Sam Liebeskind

It was only because I showed up and I paid attention," he said. "I looked for places to go. I looked for communities to join. I looked for ways to become visible and consistent, really committing to certain spots and certain groups, and then looking for opportunities to be useful and helpful.

I’m sympathetic at a cellular level to the complaints of the communities who want and need safer places to be together. I’m also still stuck believing that big-world global platforms are never going to provide those kinds of places. And also that we need the big-world layers to connect safer places together.

The culture that feels the most dangerous, and, thus, exciting to young people, will be what you can’t see online. And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room... See more

She and others wanted to find a way to restore their sense of community. They wanted to weave and the question was, how? “We chose activities that we knew people really cared about, but where there was no controversy,” she says.

According to More In Common’s The Connection Opportunity report, the vast majority of folks are willing to build connections with folks they disagree with. Sixty-six percent (66%) of Americans feel they can learn something valuable by connecting with others who are different and seven-in-ten feel a responsibility to do so. 

The report indicates that... See more

“The algorithm, more than the content type or the app’s appearance, is the core of social media because it directs how you spend your attention there,” she wrote in 2023, describing Bluesky’s goal as replacing the “master algorithm” controlled by a single company with an open “marketplace of algorithms.” The language is consistently about... See more

To say that Americans pay for civic participation and not news is to say that they care about paying for membership in a community, not digital content.

Hyperlocal is the only model. Between yesterday’s Pew Research survey data and last week’s newsroom revenue analysis from Justin Bank, journalism funders and support organizations have two sets of data they can no longer ignore. Together, they expose the fallacy of national and metro-centric economics and confirm what funders have long suspected:... See more