Our team at @newpublic.org has spent the last couple of months co-designing & building Roundabout — a new platform to help local communities share information & support, without the chaos and toxicity common elsewhere. This week, we’re moving into a closed beta in 5 towns/cities across the US 👀

Idk if follow friday is still a thing, but felt like doing a little thread to shoutout some of the people whose thinking & work around community and online spaces I've been appreciating recently...

As our team at @newpublic.org explores the idea of building a new, sustainable social product for local communities (think: a healthier alternative to Nextdoor or town-wide FB groups), I wrote up some of our initial thinking about how it all might work...

New_ Public Co-Director @deeptidoshi.bsky.social writes in @ssireview.bsky.social about how flourishing local digital spaces could be the next major cornerstone of civic infrastructure. Empowering local community stewards and finding new business models are important steps along the way.

The problem of social platforms isn’t algorithms. It’s algorithms that we don’t get to understand or control.

Great exploration of different ways to design systems that give people more control over their algorithms arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03247 by @leijiew.bsky.social, @cqz.bsky.social, @axz.bsky.social, and a couple of others

A really great breakdown of how different types of social media algorithms work knightcolumbia.org/content/into...

Love the potential of this... "Staying informed about your community shouldn’t be a chore. Civic Sunlight delivers concise summaries of local government meetings straight to your inbox, saving you time and keeping you civically engaged." civicsunlight.ai

Local Facebook groups and other online spaces for towns & neighborhoods can be amazing, or awful. This new guide from our team at @newpublic.substack.com is full of advice for mods and admins who want to make their spaces more uplifting & inclusive newpublic.substack.com/p/just-launc...

Are you the creator, admin, or moderator of an online space for people in your local community? Do you strive to make it inclusive, uplifting, and public-spirited?  Introducing our Neighborhood Steward Fellowship!  Deadline: May 20 🗓️

📣🚨📣🚨 If you help run a digital space for your local neighborhood, town, or city, we want to hear from you! Think: a Facebook group, Subreddit, email list, or forum. We're are hoping to chat with a few people in the US, in exchange for a small stipend. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

A beautiful zine for and by people thinking about the future of social spaces on the internet Includes a fun little piece I wrote on what digital product designers can learn from the field of urban planning sublime.app/zine Shoot me a DM if you want a discount code :)

Are more people creating tools that make it easy for people to create their own @bsky.app feed using natural language (i.e. I could say "make me a feed for posts related to sports from anyone I follow")? @skyfeed.app's "Feed Builder" and @skyline.gay by @louis02x.com are the best I've seen so far

⚠️Digital Community Researchers & Practitioners⚠️ What research/insights re:encouraging healthy digital communities do you wish more tech builders/designers were aware of? I’m refreshing our lit review on digital communities/community stewardship at New_ Public & would love to include your work!

Have there been any social networks that limited the amount of times each person could post per day or week? BeReal (1x/day), Retro (1x/week), and I know Minus was an experiment where you had 100 posts for life (slightly different concept). Any others?

Good new resource for anyone looking for a job / looking to hire in the "impact-tech" space https://www.tekalo.org/

Wrote up an overview of decentralized social networks for non-technical folks - maybe a little too 101 for most folks here, but I hope it's helpful for anyone trying to wrap their head around all the different emerging protocols https://newpublic.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-decentralized-social

Wrote about content moderation questions, the "nazi bar" problem, impossible tradeoffs, & why I'm still kinda optimistic about how Bluesky/AT Protocol moderation could work: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/04/on-social-media-nazi-bars-tradeoffs-and-the-impossibility-of-content-moderation-at-scale/

bullish on the concept of AI summarization of social platform conversations like Narwhal is doing - especially if you can make it prioritize / focus on the views & sentiments of ppl you follow (https://alpha.thenarwhalproject.com/welcome) What other apps are playing with this kind of thing too?

I'm excited to meet everyone! I'm thinking a lot these days about the future of digital public spaces (aren't we all?) so if that's your kind of thing, say whats up

Hi new bluesky friends ☀️☀️☀️