Overview: Communications Strategy

[EN translation] of Damien van Achter's "semi-automated monitoring and publishing system"This is essentially an automated, LLM-driven version of my content pipeline, where the AI actually writes and (following a human check) publishes the text to multiple platforms. The full process is 9 steps long, from (what I call) priority source identificatio…

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert: "Looking back, the most important things I learned weren't really about software. They were about people, scale, and what it takes to build something that lasts. Twenty-five years, twenty-five lessons."I won't list them all here, just reflecting on those that resonate with and/or surprise me the most:"Growth and gene…

X is "a power problem, and why you cannot compete as platforms with power... The world’s richest man runs a subscription service to remove the clothing from photographs of children ... [and] it’s crickets... Society is going through the motions of vocal condemnation... then not enforcing anything... ... very clearly afraid of picking a fight wit…

"a year filled with a lot of different trends":"“reasoning” aka ... Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) ... Reasoning models with access to tools can plan out multi-step tasks, execute on them and continue to reason about the results such that they can update their plans to better achieve the desired goal... also exceptional at p…

"Large organisations need dedicated tools and processes to manage their Bluesky presence and get the most out of ATproto".A repost onto Medium of version 4 of a wiki page I've been developing for most of the year.

Nekomimo "built cutebook, a tiny library that lets you add a guestbook to any website. Visitors sign in with their Bluesky account, leave a message, and that message gets stored in their own data repository. No database on your end. No user accounts to manage. Just two web components and a few lines of configuration" - and she explains how, and ho…

"What happens when you put politicians, media businesses and protocol engineers in the same room to discuss European sovereignty?" - my post following Eurosky.Live in Berlin, November 2025.

Some thoughts on technical issues surrounding building communities on ATproto, although it doesn't address the issue of what happens to someone's "community posts" when they leave a community?"AT makes it easy for individual accounts to publish things, and to build global aggregations from them. But community spaces are a bit different... forums …

"trolls seek negative attention and ignoring them removes their reward... When someone posts inflammatory content, makes personal attacks, or tries to derail conversations with bad-faith arguments, they're fishing for reactions ... trolls derive pleasure specifically from "negative social potency", aka knowing that others are annoyed... non-enga…

"A journalist gets blocked by Bluesky, but her Bluesky posts can still be seen via Blacksky. This apparent contradiction goes to the heart of resilient social media, where businesses must support their users to stay in business"

First edition of " Cosmik Lab Notes ... working in the open and sharing thoughts as we build Semble and the wider Cosmik Network" as they go into open alpha, so first notes from kicking the tyres:"modeled after social knowledge tools like Are.na and Sublime... you can collect links, organize them into collections, and see what others on the netw…

"Middleware, third-party software intermediaries between users and platforms, has been broached as a means to decentralize the power of social media platforms and enhance user agency... widespread adoption of open middleware has long hinged on the cooperation of established major platforms; however... Mastodon and Bluesky, has led to increased off…

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…

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 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…

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.

From Sublime, who know a thing or two about curation: "At first, I saw using AI as a binary choice between soulless efficiency or becoming a luddite and preserving your authentic human creativity", but Claude changed that. "Curiosity is a better compass than cynicism... [stop] defending your territory [and] exploring what's possible (cf this).Key …

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.

"Sill shows the most popular links being shared by accounts you follow on Bluesky and Mastodon", linking through to "the individual posts... with what people said about" them. You can sort (“newest” or “most popular”), "hide reposts, and limit posts to the last 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours".Built in response to the death of the link: “On Instagram and Ti…

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.

"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…

"This post was extracted from the draft of my December newsletter and published on Whitewind, demonstrating how a new array of apps on the ATmosphere - the ecosystem built with ATProto, Bluesky's protocol - could potentially usher in seamless decentralised collective intelligence."

Bluesky's announcement of their open-sourcing of "Ozone, our collaborative moderation tool... individuals and teams can work together to review and label content", coupled with the ability for people and communities to "run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app".This enables "an ecosystem of moderatio…

"AI can not only improve short-term productivity of organizations but can also ... increase the organization’s collective intelligence."HBR starts well by pointing out the false dichotomy between thinking "about AI in terms of automation vs. augmentation... Augmentation doesn’t avoid automation, it simply hides it, usually in some lower-level". Ex…

"I rarely work for the same client for more than a year or two - generally enough to help them figure out their strategy, pilot and demonstrate it, and set up the team to mainstream it. But I make an exception for the Joint Research Centre"A few slides, repurposed for LinkedIn, setting out "some of the key innovations underpinning the Knowledge4Po…