👋🏅🏆 Meet the winners of the first Open Social Awards

Below is a dispatch from Angelica Quicksey, a Managing Director at New_ Public. Angelica was a co-author on our recent research on how AI is changing the internet, and she talked with me for a recent AMA video, but it’s been a long time since she last wrote here in the newsletter!

Angelica sits at the heart of what we care about here: she has an urban planning background and has developed tech products for private firms, city governments, and for us! Since she’s been here, Angelica’s played an important role in every New_ Public project, standing up our work with public broadcasters and our Local Lab, which has evolved into Roundabout, our local community app.

Now, she’s looking to the future: where are the next, emerging, important tech products that will move us past Big Tech’s social platforms?

As part of that work, Angelica recently helped create the Open Social Awards, which we awarded with our partners in early June at the PublicSpaces Conference in Amsterdam. Here, she talks about why we wanted to give out awards, and she goes deep on the impressive and inventive winners.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

See the OSA Winners

You could be forgiven for thinking that X (née Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok are the whole social internet. That the places where we spend time online are getting creepier, more hostile, more full of ragebait, and even worse. It’s easy to feel like there is nothing to be hopeful about in the future of the internet.

But there is, in fact, a whole world of product development happening that is separate from the big social media empires and their platforms with billions of users. In this world, you’re not locked in. You’re not funneled into the profitable but ultimately empty calories of existing social media. This is the open social web — an ecosystem of products that are built on decentralized social protocols, like AT Protocol for Bluesky, and ActivityPub for Mastodon. In this world, the underlying principles and infrastructure support independence and agency rather than lock-in.

There’s already a ton of great stuff: music platforms, event tools, photo and video sharing, newsletters and much more. By default, you own your data (messages, content, etc.) and can take it and your followers with you.

This ecosystem is still young. Earlier this year, when we began working together on decentralized social, my colleague, Catherine Tait, compared the burgeoning open social web to the independent film movement in the ‘90s. She would know. Catherine is the former CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada and a giant in the worlds of North American film, broadcasting, and public media. She was instrumental in developing our partnership with public broadcasters around the world and now serves as an Expert-in-Residence here at New_ Public.

Before the independent film festivals took off and became the dominant culture-makers that they are now, before iconic filmmakers were churning out masterpieces like “Moonlight” — which went from Telluride to Best Picture — there were a lot of talented artists who lacked financing, distribution, and recognition. That insight led Catherine to help launch the Gotham Awards in 1991, and it’s why we launched the Open Social Awards this year.

With the inaugural Open Social Awards, we are bringing attention to the social technologies of the future — the ones that are human-first and resist enshittification.

We received 74 applications across a wide range of projects, from multiple continents, from small teams and solo founders, both for-profit and non-profit organizations. The majority were built on either ActivityPub or AT Protocol.

ActivityPub is the older of the two and is the protocol behind Mastodon, a trailblazing, federated community application that is celebrating its 10th anniversary, run by a non-profit. Each Mastodon community can make its own rules and control the flow of data on its own terms. These servers, or “instances,” are “federated” and can push and pull content back and forth. This is why the larger universe of apps and websites running on ActivityPub are often called “the Fediverse.”

Meanwhile, Bluesky is a public benefit corporation. They have built a Twitter-like app of the same name, as well as the underlying AT Protocol. Bluesky, the app, recently surpassed 43 million users, but a much larger “Atmosphere” of apps run on AT Protocol. AT Protocol works a bit differently than ActivityPub: data, identity, and applications are all on separate layers. Because identity and data are decoupled from the hosting server, you can move your account between providers without losing your followers or content.

While these two larger platforms continue to grow, the remarkable potential of their underlying protocols remains largely unknown to most users. And that might be OK! Returning to the indie film metaphor: When most people go to the movies, they’re rarely thinking about the role the film plays in the larger ecosystem — they just want to see something good.

As Erin Kissane said in her beautiful and prophetic talk at the PublicSpaces Conference, “people don’t adopt new technologies and platforms because we lecture them into it.”

That’s why, with the Open Social Awards, we prioritized finding and celebrating products that people already find really useful, as well as infrastructure that simplifies things in helpful ways. For the jury, it was important that the winner bring decentralized social media beyond the existing community of developers, policymakers, and early adopters, to the millions of people who are frustrated with Big Tech but haven’t yet found a compelling alternative.

Our international jury of six experts in technology, media, and digital policy — Audrey Tang, Johannes Ernst, Laurens Hof, Melanie Bartos, Mike Masnick, Robin Berjon — selected projects that had the originality to stand out, the viability to grow, and the potential to bring open social to people beyond our existing community.

But it’s about more than that. Just before the awards were announced, Blacksky Algorithms founder Rudy Fraser asked the audience: What is open source if not a multigenerational sharing of knowledge and a promise to preserve the commons that grew you? And Audrey Tang charged the conference with treating community like soil, an abundant, renewable resource, as opposed to the traditional data extraction of social media companies. Community can be something we tend to and help grow.

The open social ecosystem is about a different approach to building, deploying, and tending to social technologies, with an eye to the past and the future.

GRAND PRIZE: Newsmast Foundation
Location: London 🇬🇧
Team size: 11-25
Protocol: ActivityPub
Categories: Social networking & community; Content publishing & media

The Newsmast Foundation, led by Michael Foster, is a non-profit helping mission-driven organisations (newsrooms, community groups, civil society) build independent digital spaces. The standout proof point is their work with CAMFED: 355,000 members across six African countries migrating to the open social web.

EXCELLENCE AWARD: Blacksky
Location: NYC / Richmond / Amsterdam 🇺🇸 🇳🇱
Team size: 5-10
Protocol: AT Protocol
Categories: Moderation & trust and safety; Social networking & community; Shared infrastructure & developer tools

Rudy Fraser helped create Blacksky Algorithms, powering the largest Black community on the open social web, with community-governed algorithms and moderation. They’re now building shared infrastructure, Acorn, so other communities can do the same.

EXCELLENCE AWARD: Sill
Location: Haarlem, Netherlands 🇳🇱
Team size: 1
Protocol: AT Protocol and ActivityPub
Categories: Social networking & community; Content publishing & media

Solo builder Tyler Fisher is solving a real mainstream problem with Sill — doomscrolling! Sill surfaces interesting links from your feeds, without advertising, algorithmic ranking, or engagement incentives.

The Open Social Awards jury determined that beyond the three winners, five additional projects merited an honorable mention: Bounce | Dandelion | Streamplace | Leaflet | Bonfire Networks.

You can find more information about the honorable mentions at newpublic.org/OSA.

See the OSA Winners

We hope you get to know all of the winners’ work and maybe even take them for a spin. The Open Social Awards were presented in partnership with PublicSpaces and Waag Futurelab in Amsterdam.

The awards were sponsored with generous support from both Bluesky PBC and ZDF, one of Germany’s public broadcasters and a longtime collaborator of ours in Public Spaces Incubator. We thank them for their commitment to these bold builders and innovators. We also want to thank the Modal Foundation, Save Social, FediForum, and ATmosphere Community Fund for supporting the Next Socials programming at PublicSpaces.

– Angelica Quicksey, Managing Director, Strategic Initiatives, New_ Public

Thanks Angelica! We’ll be back later this month with another Bulletin Board newsletter.

Trying to stay cool,

–Josh