Notices by New_ Public (wearenew_public@mastodon.social)

What people all around the world want most from local news is information they can use about their community.

A global @reutersinstitute survey found the most sought-out types of stories were about local news, activities and culture, and services. Local news can rebuild trust by meeting their readership where they’re at and delivering the reliable information they need.

Read more: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025/local-news-how-publishers-can-still-provide-value-platform-world

Our friends at All Tech is Human recently convened a panel on the future of Trust & Safety: the professionals who design the systems keeping social media safe for billions.

With T&S increasingly being outsourced, AI on the rise, and Big Tech less interested in moderation than ever, this is an essential topic to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHEdXfaIUeM

Friend of New_ Public @anildash on the complex and evolving dynamics of consent online.

“Technology should only ever do exactly what we have explicitly given it our consent to do”

https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/27/internet-of-consent/

APPLY BY MAY 31: commUNITY’s 2025 Global Gathering will be in Estoril, Portugal, from September 8–10, for networking and collaboration on the most urgent technology-related challenges affecting human rights, civil society, and journalists at local, regional, and global levels.

https://www.digitalrights.community/blog/2025-global-gathering-application

A New American Awakening: A wave of civic renewal is building. Let's make sure it keeps growing.

🧰 Continue supporting local civic experiments
✍️ Shifting the national narrative by featuring these local efforts
📚 Building fields of renewal in medicine, education, law, journalism and beyond

https://www.afterbabel.com/cp/162965628

This feels like a transitional moment for the social internet.

According to Zuckerberg's recent testimony, fewer and fewer people are using Meta's social apps to interact with friends and family: users are only spending 17% of their time on Facebook and 7% of their time on Instagram on friends' posts.

https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/why-ai-is-the-new-social-media

What does one thing have to do with the other? You decide.

https://newpublic.substack.com/p/building-the-internet-we-deserve

Kicking off today: join (m)otherboard's book club for open source legend @CoralineAda's new book, “We Just Build Hammers: Stories from the Past, Present and Future of Responsible Tech”!

A fascinating exploration of how speculative fiction has repeatedly shaped our technological reality

https://m-otherboard.ghost.io/book-club-we-just-build-hammers/?ref=m-otherboard-newsletter

Facebook Group admins are losing patience with the platform and ramping up calls for something new. We recently heard from the admin of a local FB group who described dramatic drops in groups’ engagement and upticks in member aggression…

@YaelEisenstat Facebook’s former global head of elections integrity for political ads, writes about how social media whistleblowers can offer the public a crucial lens into the harmful practices at companies like Meta

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/another-meta-whistleblower-when-will

Roomy aims to become an open-source group chat application, similar to Discord or Slack.

⌨️ In active development
🌐 Federated

https://blog.muni.town/roomy-chat-alpha/

Here are some emerging projects on our radar!

We’re always on the lookout for new digital products, features, or spaces that might promote community cohesion 🤝 and/or civic engagement 🙋

Threaded below ⬇️

We’re an R&D lab focused on reimagining social media, and we’re hiring!

We are looking for all kinds of specialists, including researchers, team leaders, and culture-building experts.

Your time is now: https://www.newpublic.org/jobs

What’s the best way to resist the fickle billionaires who control the internet?

Using their platforms less and putting your own hard-won dollars towards building new billionaire-proof social media infrastructure. #FreeOurFeeds

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/17/1110063/we-need-to-protect-the-protocol-that-runs-bluesky/

Billionaires and corporations have taken over our digital social spaces, making the rules for where we work, play, and live our lives.

But Bluesky, not just what it is now, but what it could be — independent, democratic, a scaffolding to build on — has revealed a crack in the prison wall.

Are you going to help dig? Join #FreeOurFeeds and protect our freedom and choice as social media evolves.

https://freeourfeeds.com/

Friend of New_ Public @ntnsndr on why it's so dang hard for digital groups to self-govern, and a checklist of questions for setting your group up for healthy problem-solving.

https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/2024/12/18/how-build-governable-spaces-online-communities

J Wortham goes long on what she sees as "late-stage social media:"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/14/magazine/bluesky-social-media.html

In the wake of X-odus, we're returning to "Protocols Not Platforms" by @mmasnick

This influential piece from 2019, part of the original inspiration for Bluesky, proposes a fundamental power shift in social media: moving to new, open infrastructure like the protocols powering email and websites.

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech

RESEARCH: Social media now plays a major role in how Americans get their news and stay informed.

New Pew research shows that more than half of U.S. adults (54%) turn to social media for news at least occasionally.

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/

When it comes to conflict resolution on social media, unclear rules for behavior, mistrust of users, and messy enforcement doesn’t add up to fair treatment or confidence in decisions.

Matt Katsaros from the Social Media Governance Institute at Yale Law:

https://newpublic.org/study/3752/case-studies