

Fediverse
- Social media can support or undermine democracy — it comes down to how it’s designed
>It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.
>Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.
- Canvas 2025 in 24 hours!
July 12th, 2025 @ 4am UTC
SPREAD THE WORD 🔥
- View the countdown
- 2025 Canvas Size: 500x500
- Palette: link
Related posts:
what is Canvas?
Canvas is a collaborative pixel canvas that includes everyone apart of the Fediverse! Any fediverse platform that supports direct messages is able to login and participate for this 48 hour live event
socials
- !canvas@toast.ooo
- @canvas@fediverse.events
- PeerTube
- Matrix Space
- Discord Server (bridged to matrix)
- Federated Social Media with Topic-Based Following and Blocking?
I'm looking for a federated social media platform that allows for easy topic-based following and blocking, similar to how you can follow or block hashtags on Twitter. On Lemmy, you can follow communities, but there are so many that it becomes overwhelming. I want a platform where I can see or block everything related to a specific tag, and also view only the most popular posts about that topic, similar to how Lemmy communities work. Mastodon, for example, only shows the latest posts, which isn't ideal for trending content. I don't want a chat-like experience; I want to quickly see what's trending about a topic or what's trending in general, while being able to block a few specific topics. Ideally, I wouldn't have to spend hours curating a list of communities or followed users. Does anyone know of a platform that fits these criteria?
- connectedplaces.online Growth narratives on the new social networks
The narratives that networks like the fediverse and Bluesky have about themselves how their network grows are a snapshot of a specific moments in time. How do these narratives evolve as the circumstances change again?
Communities on alternative social media platforms like the fediverse and Bluesky tend to create narratives about how their networks grow. For both networks the narrative is fairly similar: Big Tech platforms and their leaders behave badly, which in turn causes users to search for more ethical alternatives. This narrative is visible in the fediverse’s understanding of the 2022 Twitter Migration and Bluesky’s explosive growth in 2024. But what happens when these migration waves disappear, even though the conditions for them do not? Musk’s continuous egregious actions have not led to new growth for the fediverse and Bluesky, indicating that our narratives of growth need updating. Meanwhile, the continuous growth of Threads shows that cultural impact might just matter more than user counts.