how anything online can spiral into a commenting catastrophe, using as a case study "the website for ... a radio station in Melbourne... published a peppy, harmless instructional post for the making of an "Amazing Rainbow Tie-Dye Number Surprise Cake.""Thank god they took screenshots.

Saw this presented at the Ahoy conference. It starts with a well argued outline of surveillance capitalism: "a few predominantly US and Chinese tech companies control information and public debate... users must disclose their most personal data to access ... [while] algorithms opaquely filter what users see ... freeing us from the common good and …

"Let's build a tool to help large organisations coordinate their Bluesky footprint, helping them get the most out of the platform" - One of my suggested conversation topics at the Ahoy conference, April, 2025.

Renée DiResta, "Invisible Rulers" author, on why "user exodus to smaller platforms has become increasingly common... What ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with “referees”; ... Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” ... attem…

Last month I published a couple of posts on X and Bluesky. They make a nice pair, so I'm including both, below, and taking this opportunity to ask for your perspective. I'd really value getting you and your organisation's views on both platforms in 2025, and I'd be happy to answer any questions in return.

OpenSocial's AI integration provides "a unique AI model trained on your specific platform data... Gaia Chatbot transforms how you access information, making every interaction a seamless exchange of knowledge discovery".Works with all AI providersautomatic tagging and classification"adapts in real time to user ... individualized community journey"A…

If, like many, you think Bluesky is "Twitter, but with less Nazis", this post is for you.

I know: you've spent probably ~15 years diligently developing your following there. At the beginning Twitter was fun, particularly when you didn't have so many followers that you couldn't interact with at least some of them. But now, you may have a problem.

"Could seeing how opposite sides of the US political spectrum use the same words differently be a first step toward greater cross-political understanding?... What if generative AI could help us understand people with opposing views better just by showing how they use common words and phrases differently?"MIT's Bridging Dictionary (BD) research …

"Blacksky Algorithms, the team behind Blacksky and rsky, is now officially Blacksky Algorithms Inc", a Delaware C-Corp with its own fiscal host, and bigger ambitions."Blacksky will continue to rely on voluntary, member-supported subscriptions while also building and hosting technical infrastructure for developers, communities, and teams".Short-ter…

I've been cleaning out a few rotten systems recently.

From 2018, a good history, but no solutions: "Facebook didn’t invent the feature, but they definitely broke it. How can we better regulate future disruptive ideas?".Brief historyPart of the A Brief History of Attention series, starts with some brief history, culminating with Zuckerberg combining "three core concepts — the social graph, the news fe…

"misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet ... as a justification machine".Humans are "evidence foragers ... historically [that's] meant digging into a subject, testing arguments... That was the foundation on which most…

"Now you can ... create an instant Bluesky-powered comments section on your own site! Here’s an example of how I added it to my site—which is built on Jekyll."