W Social is making a notable splash as a European alternative to Twitter. It has also received a ton of criticism, all of which I endorse. But here I lay out why this is not my biggest concern about the state of social media today. I can see a plausible way forward where W Social could be an entirely fine contribution to a better world of social media.

A self-indulgent poor-me rant about why I don’t use content warnings or hashtags properly. Broadly speaking, my point is that it’s not fair and I shouldn’t have to.

The use of JSON-LD in ActivityPub has recently been the subject of harsh criticism. The criticisms are valid, but I believe in many cases are coming from people who have never properly appreciated the different mindset JSON-LD represents. Here I attempt to express what I love about JSON-LD.

I wonder if it’s possible to create a safe and comfortable subnetwork within an established toxic decentralised network. I argue that the Fediverse is the only network at least partially trying to answer that question, and Fedidrama is not so much a side-effect as the underlying mechanism.

I think Forgefed is the most promising initiative in the Fediverse right now. It’s nerdy, but it demonstrates the capabilities of ActivityPub more clearly than any other initiative I’ve seen. More than that, it promises to finally solve a problem that we’ve all been suffering from for decades – the inability to share bug reports between projects.

I try to imagine how Bluesky looks after it scales up to Twitter size. I discuss how aspects of its architecture lead to big differences in how far different elements can diversify, and how this leads to predictable outcomes of how they respond to commercial pressure. I judge the overall result as feasible, and better than the status quo, but complicated and fragile. Finally I suggest how cooperation with the Fediverse could look, and how that is a more promising outcome.

Bluesky has solved its scaling problems, making a DIY server viable for hobbyists. Or… has it? No, no it hasn’t, and I see quite some dangers ahead. Overall, I conclude that Bluesky’s ambitions are surprisingly narrow for a company with that much money, and it poses much less of a competitive threat to the Fediverse than you’d think.

When you block a user, it’s possible they may be notified. This is bad. Here I explain how this is possible, and the good reason why it was deliberately built this way.

How can we create a funding model that allows startup founders to build terrific products that people love on the open social web? My answer: let’s not do that.

How to migrate a Wordpress instance with ActivityPub followers using the export and import tools. And, why that doesn’t work.