On this month’s episode of Looks Like New, we’re bringing you a conversation between guest mentors from MEDlab’s Open Social Incubator, where community organizers from all over the world come together to explore alternatives to dominant corporate platforms. These innovators prioritize community building, safety features, and governance structures in their designs. The discussion featured Rudy Fraser, founder of BlackSky on Bluesky; Evan Henshaw-Plath also known as Rabble, a former Twitter developer now working on Nostr; and Christine Lemmer-Webber, a leading author of the ActivityPub protocol, software developer, and Executive Director of the Spritely Institute.

These speakers, alongside audience questions, shared insights into the challenges and opportunities of creating open social software. They explored ways to prevent the re-centralization of power and ensure the protection of marginalized users.

This month’s guest, Rudy Fraser, is the founder of Papertree, a resource that provides joint money accounts for communities. Papertree started as a crowdfunding system to help neighborhoods provide financial assistance for groceries to community members. Rudy chose to build Blacksky, his own feed on Bluesky, to create a space for Black internet users to build a safe and supportive community online. Listen to this month’s episode to learn more about the emerging opportunities in social media through Rudy’s experience building Blacksky—and how novel moderation systems are reaching for new ways of connecting people online.