Technology

New_ Public announced its new community platform is being co-developed with five local US communities - and there’s a lot more to come.

01 Dec 2025 — 2 min read

[Hays Witt and Josh Kramer at New_ Public]

Really interesting to see New_ Public announce its first community product from its Local Lab:

“The main thing to know, maybe the most important thing, is that this is not just another social media app. Roundabout is a community space, built from the ground up with community leaders and neighbors.

[…] As a project incubated within New_ Public, a nonprofit, Roundabout will grow incrementally, sustained by a diverse and balanced set of revenue sources. With business incentives aligned towards utility and everyday value, instead of engagement and relentless scale, we’re designing Roundabout to be shielded from the cycle of enshittification. The ultimate goal is to build for social trust — every decision, every design, optimized to build bonds and increase belonging.”

There’s a lot to comment on here.

It’s amazing to see a social product co-designed with communities. For the safety and equity of all involved, this is how it should be done. I really hope New_ Public shows off more of its methodology in the future. I’d love to dive into the meta-conversation about what they’ve learned about this kind of co-design. The descriptions of participating communities — in Burlington, NC; Richmond, VA; Lincoln County, WI; North Chattanooga, TN; and Lancaster, PA — are already really promising.

The technical lead is Blaine Cook, who you might remember as Twitter’s first employee and first CTO. Since then he’s been a strong, sharp advocate for decentralized social.

On Mastodon, New_ Public mentioned that it’s building the platform in a way that’s compatible with AT Protocol, although it’s not the main focus for now.

Over on Bluesky, Blaine said they’re “building on atproto primitives but off-network because it’s currently not possible to push private/scoped data around the wider atproto network.” He also made the important point that it’s not worth building for interop until you know what the user behaviors are actually going to be — so it’s too early to focus on decentralization.

That community co-design is key, and it makes sense that this is the first step. Communities are human; they can’t be defined by protocols. The protocols should describe real human behavior, not the other way around.

I’m excited to see how the platform develops, and how New_ Public seeds the ecosystem conversations around it. And: this is only one of its community initiatives. There’s more to come.

[Link]