the intercommunal net,
scaling safe communities
with shared resources &
democratic tools

As Mastodon celebrates its 10th anniversary and BlueSky surpasses 43 million users, it has become clear that the Open Social Web is here to stay. Yet while these two larger platforms continue to grow, the remarkable potential of their underlying protocols remains largely unknown to most users. Unlocking the full power of the interoperable ecosystem that the Open Social Web promises requires more apps, platforms, and products to emerge and thrive within it. This panel explores viable business cases for decentralised social media platforms, and how to reduce dependency on the ecosystem’s larger players.

Following Rudy Fraser’s keynote, the conversation broadens into a wider discussion on community, identity, and digital space. Lauren Challis, board member of the Internet Society Netherlands, brings expertise in open internet governance and digital rights — exploring how decentralized technology can serve underrepresented communities. Nabil Moktar, co-founder of Nightclub Garage Noord, cultural venue Kanaal40 and Stichting 40Worldwide Foundation, represents grassroots community building in the physical world. Together, the panel examines where digital and cultural spaces intersect: How do we build platforms and places where communities truly feel at home? And who gets to decide the rules?

Keynote by Rudy Fraser What does it look like when a community builds its own social media on its own terms? Rudy Fraser, technologist, community organiser, and founder of Blacksky Algorithms [https://blackskyweb.xyz/], has been doing exactly that.

A new project called Acorn has launched a way for organizations and creators to build their own online communities as an alternative to centralized social media platforms like Instagram, X, and Threads. It uses the same underlying technology that powers the decentralized social media app Bluesky, allowing communities to build their own homepages, create starter packs for new members, and customize feeds and moderation tools.

When aimed at decentralized social networking services, the attacks can cause instability and outages, but not everyone is taken offline. In Bluesky’s case, for instance, those who had moved their account to other providers, like Blacksky, which run on the same protocol and interoperate with Bluesky, were not impacted.