#socialnetworks — Public Fediverse posts

Looks cool. Makes me remind me of the good old days of What.cd :-D

“ Telling us in a few words about their friends or comrades on our server or how their work relates to the community we are aiming for. “Signups” became actual human connections again, we understood who was joining and because there was a direct line of communication we could add a few remarks about maybe following the account used to send around status messages about the server itself and other onboarding info. For us the workflow is marginally harder than just clicking “yes” or “no” in the admin interface, but generating an invitation link and responding to the email also is not that much work. And at least for me it totally changed my emotional response to this moderation task: It is cool to see interesting people sign up, look at their websites and work. It feels like welcoming a new person to a party and less like fighting away spam bots.

So for us this new process works well. And I understand that this manual process does not scale up to these massive servers with tens of thousands of users. But maybe that’s a good thing? Maybe that is an indicator that these huge servers are just a bad idea? That we should structure the internet and our platforms around smaller, more connected groups that then connect to others.”

https://tante.cc/2026/09/10/making-social-media-social/

#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Fediverse #Mastodon #Spam #Bots #Decentralization

TechCrunch: Bluesky adds an ‘algorithmic opt-out’ feature for those who don’t want to go viral. “After adding support for longer videos just yesterday, open social network Bluesky on Thursday introduced a new algorithmic opt-out feature that allows users to stop their posts from appearing in the app’s main Discover feed. That algorithmic feed can currently surface any post on […]

TechCrunch: Bluesky adds an ‘algorithmic opt-out’ feature for those who don’t want to go viral. “After adding support for longer videos just yesterday, open social network Bluesky on Thursday introduced a new algorithmic opt-out feature that allows users to stop their posts from appearing in the app’s main Discover feed. That algorithmic feed can currently surface any post on […]

TechCrunch: Bluesky adds an ‘algorithmic opt-out’ feature for those who don’t want to go viral. “After adding support for longer videos just yesterday, open social network Bluesky on Thursday introduced a new algorithmic opt-out feature that allows users to stop their posts from appearing in the app’s main Discover feed. That algorithmic feed can currently surface any post on […]

TechCrunch: Bluesky adds an ‘algorithmic opt-out’ feature for those who don’t want to go viral. “After adding support for longer videos just yesterday, open social network Bluesky on Thursday introduced a new algorithmic opt-out feature that allows users to stop their posts from appearing in the app’s main Discover feed. That algorithmic feed can currently surface any post on […]

TechCrunch: Bluesky adds an ‘algorithmic opt-out’ feature for those who don’t want to go viral. “After adding support for longer videos just yesterday, open social network Bluesky on Thursday introduced a new algorithmic opt-out feature that allows users to stop their posts from appearing in the app’s main Discover feed. That algorithmic feed can currently surface any post on […]

NiemanLab: Can public media build its own social network? Chicago Public Media teams up with New_ Public to try. “Chicago Public Media is already the parent nonprofit of two existing news sites, WBEZ and, since 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times. For chicago.com, though, the news org is teaming up with New_ Public, a nonprofit working to reimagine online public spaces, to launch a network of online […]

NiemanLab: Can public media build its own social network? Chicago Public Media teams up with New_ Public to try. “Chicago Public Media is already the parent nonprofit of two existing news sites, WBEZ and, since 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times. For chicago.com, though, the news org is teaming up with New_ Public, a nonprofit working to reimagine online public spaces, to launch a network of online […]

NiemanLab: Can public media build its own social network? Chicago Public Media teams up with New_ Public to try. “Chicago Public Media is already the parent nonprofit of two existing news sites, WBEZ and, since 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times. For chicago.com, though, the news org is teaming up with New_ Public, a nonprofit working to reimagine online public spaces, to launch a network of online […]

NiemanLab: Can public media build its own social network? Chicago Public Media teams up with New_ Public to try. “Chicago Public Media is already the parent nonprofit of two existing news sites, WBEZ and, since 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times. For chicago.com, though, the news org is teaming up with New_ Public, a nonprofit working to reimagine online public spaces, to launch a network of online […]

Meta and TikTok agree to fact-check content on Spain border crossings after deadly rush

BRUSSELS, Aug 11 (Reuters) – Social networks Meta and TikTok have agreed to fact-check content on border crossings…
#Europe #EU #bordercrossings #Ceuta #EuropeanUnion #HennaVirkkunen #socialnetworks #tiktok
https://www.europesays.com/europe/113852/

Tim Bray: Mastodon, The Only Good Choice. “Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by ‘downhill’ I mean any combination of less useful, less safe, or less fun. It’s time for something better, and by ‘something better’ I mean Mastodon. Which, I’m here to say, offers a better social-media experience than the alternatives. Furthermore, the […]

ZDNet: Why we’re all posting less on social media these days. “New research from Incogni suggests Americans are quietly pulling back from social media, especially compared to just a few years ago. They’re not necessarily deleting every account, but they are sharing less, posting to smaller audiences, removing stressful apps, and becoming more mindful about mental health and the effects of […]

ZDNet: Why we’re all posting less on social media these days. “New research from Incogni suggests Americans are quietly pulling back from social media, especially compared to just a few years ago. They’re not necessarily deleting every account, but they are sharing less, posting to smaller audiences, removing stressful apps, and becoming more mindful about mental health and the effects of […]

Running out of content to post is worse than having too much content to post (at least for me) 🙂‍↕️

#sofiaflorina #ソフィアフロリナ #content #contents #internet #theinternet #socialmedia #sns #socialnetworkingsite #socialnetworkingsites #socialnetworkingservice #socialnetworkingservices #socialnetwork #socialnetworks #socialneyworking #post #posts #idea #ideas #contentidea

Silicon Snark: Social Search Cannon Makes Reddit and X Research Less Like Tab Punishment. “The product is Social Search Cannon, a free browser-based search launcher for Reddit and X. Type one question, choose a niche pack, edit the subreddit list if needed, and fire. The tool opens a spread of relevant Reddit searches in separate tabs. In X mode, paste multiple questions, one per line, and it […]

Stefan Bohacek: Make your website or blog fediverse-ready. “In the fediverse, there is no central authority that can verify you. Instead, you link to your fediverse profile from your website, blog, or even some of the larger platforms, like GitHub, in a way that proves that these online identities are connected and controlled by you. This then serves as one of several signals about the […]

TechCrunch: Mastodon looks to newsletters to help revive the open social web. “With the software’s latest release, the social networking platform is introducing email newsletters, a feature that will allow writers to send their posts directly to subscribers’ inboxes, even if those subscribers don’t have or want a Mastodon account.”

Nature: Instance-level community detection in the Mastodon federation: a graph- and content-based approach. “This study analyzes Mastodon, a prominent federated social network made of several interconnected instances, and investigates community detection at the instance level by integrating content-based edge weighting to enhance modularity maximization techniques.”

EFF: A Bridge to Somewhere: How to Link Your Mastodon, Bluesky, or Other Federated Accounts. “Think of it like a radio broadcast: you want to reach people and don’t care where they are or what device they’re using. For example, in theory, a Bluesky user can follow someone on Mastodon or Threads without having to create a Mastodon or Threads account. But these systems are still a work in […]

Liebe (Drecks-)Influencer

Wusstet ihr schon, dass ihr Kurzvideos auf euren Lieblingsnetzwerken auch ohne künstlich hinzugefügte und unnötige Scheißmusik posten könnt?

Selbiges gilt auch für künstlich hinzugefügtes Lachen und sinnlose Overlays, die einen darauf hinweisen, dass das ja alles so lustig ist.

Was ist nur kaputt bei euch? Ach ja, sonst reicht die Aufmerksamkeitsspanne wieder nicht, gell?

🔗

#shortpost #blogpost #blog #SocialNetworks #Influencer #Musik #KünstlicheDummheit

PC Mag: Mastodon Plans End-to-End Encryption for Private Messages. “Decentralized social media platform Mastodon plans on adopting its own end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for private messages. Mastodon announced the upcoming feature in a blog post about receiving €614,000 ($724,000) from the Sovereign Tech Fund, an effort backed by the German government to support open-source software.”

TikTok expands #BookTok bestseller lists across Europe and the UK

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-expands-booktok-bestseller-lists-across-europe-and-the-uk/815270/

#tiktok #tiktoknews #tiktokbooks #booktok #booksnews #books #digitalbooks #tech #technews #socialmedia #socialnetworks #bestseller #europe #uk

TechCrunch: Mastodon is making its decentralized social network easier to use with its latest revamp. “Mastodon is making changes in the hopes of making its social networking service more appealing and easier to use, especially for more mainstream users looking for an alternative to X or Threads. On Thursday, the decentralized social networking software maker said it’s redesigning a key part […]

McMaster University: Study examines what Reddit reveals about measles’ return . “Rachel Zhou, a professor in the Department of Health, Aging and Society, studied thousands of Reddit conversations to understand how people made sense of the measles’ resurgence in 2025. The posts reveal more than opinions about vaccines, she says. They show how people remember – and forget – disease, how […]

McMaster University: Study examines what Reddit reveals about measles’ return . “Rachel Zhou, a professor in the Department of Health, Aging and Society, studied thousands of Reddit conversations to understand how people made sense of the measles’ resurgence in 2025. The posts reveal more than opinions about vaccines, she says. They show how people remember – and forget – disease, how […]

TikTok alternative ‘RedNote’ removed from Android and iOS app stores in India

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/tiktok-alternative-rednote-removed-from-android-and-ios-app-stores-in-india/article70694068.ece

#rednote #rednoteapp #rednotenews #apps #tech #technews #india #indiaapps #indiaban #appban #tiktok #socialnetworks #socialmedia #tiktokalternative #chineseapps #chinaapps #china #chinaappban

TechCrunch: Mastodon, a decentralized alternative to X, plans to target creators with new features . “Today, Mastodon sees somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million monthly active users, depending on the source. One third-party tracker puts the figure closer to 750,000, while another estimates as many as 1 million. Mastodon’s own site says the figure is around 785,000. As part of its coming […]

Stepping Back From Social Media To Read a Book

I’m taking a break. After spending like two years in the worst parts of the Internet modeling the memetic spread of conspiracy-driven behavioral patterns and developing social media software as a side hustle, I think I’m going to take a step back and… I don’t know… maybe read a book? lol.

I’m a Computational Biologist who pretty much studies the memetics of conspiracy theories and how they act as another vector/epidemiological layer. I’ve also been working on various contracts for social media development stuff. Working on the shit I’ve been working on for years forces you to see the worst parts of people that they split off. It makes you hate everyone — and I mean everyone.

Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction

A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.

The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.

So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.

That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.

These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.

The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.

Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.

Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.

I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.

BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity

I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”

Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.

Bluesky mentions that here:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update

As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.

I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.

Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.

Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.

Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.

Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.

Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.

Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.

I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.

In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.

I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.

Ah, yes, a riveting read on how people choose to like things in secret, because who doesn't want to risk their precious online rep for a digital thumbs-up? 🤔✨ Spoiler alert: It involves social networks, reputational anxiety, and enough academic jargon to make your eyes glaze over. 🚀📚
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11140 #socialnetworks #reputationalanxiety #academicjargon #digitalthumbsup #onlinebehavior #HackerNews #ngated

TechCrunch: A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the open source Twitter alternative . “Unless if you’re really in the know about nascent platforms, you probably didn’t know what Mastodon was until Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. In the initial aftermath of the acquisition, as users fretted over what direction Twitter would take, millions of users hopped over to Mastodon, a fellow […]

Donald Trump’s social network Truth Social (a Mastodon variant) is familiar with mainstream America 🇺🇸, but does the site rival progressive social alternatives like Bluesky‽

https://darnell.tv/2025/11/28/truth-social-mastodon-bluesky/

Meta utilise désormais vos données personnelles pour concurrencer ChatGPT - France 24 - Infos, news

C'est le moment de quitter #Meta si ce n'est pas encore fait !

Rejoignez les applications du #Fediverse :

#Pixelfed pour remplacer #Instagram
#XMPP pour remplace #WhatsApp
#Friendica pour remplacer #Facebook
#Mastodon pour remplacer #Threads

Nous offrons tous ces services, plus d'informations sur https://gayfr.online

https://www.france24.com/fr/émissions/info-éco/20250527-meta-utilise-désormais-vos-données-personnelles-pour-concurrencer-chatgpt

#gayfr #QuitMeta #AI #IA #ReseauxSociaux #SocialNetworks #SocialMedia #GayPixelfed #GayXMPP #Movim #GayMovim #GayFriendica #GayMastodon #GayFrancophone

The Verge: The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences. “Our research makes one thing clear: power is shifting back to the consumer (the fediverse signals this). Consumers crave community, but on their own terms — seeking deeper, more meaningful connections with those who truly matter (something we identified in 2014). Authenticity is at the […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/03/11/the-verge-the-future-of-the-internet-is-likely-smaller-communities-with-a-focus-on-curated-experiences/

Na próxima Oficina de História e Imagem, no dia 20 de Junho, vamos receber Luis D. Rivero Moreno (IHA - Instituto de História da Arte / Universidad de León) para uma conversa sobre os desafios que a #Web30 e #blockchain, entre outros, trazem à arte contemporânea e património visual.

#histodons #ContemporaryArt #VisualHeritage #NewMediaArt #Internet #SocialNetworks #IntangibleHeritage #VisualSources

https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/events/arte-contemporanea-limite/

Decentralized Social Networks vs the Trolls:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=yZoASOyfvGQ

#decentralizednetworks #socialNetworks #trolls

Nine lessons on how Niantic reached a $4B valuation - We’ve captured much of Niantic’s ongoing story in the first three parts of our EC-1, from its begin... more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/rlAavekhMPY/ #harrypotterwizardsunite #augmentedreality #customerservice #virtualreality #socialnetworks #bestpractices #harrypotter #philkeslin #usergrowth #johnhanke #pokémongo #startups #niantic #pokemon #product #scaling #gaming #mobile #apps #ec-1 #tc