Waag is a big fan of social media. Social media is, in many ways, the heart of the internet: a way to connect with your friends and take part in public debate. It is no coincidence that Waag has its roots in De Digitale Stad (1996), which sought to realize these promises of the internet. Social media connects people and helps you discover new places. It’s where you read the latest news and where the day’s conversations take place. It’s where you follow your favourite artists, find out where to go out this coming weekend, and have a place to share your happy moments and your worries with your friends.
In recent years, it has no longer been entirely natural for people to think of social media in these terms. Social media has gained a bad reputation due to addictive algorithms, filter bubbles and the influence of foreign interests. It’s a place where you’re targeted with adverts based on information you’d rather not have shared, and where your attention is held captive by AI-generated clutter. It’s also a place where various countries are deliberately attempting to influence public opinion and democratic elections. A handful of companies run the largest social media platforms and thus exert far-reaching influence over what we all see in our feeds. And that is not always in our best interests.
Open Socials
That is why Waag, together with many partners, is developing social media platforms that we can control ourselves, here in the Netherlands and across Europe. This allows us to influence what the feed looks like, decide what content we consider acceptable and what we do not, and experiment with new forms of social media that do not keep us trapped in the grip of a large foreign company.
We call these new social media platforms ‘Open Socials’. They are characterised by the fact that they are not standalone applications, but consist of various apps that are interconnected. This means you are not locked into a single provider’s ecosystem. We are not building these Open Socials behind closed doors, but in open environments that you can already be part of.
There are two variants of Open Socials currently being developed in parallel, and Waag is working on both: the Fediverse and the Atmosphere. Both are built on open technology and enable us to control how they work for us. They are both built on an open protocol – a standard that facilitates data exchange between different applications. As both ecosystems work slightly differently, we’ll explain them below.
Fediverse
The Fediverse is built on the open ActivityPub protocol. It is a network of independent servers that exchange data with one another. As a user, you choose which application – for example, Mastdon – to create an account on, and which server to use for that. Each server is managed by an organisation that can set its own rules. There is a high degree of control over one’s own server. Content from other servers is not easily found. As a result, the Fediverse works well for communities with a shared interest, but there is less of a ‘central village square’ feel to it. Developing services requires technical knowledge. Each server takes responsibility for moderation and for determining what is and isn’t acceptable on its own platform.
Examples: mastodon.nl, waag.social
Atmosphere
Atmosphere is built on the ATproto protocol. This was originally developed by Bluesky but is currently being adopted as an open standard by a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force – an international working group that has developed several widely used internet protocols. Waag has raised concerns about the high degree of control that the US-based Bluesky exercises over Atmosphere. To explore how we can reduce our dependence on Bluesky, we are in the process of setting up our own Personal Data Server, working on our own Relay server, and establishing our own moderation service. We explain what this means below.
In Atmosphere, there is a separation between your own account and the data associated with it, and the applications that make use of it. When creating an account, you choose where you want your data to be managed: the Personal Data Server (PDS). This can be oso.social or eurosky.social. Subsequently, all posts on Atmosphere are collected at a few central points: the Relays. You have a high degree of control over your own PDS. The investment required for a Relay is substantial and necessitates collaboration. Waag is partnering with Eurosky for this purpose. Users have a clear overview of available content, and it is straightforward to develop services.
Moderation on the Atmosphere operates on several levels, one of which is controlled by Bluesky. They are responsible for filtering out, amongst other things, CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and legally prohibited content. In addition, we are working with Eurosky on a moderation service for oso.social, so that, in the long term, we in the Netherlands can decide as much as possible for ourselves what content is and isn’t acceptable.
Examples: mu.social, oso.social
