Overview: Online Community Management

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 online world seem so toxic ... [because of] a small number of divisive accounts", according to a researcher in "topics such as intergroup conflict, misinformation, technology and climate change", who found that "what we’re seeing online is a warped image created by a very small group of highly active users".SOcial media is "a funhouse mirror.…

"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…

A deep dive into the April 2025 "censorship" on Turkish Bluesky illustrates that government censorship on ATmosphere apps is limited and will become even less effective as more people exploit its decentralised nature.Context in brief:March 2025, the Turkish "government ordered X to restrict access to various X accounts ... associated with the prot…

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.

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.

"Could seeing how opposite sides of the US political spectrum use the same words differently be a first step toward greater cross-political understanding?... What if generative AI could help us understand people with opposing views better just by showing how they use common words and phrases differently?"MIT's Bridging Dictionary (BD) research …

"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…

My mid November 2024 newsletter summarises how a deep dive into Bluesky has changed how I view #AI4Communities, and summarises some of the most influential things I've read recently.

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…

"Decentralizing the Web means people ... store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need... requires major changes in the way we develop applications... In this post, I discuss three paradigm shifts a decentralized Web brings"Rather than "accept package deals we cannot customize", redecentralising the web allows us …

"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…

"Only people can trust, but only machines scale well. Today’s websites and apps are built to compensate for an absence of trust, rather than to support its growth."Instead we have the 'I accept' button: "we know we are lying the moment we touch it, as does the author of the legalese no one expects anyone to read. Navigating a trustless world is a …

Basically a restatement of echo chambers, using the language of AI."Like an AI trained on its own output, they’re growing increasingly divorced from reality, and are reinforcing their own worst habits of thought".A good definition of model collapse: "the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cas…

"The most common AI-based functionalities in participation tools are toxicity screening, analysis of inputs and translation. The first two in particular are meant to lighten the workload" of community managers."Toxicity screening ... is used to flag hateful or inappropriate inputs." Text is usually flagged and post-moderated, but images are blocke…

"As AI-generated content blurs the line between human and machine online, “model collapse” might help us find new value in well-managed human communities."

Good piece on how "the free speech warriors... [behind] Truth Social and the ... decay of Twitter ... the “Festung” cities of unrestricted expression... still not happy... shouting into an echo chamber isn’t nearly as satisfying as they thought it would be... What they’re really after ... is our attention... The thrill of provocation quickly fade…

Profile of New_Public, founded by Eli Pariser of Filter Bubble and Upworthy fame, and Deepti Doshi "from from Meta, where she’d spent much of her tenure leading the company’s Community Partnerships... supporting, Facebook group admins... as well as UT Austin professor Talia Stroud, who remains on the board, and their drive to stimulate "citizen-dr…

After so many years of spam, splog, slop, phishing and above all trolling, "Our guard is up. Our filters are activated. Our default mode is suspicion", something that's only going to get worse with AI: are those photos too good to be true? Can that video actually be real? Is that a spambot, or just "someone who isn’t neurotypical or who doesn’t sp…

The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure's manifesto sets out the three legs upon which an open public sphere must rest.

Michael Foster's "top ten unfinished building blocks" are:trust & safety: "heart of an ethical social web... [currently] delegated to a small group of volunteers... [but] green shoots emerging"spam filters: "there are some amazing tools now... Pixelfed has shown what can be done"safe spaces / bridging & federation: 2 closely linked challenges whic…

"A deep dive into Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone", over 20 years later, by "former New_ Public Research Fellow Serena Chao".Social capital, according to Putnam, "is the “connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”... [making] a strong case for a correlation between thriving,…

Anuj Ahooja asks, on Threads' first birthday, the "existential question... Why does Threads exist? ... an alternative to Elon Musk's X. But ... a platform can't exist to be "an alternative." It should be able to stand alone with its unique purpose and be built to incentivize users to follow that purpose... [unfortunately] the humans who have worke…

What happens when we make machines "that we can’t help but treat them as people"?While "GPT-4o doesn’t represent a huge leap ... it more than makes up in features that make it feel more human... an ability to “see” and respond to images and live video in real time, to respond conversationally ... to “read” human emotions from visuals and voice, an…