Hi {name},

Welcome to Connected Places! Connectedplaces.online Places is the rebrand of the Fediverse Report website, and you'll now receive the same weekly emails from this Connected Places.

The practical stuff first: the only thing that changes is the domain name. Every Tuesday there will be an article named Fediverse Report, every Thursday an alternating Bluesky Report and ATmosphere Report, and every Friday an essay via email. Publishing this all under the domain of Connected Places communicates more clearly that the focus is more than strictly just the fediverse. I'll publicly announce the rebrand next week on the socials, but wanted to give everyone who subscribes via email the news early. Thank you again for subscribing to the newsletter, it is much appreciated!

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. 

The internet as used by the majority of people consists of some dozen places, big platforms with millions or billions of users, and TikTok, Instagram and Facebook have become household names. These platforms are siloed places, with little to no connectivity between, often described as walled gardens. Within the walled gardens, algorithmic feeds flatten the network. A sense of community, a sense of place within a larger group of people, got replaced by a personalised recommendation engine. Even that cannot fully prevent the tendency of people to create their own places however, whether that is BookTok or FinTwit.

In contrast, the open social web allows people to create their own digital places that they can have ownership over. It is something I strongly believe in, that there should be no Caesars of social networks. 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. Considering you've subscribed, I'm assuming you already know 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. 

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 altogether. Power is spread out over many places, but with it, new gatekeepers can appear, in ways that can be hard to see. 

The current media opinion pieces of how "Bluesky is dying", at the same time as US Vice President JD Vance joins Bluesky, show that these new digital places such as Bluesky do already have significant power and social capital. The reason for writing these opinion pieces is that there is an underlying conflict over who can benefit from the cultural influence that Bluesky generates. 

One of the core premises of the platforms of the open social web is that they can replace the centralised Big Tech platforms. The Big Tech platforms have become so powerful, because being the digital place 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. As the ecosystem of the open social web develops, I would expect to see this conflict to come more into the foreground.

I will keep writing the weekly (Fediverse, Bluesky) Reports, because I think the details 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. There is an option to donate now (see the QR code at the bottom of the newsletter), 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