from the time-to-grow dept
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.