Got Ideas For Growing The Open Social Web? Bring Them.
Register here for our Growing the Open Social Web Un-Workshop.
For over three years now, since Elon Musk decided to spend $44 billion turning Twitter into his personal playground, we’ve been watching the open social web slowly, sometimes painfully, come into its own. Bluesky. Mastodon. The broader ATmosphere and fediverse along with a few other experiments (nostr! farcaster!). These aren’t just tech experiments anymore—they’re real alternatives that millions of people use every day.
And yet.
While these open social systems are working, and working well, tons of people are still choosing to stay in closed, proprietary, billionaire-controlled systems, where they have no control, no say in how they work, and no real agency. We’ve heard various excuses. We’ve heard about the pull of inertia. We’ve even heard the complaints that people haven’t found communities they like… or that they actively dislike some of the communities that have formed.
So instead of just writing another post about why that matters (I’ve written plenty), Johannes Ernst from FediForum and I are doing something about it. On March 2nd, we’re hosting an online “un-workshop” focused on one question: how do we actually grow the open social web even more?
And, yes, I’m on the board of Bluesky, but this isn’t Bluesky specific. We want an open discussion and brainstorming on growing the wider open social web.
This isn’t your standard conference where you sit through presentations and nod politely. It’s a participatory event built around the FediForum unconference model, though modified to be more of an ongoing brainstorming workshop (not unlike the Greenhouse events we’ve run here in the past).
Before the event, participants can submit short position papers—your experiences, your ideas, your proposals for what might actually work to engage more people on open social systems. We’ll cluster those into topics and spend the actual event discussing them and brainstorming around them, not just listening to people talk at you.
Here’s the thing: we want people who have real ideas and experience. People who have tried (and maybe failed) to get their friends onto the open social web and learned something useful from it. People who have had success convincing entire communities. People running organizations who are trying to figure out how to make the jump. Builders who want more users. Advocates who have done actual research with actual humans about what’s working and what isn’t.
What we don’t need are more cynical hot takes about why the open social web will never work. If you’ve already decided it’s a lost cause, this isn’t the event for you. Go post about it on Threads or whatever. We also don’t need hot takes about how you’re glad most people don’t use the open social web. That’s great for you open social hipsters, but some of us think it’s important to get more people to recognize the power of open social.
So, for everyone else—the people who believe this matters and want to figure out how to make it happen—we want to hear from you.
The event will run from 8am to noon Pacific (which means Europeans can actually attend without setting an alarm for 3am), and registration is open now. The event will be run online, using Remo, a tool we’ve used in the past for online events, that is conducive to small group discussions and brainstorming.
Position paper submissions are due by February 16th, and while they’re not required, they’re strongly encouraged (you can submit them during the registration process). The whole point is to come prepared to engage, not just spectate.
Look, I’ve been writing about the importance of protocols over platforms for years now. The open social web represents one of the few genuine shots we have at building online spaces that aren’t controlled by a handful of companies (or their billionaire owners) making decisions based on whatever serves their interests that week. But potential doesn’t matter if we can’t translate it into much wider adoption.
So if you’ve got ideas—real ideas, not just complaints—about how to get there, come share them.