Welcome to Connected Places, your news source that helps you better understand the new social web. It is a rebrand of the Fediverse Report website, to make it clearer that this is the place to go for news and analysis about the open social web, the fediverse, the ATmosphere and a variety of other online spaces that form part of this connected web of social platforms. Publishing under the new name of Connected Places communicates more clearly that the focus is more than strictly just the fediverse.
The practical stuff first: nothing really changes except the name. Connected Places will continue to publish the following:
- Every Tuesday I publish Fediverse Report, which focuses on the news of the week for the ActivityPub ecosystem
- Every Thursday I publish an alternating Bluesky Report and ATmosphere Report. Bluesky Report focuses on Bluesky and more on the cultural and social news. ATmosphere report is about the wider ATProto network, and is more focused on tech news.
- Every Friday I send out an email with an essay and my thoughts on the news of the week.
- Regular deep-dives and analysis articles about the open social web.
The easiest way to stay up to date is to subscribe via email, which also gets you a weekly essay as a bonus right in your inbox!
You can also subscribe via ActivityPub, and get all the articles directly in your fediverse feed:
(I’ll also keep publishing articles under the fediversereport.com domain for now on the fediverse until the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress gets some updates.)
Importantly, part of transferring to a new website was setting up payment infrastructure, and you can now donate to support my work with Connected Places! Check out the donate button at the bottom of the page, or click this link.
I chose the name of Connected Places because it describes best what the open social web, the fediverse, and the ATmosphere, fundamentally are: a series of digital places that are connected with each other via open protocols. These new places that people are building online matter.
For most people, the internet consists of a handful of places, massive platforms with millions or billions of users. These platforms are siloed places, with little to no connectivity between them. Within these walled gardens, algorithmic feeds flatten the network. A sense of community, a sense of place within a larger network, got replaced by a personalised recommendation engine. Even that cannot fully prevent the tendency of people to shape their feeds into places however. BookTok is a digital place within TikTok, grown organically by its users. Walled gardens and a hyper-optimised algorithms cannot prevent the deep intrinsic need of people to create communities.
The open social web allows people to create their own digital places that they can have ownership over. I strongly believe that there should be no Caesars who controls the majority of our online communities. Humans are too complex, too diverse to give ownership to over the most powerful communications network of our time to a few oligarchs.
The focus on Connected Places is not on telling the story of why networks like the fediverse and the ATmosphere matter. My assumption is that you’re already convinced by that. My interest is in discovering the intricacies of what it actually looks like to build connected digital spaces, and the challenges that it brings. Connected Places is for telling the stories of how communities are slowly figuring out the process of how to build federated diplomacy. It is about how people handle open networks when hateful people use that openness to join the network. It is about the people who are experimenting with what healthy algorithms look like on decentralised network. These are messy and complicated stories, where there is no clear answer and people are figuring out together what these new spaces are as they grow and build them.
Above all, Connected Places is a newsletter about power. Centralised social media leads to power concentration at the very top, creating billionaire oligarchs. Decentralising social media takes power away from the oligarchs. But that does not mean that the power has disappeared. Power is spread out over many places, but with it, new gatekeepers can appear, in ways that can be hard to see. The Big Tech platforms have become so powerful, because controlling the communication platforms that billions of people use for social interaction is intrinsically powerful. Using open protocols as a different way to build social platforms does not take away the immense power that is tied up in providing the main social communications channel for society. Instead, it opens up the place for new actors to build mass communications platforms and build influence that way. As the ecosystem of the open social web develops, I expect to see this conflict to come more into the foreground.
I will keep writing the weekly (Fediverse, Bluesky) Reports, because I think the knowing the details of what is actually happening matter greatly for understanding the open social web. Switching the domain name to Connected Places is a way to signal that I want to expand to write more analysis articles as well, that help people further understand the dynamics that are at play.
It also is a first step towards making the project financially sustainable. I’ve finally added the options for donations, and I’m in the process of launching some additional features for financially sustainability as well. More on that soon!
Thank you so much for your support over the years, I’m truly grateful for all the support from everyone in the community for my work. Here’s to a lot more years of writing. Thank you again!
– Laurens