We should legislate identity portability for email addresses. We have it for phone numbers, where the technical challenge was much greater. We should have it for email, too.

Over on dead-Twitter, @geoffreylitt.com asked the following question last week: "I desperately need a Matt Levine style explanation of how OAuth works. What is the historical cascade of requirements that got us to this place?" Here's my attempt at an answer: leaflet.pub/p/did:plc:3v...

Stoked to see @baratunde.com talking about our work on Roundabout, and so eloquently put! youtu.be/si-d1Lj1zZQ?...

Yes, we need rules to regulate social media, but new rules on old, Big Tech platforms can only go so far. We need new platforms, new infrastructure, and a lot of ingenuity to make something better. joinroundabout.com

It's been basically a decade since I last rode BART, and it's awesome that they've kept the super robo-voice platform announcements. Feels especially nostalgic rn. 🤖👾

Stoked that what we've built so far for Roundabout is almost precisely what @bnewbold.net is describing here. I'm biased, but also very bullish on the future of small-world spaces built on atproto.

atproto folks with a special knowledge and interest in calendaring / events! I've got questions! 💜 discourse.atprotocol.community/t/recurring-...

The DWeb Virtual Meetup is happening today, 10am PT / 1pm ET / 19 CET! www.eventbrite.com/e/dweb-virtu...

Financial security eats up so much of one’s productive capacity (and well-being). Imagine what Emelia could do in a safe and steady work environment. I see her helping someone in the atmosphere every single day with anything from tech support on Discord to critical security disclosures. Hire her!

Adding to Anil's reminder, as atproto becomes more robust, there's increasingly less reason for any "alt" social media site to build its own technical infrastructure from scratch. Social interaction deserves to be built into the fabric of the web.

We're thrilled to announce that New_ Public is supporting the upcoming #ATmosphereConf, the global conference for AT Protocol. Join @atprotocol.dev on March 26-29 in Vancouver, BC – early bird tickets are still available!

Twitter died a long time ago and X isn't worth it. Before I made the jump, my ego was holding me back. I was too concerned with vanity metrics. I finally realized if you're posting stuff people want to follow, then they'll follow you, even when you leave. www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/k...

Today, your most-used interoperable protocols are probably smtp, delivering your email, and https, loading web pages Interoperability means you can use Gmail and Outlook, or Chrome and Firefox, to access the data that's moving over the same agreed-upon (protocol) rails ATProto does that for social

Join Blaine Cook, New_ Public’s Principal Software Engineer for Roundabout, at a @getdweb.net virtual meetup this Wednesday from 1-2pm EST Blaine will present on Roundabout, our new local community app! Folks from @awana.digital and @dod.ngo will also present.

I would love to see this in my hometown! We're a ~12k person community, and if we had ~250 shared cars, that's at least one car on every other block, so "runabout" cars would be widely accessible, but biking would feel much safer, and we could support higher density (no parking minimums!)

Many Europeans want to be free of American and Chinese Big Tech apps. Open, decentralized protocols like ActivityPub (powering Mastodon) and AT Protocol (powering Bluesky) may be the key to a new sovereign social media infrastructure.

DWeb Virtual Meetup: Latest from the DWeb Ecosystem — featuring @mauve.moe of @awana.digital, @blaine.bsky.social of @newpublic.org, & @l5y.tech of @dod.ngo Join us next week, Wed Jan 28 10 am PT / 1pm ET / 19 CET Register here >>> www.eventbrite.com/e/dweb-virtu...

The Internet is alive! @chezpanique.bsky.social builds on her viral newsletter and takes us on a tour of the indie web. These are hand-coded, independent websites, outside the walled gardens created by tech giants. “It’s a canvas for boundless creativity and really you can be yourself.”

Why are we disconnected, and how could we reconnect? The US Chamber of Connection just released the Social Connection Index, a “practical, data-backed blueprint for rebuilding social bonds, trust, and belonging across communities.” Take a closer look at the full report:

Hmong families didn't walk across a border to find a better life. Their homeland was bombed to hell by the United States, who they fought alongside in the Vietnam war. They escaped Vietnamese retribution through legal refugee pathways 50 years, almost three generations ago.

Have you heard about Gander? I can't wait to ditch Facebook here in Canada & switch to this new social app. We spoke to Gander's co-founder/CEO on this week's new ep of The AmberMac Show podcast (available everywhere now, also below): www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2iD... cc @jeffmacarthur.bsky.social

Technologist/podcaster @rabble.nz calls Roundabout, our new local community app in closed beta, “the Good Place version of Nextdoor.” In an interview with Bluesky’s @jay.bsky.team, they talk about how New_ Public is moving from research & critique ➡️ building flourishing digital public spaces.

Also, full-length pasta-level chewy French Fries would be horrible and do not exist, despite the existence of 刀削面. Thus, French Fries cannot be pasta, QQED.

We've been working hard over the past six months to ship Roundabout to our pilot communities. It's amazing to see them come to life, and I'm so excited to keep building & learning to support healthy online spaces for local communities. 💖

We've been working hard over the past six months to ship Roundabout to our pilot communities. It's amazing to see them come to life, and I'm so excited to keep building & learning to support healthy online spaces for local communities. 💖

Canadians: am I out of line for thinking that an NDP (union-left, for those outside of Canada) politician probably shouldn't re-post Theresa May talking about the lack of civil discourse being the result of digital platforms, and positing that what we need is more gatekeeping of who gets to speak? 🫣

We waited for nearly an hour. Just as we were losing hope, we spotted a dark spot in the bushes. And then it dropped to the ground.

This was a pretty amazing morning hike.

Giant clam the size of a tiny clam

A giant clam the size of a small clam

Six months ago, I joined New_ Public to help build a new social platform for local communities. Today, I could't be more excited and proud to share what our amazing little team has cooked up, and is launching in closed beta this week. Learn more at joinroundabout.com

ATmosphereConf was such a great event. Looking forward to Vancouver in 2026!

@governmentofbc.bsky.social hi! Great to see the BC Government on here! It would be great to see Government accounts on Bluesky using official Government domain names, happy to help out with that if anyone has questions. 💖

I love my little mountain town. Three academics talking about protecting old-growth forests is the social event of the month. 💖🌲

What would a 100% Canadian social media platform look like? The team at @gandersocial.bsky.social is about to find out. By giving Canadians control over their data, their feeds, and more, they’re hoping to offer a viable alternative for American social media.

That feeling when six months of intense work becomes real.

How do we feel about using the term "Cogitarian" to identify as someone who doesn't use AI tools? 😅

Bonfire Social is a kind of social network construction kit that federated via ActivityPub and plans bridging via @anew.social They’re doing a crowdfund bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bonfir...

This is huge: graze.leaflet.pub/3m4yjmbnyec2c Journalists are organizers – like political organizers – but of information, knowledge, and culture. In my most humble opinion, I think journalists _need_ to be using tools like this, on their own terms. It's scary, but so is being a socialist in NYC.

Someone should re-make "Brewster's Millions" as "Brewster's Billions" but make it a horror. The turn comes when it becomes obvious that amount of money can never be spent and Brewster's challenge becomes a Promethean punishment.

I've been working on this with our amazing team for five months now, and we're getting very close to sharing more about what we've been up to. I'm so excited.

As part of our mission, we’re committed to building new online infrastructure to foster community and civic health. But what does that actually look like? Our Co-Directors, @eli.bsky.social and @deeptidoshi.bsky.social, often turn to IRL public infrastructure for inspiration. In this case, BRIDGES

A science fiction story about Robo-ICE and JD Vance's face in this database as the spark that starts the first robot-human civil war would be a fun read.

I've heard that the AI cognoscenti are calling AGI "extraterrestrial" but that feels wrong – setting aside the debate and making assumptions for the sake of argument, whatever they might be, they're of this place. I propose: "neoterrestrial" instead.

This is so exciting – at @newpublic.org, we're looking forward to building in collaboration with a rich ecosystem of open-standards-based tooling to support healthy online spaces for local communities, and @roost.tools is so inspirational in that regard.

I love that things that we're building internally at <Super Not Secret New_ Public Project> are being validated daily in the wider Atmosphere. This is [roughly] how we're handling pre-moderation, and I'm impressed daily by how easy it is to add behaviours to our system with atproto.

I feel this in my bones.

A.I. at its peak

At that point of a project where I'm giving things clever names.

Extant decentralized solutions (Mastodon, etc.) demonstrate that the kinds of social problems that decentralized networks are supposed to resolve simply emerge in different forms due to the properties of the networks in question. Decentralization isn't a bad thing, it's just not the silver bullet.