iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Theia Henderson

Ethan Zuckerman @ethanz.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

"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

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 08/03/2026

Little preview: What if websites didn't have owners? What if the web was more like Wikipedia and every site had an "Edit" button? social.wiki

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 08/03/2026

Boston-area folks: I'm hosting a "build your own social app" hackathon next saturday @ MIT. No coding experience required! Learn about our vision for a "malleable social web" and help shape the new ecosystem :) Register here: social.wiki/Social.Wiki/...

A poster for a hackthon with examples of various social apps. The text says:
"Build Your Own Social App
Hackathon

No Coding Experience Required!
Food and prizes!

Saturday, March 14, 2026
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM (partial attendance OK)
MIT Stata Center, Kiva Room (32-G449)"

There is a QR code that says "Limited capacity please register!!" and a link to https://social.wiki

The apps around include a pink discord-like app called "PinkCord", an app called Pixel Flip for collaborative pixel art, a messaging app where the messages are targets, a game of Othello, a microblog called stanza, an apple notes-like app, a figure drawing app with a poorly drawn bunny, and an instant messenger where all messages are handdrawn.

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 14/10/2025

All the conference talks were recorded but they haven't been published yet - hopefully they'll be out in a week or two I'll let you know!

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 28/09/2025

Glad you found it interesting! Twitter-clones is an oversimplification but no support for private or semi-private (unlisted) content and the need to spin up bespoke servers for certain features (labeling) does vastly reduce the design space...tho you can still build a lot in that smaller space!

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 27/09/2025

I'll be following up with how to make Graffiti apps soon! In the meantime, we're running a forecasting study to see what societal-scale effects Graffiti might have if widely adopted. Will apps evolve to be "good" or even more addicting/polarizing/etc? Help us predict the future! socialverse.study

socialverse.study

Socialverse Study

Predicting the future of social software.

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 27/09/2025

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".

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 27/09/2025

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

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 27/09/2025

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

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 27/09/2025

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!

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 27/09/2025

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

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 27/09/2025

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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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 27/09/2025

I'm headed to #UIST2025 🇰🇷 to present our 🏆 Best Paper (!!!), "Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications" @karger.bsky.social and David Clark doi.org/10.1145/3746...

doi.org

Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications | Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

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Reposted by Theia Henderson

xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen) @xuanalogue.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

learned how to sing like 100 gecs from @theias.place

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Theia Henderson @theias.place · 15/05/2025

I've been messing around with the AT Protocol and it seems like I've bricked my test account, @graffiti-garden.bsky.social ... and if you follow it, your follow feed can be bricked too! 🥰🧱(don't worry, unfollowing the "bad" account fix it)

A picture of the BlueSky feeds interface with the "Following" tab selected and an error below saying "Internal Server Error"

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