Three days that changed European social media (and why you missed it)

Last week was immensely significant if you care about European social media sovereignty, but you probably didn’t hear about it if you rely on LinkedIn

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To begin with, Eurosky.Social launched some really significant developments to support European social media sovereignty last week:

  • Tuesday launch: a mirror of the PLC Directory on European infrastructure. This is the Atmosphere's "address book": while it only needs one, the fact that there was only one remained a valid critique of the Atmosphere's claim to be decentralised. Now we have a mirror, finalising the technological decentralisation of the entire Atmosphere, making it far more resilient and removing (I think) the last "it's not really decentralised" claim;
  • Wednesday launch: a relay on European infrastructure. Relays are the "broadcast towers" for the open social network - there are already a few, but this one provides a unique piece of European sovereign social media infrastructure;
  • Thursday launch: Mu.social, a new microblogging app with three new features: an Edit button(!), dedicated news tab and democratic verification. There's much more to come.

And then there's community. While there are a lot of teams working on this, BlueSky Social PPC's announcement last week was particularly significant: "communities are coming to Bluesky this year... smaller spaces inside that where you can go deeper and hang out with people who care about the same stuff".

Linkedin's parasocial algorithm

There's more, so much more, but if you rely on legacy social media to keep you informed about this stuff, I have some bad news. I ran a little experiment last week, and the results confirmed my earlier findings - every Linkedin post on the above topics got a small fraction of the impressions my LinkedIn posts usually get.

LinkedIn's algorithm is (probably) not malevolently tuned to suppress news about the Atmosphere, but it has a blindspot because LinkedIn is no longer social media, it’s para-social media: "the Atmosphere is so new that relatively few people in my LinkedIn network have ever interacted with content about it, so the algorithm probably just assumes they’re not interested."

You will therefore not be informed of some of the most consequential developments affecting online communications and communities for the years ahead if you rely on LinkedIn.

algorithms look at your past to predict what you’ll want to see; they do not look at your future to predict what you need to see - LinkedIn’s filter bubble

So ask yourself this: what else are you not seeing because you live inside LinkedIn’s filter bubble?


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