Some analysis and notes on the submissions, in the hope they may be helpful. No guarantee whatsoever that we didn’t miss anything important or misinterpreted what people were saying. Read the actual submissions instead.

Themes

From an analysis performed by Anca.

Theme	Count	% of submissions
UX / Messaging / Value Proposition	31	72%
Novel Products & Differentiated Features	15	35%
Network Effects / Content / Creator Economy	15	35%
Community & Local Instances	11	26%
Funding & Sustainability	10	23%
Trust, Safety & Moderation	9	21%
Research & User Understanding	8	19%
Institutional Adoption	8	19%
Identity & Portability	7	16%
Global Diversity / Language / Culture	6	14%
Feed Algorithms & Discovery	4	9%

Notes and summary

Aggregate notes by Johannes from reading through all the submissions. Note that these notes are not internally consistent, as they are an aggregate from many submissions.

What we want to accomplish:

• Enable more people to build their own platforms / self-governed spaces for their own communities
• A million places for a billion voices – with boundaries
• More people who have, and more communities who have:
  • freedoms
  • safety
  • self-governance
• Provide local/developing countries/indigenous alternatives to international homogenization
• Particularly marginalized, linguistic, regional, etc communities, communities in the global majority
• Restore and strengthen the role of communities, institutions, shared processes to provide context and help with sense making
• Migrate a meaningful fraction of all online interactions online into healthier environments

What we want to avoid:

• “global townsquare”

Additional things we might need or want:

Protocol / technical level

• E2E (end-to-end encryption for private messages)
• Private Groups
• Identity upgrades
  • Portable identity in ActivityPub
  • Cross-protocol identity
  • Move away from email-like user handles to domain names
• Conversation-specific data format
• Verifiable authenticity of content, creators, and endorsements
• Identities and endorsements are usable across apps
• Micropayments
• Tech underlying the fediverse should directly support commercial creators, and expose this consistently across platforms, e.g. micropayments
• Reputation and trust

Services level

• Age verification
• Federated moderation tooling

Product level

• Improved usability
• Onboarding processes need to encourage connecting with people / orgs / brands / creators / publications they already have a relationship with
• Malleable software that can be customized by non-technical people for the needs of specific communities
• A model for micro-apps instead of putting all features into a big app (e.g Facebook Blue, Discord)
• Progressive web apps
• Cannot depend on appstore distribution
• Cannot depend on people running servers
• Need to go beyond the features in a “good old times” Twitter we are nostalgic for, not just copycats of existing centralized social applications: tangible features that are not offered by commercial platforms
• The equivalent of Facebook Groups
• Better tools for our own attention management
• Games native to the open social web that keep people coming back
• Focus on retention, e.g. on day 2, 7 and 30
• Need measurable engagement

Community level

• Need to build products in collaboration with, and to serve, specific communities
• Community-scale networks
• Domain-specific tools and applications
• Creative spaces
• Civic platforms
• Custom software / just the right combination of mini-apps for micro-communities

Governance

• Governance models for institutional participation in decentralized networks

Movement-level

• Need a “big-tent” alliance across AP, ATProto, DSNP and others
• We need strategies that do not depend on network effects
• Grant-makers need to provide funding to communities in the global majority,

Specific segments

Academic/public institutions context

• Need peer visibility
• Need better onboarding
• Need practical support
• Institutions need to participate to provide legitimacy
• Make researchers, professors, journalists, science communications people use them as an official means of communication

Activists

• Build for activist organizing

Better outreach / advocacy / marketing

• Need specific campaigns:
  • E.g. FediGov in Brazil to get public institutions to adopt federated networks
  • 1+ campaign
• Do not define Open Social Web as what it is not: “not Twitter” etc
• Need a better term than “Open Social Web”. The normies don’t get it.
• Ethical motivations for moving are seldom enough to drive adoption in practice
• Need resources that address organizational needs
• Lean into camaraderie
• More Digital Independence Days: showcasing alternatives
• Sign up existing formal communities, like clubs, universities, schools, professional societies etc
• Recruit celebrities and big creators, offer incentives
• Tell better stories
• Stop doing things that turn people away:
  • Stop chasing away people we disagree with
  • Avoid political messaging: it’s a turn-off for most people
  • Stop belittling other platforms or protocols
• Improve how “inviting” we are
  • Be friendly
  • Be supportive
  • Donate to developers and admins
• Business / management / marketing as a shared service for developers

Towards developers / founders / (social) entrepreneurs

• Explain opportunities
• Explain how to leverage the power of linked data
• More promotion of C2S
• Leverage unique capabilities: open data access and interoperability. e.g.
  • e.g. integrate inventory and social posts into a common experience for small businesses
• Training programs to developers how to build customized software for the open social web.
• Libraries of custom software components.
• Need to build community-first, not tech-first.

Obstacles to growth

• I want more of my friends to be here
• I want more people with my profession to be here

Strategies:

• Encourage “1+”": use in addition and in parallel with commercial networks
• Encourage POSSE
• Need to AP-enable existing platforms
• Need to AP-enable new platforms
• Focus on the specific needs of specific communities and build for that
• Prioritize adoption / adoptability by value-aligned organizations

Open questions:

• What is the measure by which we determine growth?
  • Number of users
  • Amount of content
  • Engagement
  • Number of connected services
  • Cultural impact
  • Money invested
  • Number of interoperable servers (AP-style)
  • Number of apps interacting with the same data (ATProto-style)
• How do we coordinate across protocol communities on shared infrastructure problems like media hosting and discovery?
• How do prioritize building things that get people in the door over protocol correctness?
• Why will we succeed when we have multiple decades of failed attempts behind us?
• Who exactly are the next set of adopters we want to adopt this? What do we they need, and are we offering it? If not, how do we get there?
• Where and how does the money come from to fund expansion?
• How are we serving organizations who would join us based on a “business case” with associated funding?
• How do we make this more appealing?
• What features are we missing?

What research do we need performed?

• What are the obstacles for joining?
  • Don’t understand federation? (Do they need to?)
  • UI not on par?
  • Not enough of their friends?
    • Not on the network?
    • Cannot be found?
• Not enough interesting content?
  • Not on the network?
  • Cannot be found?
• Why do people who are here stay vs leave?
  • Do they leave after 2 days, 30 days or much longer?
  • What makes them leave?
• What are the most compelling features in comparison with the closed platforms?
  • that we have?
  • that we could have?