mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06New_ Public is a nonprofit product studio focused on reimagining community, connection, and conversation online
In less than a year, folks using our local community app Roundabout have shared over 2,000 local events across just a few pilot communities! 📅🎉
Unlike most social media apps, Roundabout actually enables and encourages neighbors to build connection OFFLINE, in the real world.
That’s why we’ve made our events calendar easy (you don’t need an account to see event details) and quick (by snapping a photo of a flyer to upload the deets)
Here’s to another 2,000 gatherings!
How can we make the feed be less of a doomscroll and more like sitting on a stoop or porch?
Rudy Fraser considers his platform Blacksky, the largest Black community on the open social web, as a true third space — where folks can chat, hang, and see what’s going on.
This speech is refreshingly personal and rooted in community organizing, with a hopeful look at the open social web.
https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/keynote-rudy-fraser-en
Everyone should be following along and rooting for Gander Social, a prosocial startup that’s building digital sovereignty for Canadians! 🍁
@fediforum@mastodon.social, the global online unconference dedicated to the Open Social Web, is taking place next week April 28-30! This is a great opportunity to learn and connect with experts in the decentralized social protocols space.
The unconference is designed to serve all levels of interest and experience, so anyone curious about the tech that powers Bluesky, Mastodon, and beyond should take a look at the agenda 🙂
“Y'all don't just write reports and convene people. You don't just issue strongly worded Substack notes. You actually launch things that people can use.”
That’s @baratunde@mastodon.social of Life With Machines talking to New_ Public Co-Director Deepti Doshi about AI, community tech, Roundabout (our new local community app) and much more.
L. M. Sacasas is not letting us blindly stumble into this AI era without really learning hard lessons from the social media era.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/your-ai-is-not-a-tool
Former CBC/Radio-Canada CEO Catherine Tait watched younger readers and viewers abandon public media sites for social media news updates, but at the same time, social platforms are abandoning people through misinformation and toxic chaos.
There’s an opportunity for public media to once again host thoughtful, healthy conversation.
https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-public-broadcasters-are-changing
The people have spoken – they’re not interested in letting AI companies “move fast and break things” 😤
Happy 20th birthday, Front Porch Forum! 🎂
Their neighborhood-specific online network in Vermont has been a HUGE inspiration for Roundabout, our local community app.
FPF shows that hyperlocal communities, human moderation, and stewardship are key components for sustainable and healthy digital spaces.
Whether or not you agree with social media bans for teens and kids, we agree with Jonathan Haidt that this is just the beginning. We can build better, healthier, and more accountable digital public spaces.
https://time.com/article/2026/07/18/the-world-should-learn-from-australia-s-social-media-law/
Calling everyone building new apps and tools on ActivityPub: Is your project …
🌐 on the Open Web?
🌱 past the prototype stage?
✨ Reimagining the social internet?
New_ Public, @publicspaces@social.publicspaces.net and @waag@waag.social are investing up to €10,000 in better alternatives to Big Tech
Learn more, share, or apply by May 1st at https://newpublic.org/OSA
We have about 30 articles and counting on @elipariser@mastodon.social and Angelica Quicksey’s crowd-sourced reading list about how AI is changing the way we interact with information and each other.
If something you’ve read, listened to, or engaged with has helped you decipher this topic — it belongs on this list!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17Qlxbu0OjkigFIE9YHlQTqttK-7hc3jQvN7GM4hp7yE/edit?tab=t.0
Social media researcher @jonathanstray@techhub.social shares promising results from the Prosocial Ranking Challenge!
After testing five algorithms, two approaches showed statistically significant depolarization effects:
- Adding personalized news from credible, ideologically diverse sources
- Upranking bridging content while downranking toxicity.
https://rankingchallenge.substack.com/p/its-possible-to-reduce-polarization
“We don't have an algorithm — we have people taking care of the space, inviting folks in, setting a tone, engaging with people, and helping things stay productive and constructive.”
Hays Witt is both a Portland local and working on the team making Roundabout, our local community app. On Citycast Portland he shares what goes into creating a healthy, hyperlocal online space.
“There is no need to ban social media. We just need it to be too expensive for the companies to keep doing business as usual.”
Author and entrepreneur @Julia@journa.host endorses a big tobacco-style movement of suing the pants off Big Tech to reform social media.
Built with public media partners around the world, the Public Space Incubator toolkit brings journalists and readers together, reimagining news comment sections as nuanced conversation.
New_ Public’s Expert-in-Residence and former CBC/Radio-Canada CEO Catherine Tait shares updates from PSI:
https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-public-broadcasters-are-changing
Too often, the voices of teens and young adults are completely missing from the conversation about how social media affects their lives, and what to do about it.
Thursday 4/16, hear directly from game-changing youth who are designing solutions to some of today’s most urgent digital challenges.
Builders aged 14 - 23 will present their projects as part of ReThink Citizens’s Youth Coalition Showcase 🚀
Want to support Wikipedia AND your local government?
Here’s a request for support from our friends at @govdirectory@wikis.world, a “crowdsourced and fact checked directory of official governmental online accounts and services.”
You can find all these resources and more in our latest Bulletin Board newsletter:
https://newpublic.substack.com/p/bulletin-board-open-social-awards
Check out this impressive (and actively growing) “database of independent journalism creators across platforms, topics and geographies” from The Independent Journalism Atlas!
It’s cool to see journalists building their own discovery tools on their own terms, outside of Big Tech platforms. Take a look 👀
Many of us take Wikipedia for granted. How does it sustain such a high level of quality, stewardship, and diverse expertise?
Spaces like Wiki – where people can work together in a positive, productive way to build something amazing – need to be less of an outlier.
The Citizens and Technology Lab studies what Wikipedia reveals about the potential for human cooperation and how to organize people for the common good. Here’s what they found:
There is a growing debate about the future of the internet: will it be fully compromised by bots? Can humans and AI-powered agents coexist online?
This question is not exactly hypothetical, it's already happening: recent data from Pangram Labs found 41% of longer posts on LinkedIn in recent months were flagged as fully AI content.
We’re building Roundabout, our local community app, to be as useful as possible, for as many people as possible.
But, notably, we’re not here to make a billion dollars. (‼️)
We’re a nonprofit, funded by philanthropy, trying to build Roundabout into a sustainable, resilient org for the long haul.
🧵
Twitter publicly launched exactly 20 years ago today! ⏪ What was that moment really like?
Well, New_ Public’s @blaine@mastodon.social was working frantically to keep it up and running as demand exploded during SXSW 😅
Blaine and @rabble@mastodon.social talk about Twitter’s first steps and what new prosocial web projects like Roundabout, New_ Public’s local community app, can learn from this history.
Feedbuilders like Graze and Attie are meant for customizing Bluesky feeds. In recent research on something similar, participants were able to focus on their interests, discover relevant content, and engage with social media more intentionally.
Former surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy, who declared loneliness as a public health crisis, now has a newsletter.
We’re excited to see what else this up and comer has to say about human connection and belonging 😁
https://vivekmurthy.substack.com/p/if-you-want-to-build-community-you
Communities are not interchangeable or disposable. Break a network and some of those relationships, all that institutional knowledge, are gone forever.
@Daojoan@mastodon.social writes eloquently on communities and digital displacement, and how Big Tech is addicted to this cycle of social destruction.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/communities-are-not-fungible/
We are so excited that Divya Siddarth is curating the Collective Intelligence track at TED2026 this week in Vancouver. We've always appreciated Divya’s reframe on democracy and AI, and we’re excited to hear more from Gina Raimondo, Jay Baxter and @digitalminister.one@threads.net
Also New_ Public Co-Director Deepti Doshi will be there in case anyone wants to connect.
Reminder: applications for the Open Social Awards are due May 1
👉Seeking MVP products on open protocols!
https://newpublic.org/OSA
What if we brought the best, most participatory values of urban planning to digital public spaces?
Unlike the planning of physical spaces, the guidelines and standards for digital public spaces are pretty undefined, says Managing Director at New_ Public @angelquicksey@mastodon.social.
Which means that communities have far more latitude to build what they truly want and need.
Communities are not interchangeable or disposable. Break a network and some of those relationships, all that institutional knowledge, are gone forever.
@Daojoan@mastodon.social writes eloquently on communities and digital displacement, and how Big Tech is addicted to this cycle of social destruction.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/communities-are-not-fungible/
