Decentralized Social Media
Disclaimer:
Everything below is a mix of what I observed and heard during the event. The goal isn’t to pinpoint "who exactly said what," but to share (usually) an outsider's view and overall perspective on these industries. I’m not here to act as a definitive firsthand source—readers should do their own research. I hope this inspires you to attend events, explore new industries, and hear what leaders are presenting. These notes combine my observations with thoughts on how things could run smoother and how ideas connect (IMO). I’m not an expert, you know? Just hanging out in the room with them. Enjoy!Topics Covered: Decentralized Social Media, Personal Identity, Cyber Security, Bullying, Niche Groups, Communication, Web 2.0, HTML, At Protocol.
The event was called “Atmosphere Something-or-Another” but it had nothing to do with the weather!? No. It had to do with “the cloud” hosting social networks and communication opportunities. Since I’m a semi-avid user of social media (I mean, freakin’ grew up on it from my teens, on) seemed appropriate to learn a little more.
Why Attend? Ever heard of social media? Yeah! We all use it - or at least our grandma’s do. But social media is changing super fast, and in a way that is not totally clear. Rather than being platform-centered, individuals are gaining power and anonymity in their conversations. It seemed like a relevant and interesting topic to try to pick up on. Also, worse case, if this event was boring, my plan was just to body-double the people around me, and get some work done outside of my house + get ‘free food’. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s decentralize our social media and learn what’s going on behind the scenes.
Overall Event Ratings: Venue (4.5/5), Food (3.75/5), Speaker Content (3/5), Networking (2.5/5), Likeliness to Return (3.5/5)… (more details below)
Photo Collage and Commentary:
BTW all of my notes deleted after the first speech
And this was at a hack-knowledgable event… so i’m like, okay - did someone not want me to write that stuff hahahah? omg. JK. Anyway, I rewrote those notes and then none others deleted. Here we go!
Also btw —- this event I half-did-work, half-took-notes… I almost didn’t even go, but then I decided to do exactly that. I wanted to get out of the house a bit and get some work done… but this is a really niche topic, and I wasn’t in the mood to become a professional on it today. Just learn the basics.
OMG MY NOTES ALL DELETED!!!
So far my notes all deleted.
Lemme review: (wow) Never had that happen before. Risky and insane.
The web is a space holding documents. The documents are received by users on servers. The web is permissionless, the servers determine the permissions.
This is all about social media. Not relying on platforms but letting it tie to users = straight P2P.
Uses lazy trust, decentralized… based off distrust for centralized platforms.
How do you handle if someone wants security and say, “if someone gets my files their fingers will get chopped off?”
These are great for if you want a lot of data and privacy. If you are a person who needs a lot of data and privacy, you can customize your experience.
How can people login to other sites using their Bluesky if that can’t really technically happen…?
Yes, we need help with that and if anyone wants to come talk to me, great.
I remember writing the note (before my notes deleted) about how every question he was asked, his reply was basically along the liens of “i’m not sure the answer to that” or “i’m not so sure about that topic” or “I don’t know enough” - hahaha. I just thought it was so funny cause like four of five questions he answered essentially the same. I noticed it so much cause I was taking notes.
But, again, then they all deleted. NO idea how hahaha. Oh well. At least it was early on.
Some of these protocols have monetization, some do crypto, some do payments from hosting.
Governance: IETF, W3C, community.
Bluesky’s governance is maybe better than community, but they’re working towards micro transactions too.
One girl stands up saying in 2021 she was pretending to be a team for this company, like wizard of oz, in charge of reading every single proposal, but she apologized cause she and dint get a chance to read every single proposal.
This is crazy and reminds me of the ‘security monitoring team’ you hear about at some websites, to prevent inappropriate pics of kids and such… then they admit only one person is doing that job - or it just ALL goes to one single email address, etc.
I’m like, girl, okay saying that aloud…bold.
The next speaker says, he’s a tough act to follow, not only cause he’s tall and strong, but also cause he’s entertaining! But I’ll do my best.
Then he has over 10 minutes of technical issues trying to pull up the slides.
Many problem with the slides, and even the host said it’s what happens: he can demand everyone sends slides ahead of time, or leave it like this - and thats what he chose.
This host is handling this so well. He has a really calm voice, keeps taking time to thank people randomly, taped about how future events may be in other cities. HE just has a good tone.
Finally the speech begins: 2022 had a lot of changes in social media. Decentralized became a thing. Everyone moved to Mastodon. Then Bluesky in 2023, now Pixelfed is in 2024. This vision is decentralization.
We love this, the concept, the idea.
Initially, they built only publishing for Bluesky. Like publishing and automation, aded in analytics, engagement, and discovery tools so people can start to understand what their audience is.
With their service you can do a couple of things
(he was about to finish his speech early but the host said, ‘you’re good, we’ve got padding’) this host is nice.
He was nice, helping me check in, and even let me cut in line at lunch. Haha. I know, I sound like a super fan, its just I see hosts flop at this job all the time and he’s nailing it on day one (by day two, my infatuation and surprise with his talent had died down a bit hahah. But day one he nailed it).
This sounds stupid, too, but earlier I couldn’t find the end of the lunch line, then I went to ask and then they just let me cut. Lol. But it was too hard to tell!! I was standing like 2 minutes in what I thought was the lunch line but it was jsut people standing around talking about protocol hahaha.
So then he let me cut him in line when I asked him where the back of the line was.
Sometimes events flop on their host choice and the hosts lose their cool as schedules go astray and/or dont lead well.
Tech difficulties, but he (the presenter) sys, “I’m a windows person working on a Mac”
He says you can search for users on Bluesky based off how many connections they have or whatever.
Building on their app is great. It’s a social graph, ip based rate limits, and PDS + jetstreams (but only sourced data). You can make your own app for clients.
Now he’s done and the next guy is up. They didn’t have time for Q&A for him, now this guy is having technical difficulties too.
He has 65 slides in 900 seconds. You can see his script on the screen (but now his screen won’t play). Seems these peopel are windows users and using Macs
He said this is extremely embarrassing
He said by mistake lately he’s making gov technology better.
He says I’ve got 65 slides in 900 seconds, I’ve already used 33
EXPRESSING EMOTIONAL INTENT SOLUTIONS
Okay, his speech ended up being fantastic and it was the majority of the screenshots I put in my collage. he was funny and interesting.
Famous troll behavior - where someone shows up and tries to argue with you and politely asks you to justify your claims. You dont’ have to do this because they’re a random stranger and you want them to go away.
Sometimes trolls are acceptable when the context of hte speech they’re commenting on has collapsed. They win. When the content collapses, then there is nuance, intent, emotion.. how can you make it easier for you to understand me and easier for me to be understood.
The best way of dealing with a problem is dealing with it with a joke, so if anything goes wrong, you can just say it was meant to be a joke. hahahahaha.
We have such a low bandwidth and a low energy way of communicating, but so many thing sin communication are lost through text. Sometimes /s and /j both mean joking, and it maybe is confusing. It gets confusing cause you don’t know when /s = serious versus /sarcastic.
How might we think about conveying rich meaning alongside text speech?
He shows what a bunch of sketches of drones would look like!!! Culture drones with aura fields, it changes in color based on the mood
So it’d be like if we could talk in colors. Different colors might…
red = humorous pleasure
Brown = displeasure
How do you know people emotions? You can show your avatar as your emotions are changing. This was invented back in the 1996 - you got it with Internet Explorer 5. Then they stopped this, there shoudl be a slap for this!!
But now we use emojis kinda to express the whole breath of the human experience, especially ways that humans are embarrassed about.
Fortnite has different emotions you can lock.
Do we need an alt-text for emotional context? A markup for how you’re feeling when talking about things so others understand how you’re feeling.
He started working on making the not-a-joke imgages not a joke. They worked through imagery. Different standards. Different visual languages (like for hte film alien), subway designs and diagrams, temperature displays… lots of visual ways to communicate feelings and emotions and temperatures.
He likes to have posts about doreply.cards: post about how view source changed evertything, the best days of the internet are ahead of us. We can take back the internet together!!!
“DO NOT TELL ME WHY THE THING I LIKE IS BAD” (these cards work. People get less shitty replies than if they did not” - though some people don’t like that they’re using these cards. If you’re posting on the internet, expect replies. Why are you posting anyway?
Let’s steal the internet back from our gay space communism future?? We steal the internet back.
“Once again, I get confused by tone tas cause I thought /pos = piece of shit”
They’re too culturally specific, terrible for translation
Low bandwidth and little information
Probably we can do a lot better than this.
They can label things… like in the sims, you know when someone needs to use the bathroom, they’re happy, sleepy, want a party, want romance, in love, etc… video games know these problems and they sell them and they’ve solved them for a long time.
Tehy know this stuff works and it makes a shit ton of money.
They also have voice chat, not just text chat
Why not just put an LLM in it? Use some Ai?
Well, another ai company said they want to make sure “content is accessible for everyone everywhere” - thats a big promise.
They say the way is to use narrative context. LOL - and right as he says “audio generation” (the audio drops). The audience loves this, it takes a while to fix, then we carry on.
Sometimes the audio generator leads out the tags. SO don’t put an LLM here, if we want more expression, we need to be in control. We want it to be MY speech, autonomy, I need to know what’s being translated and produced.
THE GIRL I HAD LUNCH with is giving a presentation on human rights and digital preservation. It’s funny how her shirt has butterflies but their symbol, sometimes in the specific context, is really against human rights. Its like, again - ignorance is bliss, huh?
Content advocacy. Mostly works in software systems and open society.
Her first job was interviewing with social media playrooms.
Popular Platforms:
2003 - myspace, 2004 Facebook, 2004 orkut, 2005 YouTube, 2006 twitter , 2007 Tumblr…
She used to think little posts were lame, but now she realized its great
Back in 2022 most peopel said its good for democracy, (but hte USA is an outlier… the other countries still think ]
People act like online isn’t the real world.
Using what happens online to change minds nd create movements offline. Other than off jokes, what makes up a movement? A lot of things from policy pressure, cmmujnity building, educational outreach, rapid mobilization, eyewitness reporting, and documentary evidence
She met people from a Sudan human rights hub, she focuses on archives, incidences… lots of open and closed source media. War files, coup files, Nuba files. Working on stuff from the organizations. Examples are submitted and reviewed by a human before being sorted. IF it’s evidence thats worth it, I’ll get sent to the national criminal court.
Submitting a link to a social media post is just one of 8 steps of how organization use, reuse, and make sense of what happens online. The way the post is packed, how easy API is.. that all matters to how a social media post is received and lives on after the event.
Documentary evidence: journalistic integrity framework. T o hash images up from, inspect the source— maybe even partner with phone and camera so that timestamps can be embedded into there 9it’d be the opposite of scrubbing all metadata isn’t the goal — some time being anonymous is the goal, but someimte proof is the goal)
Scene verification can be built in, making it very powerful for deigning open networks and growing a community of 33M online. You can do a lot with this outside.
We want a better social media and web landscape. Beyond AT Proto and Bluesky are impressive alternatives to twitter. But 60-90% of people around the world are on WhatsApp and Facebook. They prefer peer to peer more than broadcasting. Only 10% of the population is on twitter.
AT Proto Beyond Bluesky is an alternative for WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Grow algorithmic choice generally, new micro posting formats.’
The 2010’s were a golden era for social media, then the bots came.
A post goes viral within 50-70 minutes… you have about an hour to fight misinformation before it gets locked in. It’s a small window to take action for misinformation. Learn how to fight bots and attacks quickly.
Content address is everything - that will become incredibly valuable in teh future for moderation, reuse, archive processing. Think about archiving and archiving tools that are out there.
Think about analysis tools. There have been some good ones: playgrounds like red blue… another powerful layer is incorporating things that happen outside of the social network - weather, election cycles, album releases, events from the outside world and correlating it with activity within a social network.
This next guy is giving his speech that he thought was tomorrow but now it’s today and he’s 15 min late - he was somewhere else. This speech is a flop and I work during it.
Lately peopel are really interested in encrypted messages, private groups and communities.
End to end encryption, privacy.. it’s not all solved, we definitely don’t know what were’t doing - but we’re working on it.
NEXT SPEAKER - technical difficulties
Why are you here? Do you not trust big tech? Are you curious about the trustiness of the internet?
Do you like the weirdness of the internet an the community you can find on the internet?
What do niche communities need online? They need the skills to create and control their own social spaces.
Fan fiction servers to share love for media with communities.
Her server host online events, projects, and initiatives - with decades of history and thousands of participants.
Contribute a lot online and offline
Helping save lost series
Create archive of own fan fiction
I know my chickens, and whether they’ve eaten or not, tehy love falling for bait.
People often sense when they’re being baited… it can be hard to get peopel to try your product.
How do you get fans interested in this? How can fan communities not resist?
Fans LOVE to label things. A labeling system.
Badges and labels are the perfect entry point to peak interest. The urge to showcase yourself on a personal profile.
Modern social media destroyed badges, but not our social media
“We may be weird, but we can find peace”
Every time you visit a website you use HTTP -
You want to label and moderate things for the fan fiction, so if something is like related to a certain season - or a spoiler, you will label it.
Moderation is a thankless job.
END OF DAY
Today we talked about what we’re planning to do, tomorrow we talk about what we’re doing.
what a freakin’ good hook!! it got me to come back the next day.
ARRIVAL DAY 2 - Breakfast This Time
This day I didnt’ stay as long AT ALL.
I stayed for a few speeches, then got some food, then took some food home too. Cause the day before I watched the catering staff throw away hundreds of pounds of salads and hundreds of half-sandwiches.
So this day, I found to-go boxes, and took food home.
You can’t scare peopel into using something. Instead, build cool shit that makes them feel good about themselves.
Terrible things and good things coexist at the same time. Thinking about both of those thing and how you want to pirotize them is really important
We shouldn’t build decentralization out of fear
The founder is a black man and he hears lately white peopel feel hopeless and fear and at risk. He said that’s how it’s always been don’t worry.
This is a platform for communities.
We’re still fighting with more tools in our system.
Social media has a monopoly of our data and our friends. They keep us there by locking all the data to the platforms.
Protocol makes you say “my posts, my friends” and then connect everything just to you. Take all your posts, friends, and data and separate it from the platform.
When your pictures get rendered to png’s then it can’t be updated.
Raise your hand if you did manual client implementation in the past. How did that work out? No. You can not login for every identity provider and user and register the app with it. No, boo. We don’t like that. We need to have decentralized authorization. Forking and running some code. Dynamic client registration that can be done on the fly. It’s about user and client identity. Both covered.
Logging in can feel very weird to users at first. You’re logging into yourself. Log in to your ap with their handle. Everyone is so close to logging into the app that you’re working on, built in the atmosphere. If you don’t like apps you can revoke access from different statospheres. It’s the account session management.
Apps can’t mess with your posts
What are your app’s boundaries: users can login, write, post, sync… but you can get creative thinking how to leverage the open network and identity. We need more creative thinking in all of this. There is kinda this broad spectrum, as you get more specific, from like soup-to-nuts bff w/ full index… all the way to developer platform w/ open API’s in between. Stops in-between = partial index, other bff combos, etc.
He links good places to build
NEXT SPEAKER
Next speaker runs a nonprofit that audits social media recommender systems. He’s interested in algorithmic interoperability. He is a custodian of FreeOurFeeds
The Brussel effect has good and bad parts… but it’s why you need to keep the cookie banner. It’s why you have different data rights on different platforms. ITs why the ports are on your devices.
We need to support progressive standardization of ATProto and public interest governance
A push for interoperability regulation in socialmedia. Think of systemic change to impact the entire industry. There’s going to be a new kind of regulation that is currently being discussed . A couple of really tech savvy members of parliament are working on this worthwhile effort. You can have an opportunity to impact the industry on a global sale. '
The Innovative Ecosystem is supportive with a good team, a good plan, and plenty of money.
Next speaker:
Twitter was taken by the worst peopel it could have found.
Bluesky was supposed to bring twitter to another escape route but they weren’t given enough time and now Elon lives rent free in my head as a problem as he shoudl for all of you. We need to prepare for hte next moment like this.
Luckily there are lots of great things happening in this space.
As these lapses of judgement from X seem to happen, we see waves of migration going to other platforms… even many are going away from meta.
The new platforms are built on open platform technologies. As these are growing, others are paying attention and adopting the protocols. They can tap into these existing networks and not have to start from scratch every time a new product launches.
There are four main platforms that people are migrating to. Then when there are more platforms to choose from, once you’re in the open social web and you exist in there, you can connect with new ones over time.
Which protocol should win? It’s not the right question to ask right now. iT’s nice we’re in this exploratory phase while figuring out what users want. We’re figuring out what all of this means for users as well.
The UX is really valuable. Identity isnt’ the central part of the network, a bunch of UX issues are only going to get worse. Work on UX problems as soon as possible so things make sense to the average user. The promises we’re making about the open social web aren’t always true in the current moment. It’s future looking, so I want to make sure we’re ready and future looking. \
Users shouldn’t have to care which platform their friends and favorite people are on, they shoudl be empowered to find and keep community. To migrate between protocols. Help people find their people.
OVERALL EVENT REVIEW ELABORATED:
Venue (4.5/5): It’s fun to attend events at this location. I’ve been here now three times. It’s really a nice atmosphere, nice lighting. The only problem is that I wasn’t sure where else the speeches were (but truly I wasn’t there to learn much, I wanted to go there to learn a little + work on the side. So, it was perfect for that.
Food (3.75/5): I can’t believe they threw away so much food the first day. I’d believe it more the second day, only cause i’d seen it the first. Eew!! That’s surreal!! So many peopel and students woudl love that food. (As woudl everyone with all wasted food). So, that was too dumb. The food was fine, not mega healthy, but good enough. Just sandwiches with processed meats and stuff.. salad, pasta salad, a nice cheese board with nuts. They definitely ordered way too much food though. But I still can’t believe they threw it all away.
Speaker Content (3/5): Well, there were so many technical difficulties. Literally every single person had technical difficulties as far as I can remember, so it took 5 minutes for everyone to get started each. Luckily they built in a buffer and seemed to keep to the schedule decently as far as I was there. But, I only was captivated by a few speeches. Some were impossible not to tune out (and that was my goal, again, only let myself get distracted with what was interested, besides that, use the environment to work.) So, I’m impressed with how many speeches captured my full attention.
Networking (2/5): Besides someone coming to sit with me for lunch, I didn’t really talk to anyone. That was kinda mission accomplished. Though, those guys did let me jump into line with them, sorta by mistake, but they were extremely kind and friendly. It was a nice vibe in teh room for hte most part, so I think peopel would have been nice to talk to. But it was very easy to be anonymous.
Likeliness to Return (3.5/5): Yes! I’d like to go back and do the same thing - or, scrap my work and pay full attention and see how much I can learn about this topic as well. It seems like just the beginning and everyone is still figuring things out. It’s even hard to understand/explain… ‘decentralized social media’, but of course social media is going to develop. So let’s keep up with ‘how’ it does it.
Until next time, I wish you the motivation and success to search for opportunities around your area. Search and explore: Who is out there giving talks? There are new things happening all of the time.
Find relatable or interesting topics you like and check them out! Maybe even something hosted at a cool venue, if there’s no other reason to go. Let’s see what you can learn and discover not too far from home. 😊
