Theia Henderson

Theia Henderson

@theias.place

178 followers55 following16 posts

Theia Henderson reposted

Ethan Zuckerman
@ethanz.bsky.social

"The loyal client" is a concept that's been important to our lab over the past five years as we've tried to make social media better: it's the idea that the tools you use to access social media should meet your needs, not those of the platform owner. Spencer Lane wrote a great paper on this as part

Theia Henderson
@theias.place

We also present the concepts "total reification" which allows seemingly contradictory designs, including conflicting moderation rules, to interoperate and "channels", which prevent interoperation from occurring by accident, avoiding the phenomenon "context collapse".

Theia Henderson
@theias.place

Graffiti *is* decentralized but the protocol(s) that implement is are an implementation detail. We actually present two decentralized protocols and its easy to swap new ones in as technology changes, similar to how the web upgraded from HTTP → HTTPS

Theia Henderson
@theias.place

To be so flexible, Graffiti builds on the concept of "folksonomy". Think of hashtags, which can be any string but there is social pressure to use the same hashtag as other people, like #UIST2025

Theia Henderson
@theias.place

Graffiti is a system that can be used to build a wide variety of personalized social apps with relative ease that also interoperate with each other. People can freely move between a plurality of designs—each with its own aesthetic, feature set, and moderation—all without losing their friends or data

Theia Henderson
@theias.place

How is this different from ActivityPub (Mastodon) or the At Protocol (BlueSky)? Graffiti doesn't just make Twitter clones, you can build Wikipedia or Messenger or Pinterest or Goodreads or Minecraft or plenty of *new* apps. And you never need to run your own server!

Theia Henderson
@theias.place

Most social apps, from Twitter to Wikipedia, have rigid one-size-fits-all designs, but building new social apps is both technically challenging and results in applications that are siloed away from existing communities.

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