In the six months since we launched Modal, we’ve been putting most of our energy into our first major project, Eurosky. We’ve kept a relatively low profile as Modal while we get ourselves organized and map our plans. Today we’re sharing major updates and news of our next moves.
Eurosky’s aim is to build infrastructure for open social applications. We’re based in Europe and designed to serve European plurality and democratic participation, while being open to the world. Eurosky is building on with AT Protocol (atproto) because it’s an open standard that supports people to retain ownership of their data and their social network, to use the same identity for multiple applications, and to move between service providers and applications without losing their data. In the language of atproto, that’s platform interoperability and data portability.
The theory behind Eurosky: we can radically reduce the cost and risk to build new social forms by building a technology commons for core services: server, firehose, databases, and content moderation.
This is the logic that propelled us to build mu.social, which we are launching today. Mu is a microblogging application rooted in the tech and ethical stance of atproto. We’re starting with the Bluesky form factor, but we’ll be iterating quickly to offer new features, based on the interests of our users and a research-based approach to better social conversation.
Mu is a glimpse into the future of social: fast to build, relatively easy to customize, and based on a common identity and tech stack that prevents data lock-in and rewards focus on people’s needs and interests. We built mu in a month, mostly funded thanks to the generosity of Eurosky users who contributed to an online fundraiser. Also, the interoperability on atproto means no cold start for users, and a different concept of competition with other apps. When we all succeed, the network grows larger. This design breaks the power of tech monoliths.
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that building Mu is also possible thanks to the skills, energy and generosity of the developer and open social communities working on atproto. Dozens of people have shared their knowledge and passion to help us get to this point: with special thanks to Florian Killius, fig, Barry Prendergast, Brooke Higgins, Bailey Townsend, Rudy Fraser, and for work on the portal, Emilia Smith. We recognize that it’s precisely the effort to build in and with communities that makes a difference over the long run. And for that reason, we also aim to collaborate other organizations working on open social tech and related initiatives; we are stronger together.
Running mu.social ourselves allows us to demonstrate the benefits of this open ecosystem, and also to identify and fix the blockers that might keep others from attempting to build and run their own platforms.
Modal and Eurosky have a public interest mission. We aim to support the core rights and freedoms of democratic participation and governance, and we’ll be developing our organizational governance accordingly over the next months, to ensure that the tech we build and the programs we run are accountable. But you don’t have to take our word for it. Underpinning atproto is the idea of credible exit: if you don’t like our service, you can take your content and your social network and use another.
Mu.social and Eurosky also demonstrate the core logic of our approach with Modal: we need to build the future that we want to see. Theorizing about and advocating for better social technologies hasn’t fundamentally changed the behavior of the big tech monoliths. Regulating them may have curbed some of their worst excesses in some countries, but it has not moved them to prioritize information integrity, user interests, or democratic principles. And regardless of whether they might have served the public interest in an earlier phase of their existence, they are now in full market capture mode. The only way to effect exit is to offer better alternatives.
In addition to incubating Eurosky, we’ve been cooking on other projects. We’re part of the group behind European.social, working with partners across the open social world to assert shared values. Together we focus on what people need to be informed and to communicate, rather than get stuck in the functions of various protocols. We do care about protocols, of course, but we think of them as tools in the service of healthier discourse, not ends in themselves.
We are often asked whether social technologies are the past, given the fact of AI’s potential for fundamental transformation of information spaces. Our response: as long as people want to talk to each other, there will be a need for better social tech. AI won’t just operate outside of social spaces; will be integrated and intertwined. And the core questions around the behavior of tech companies remain, regardless of whether they are offering social, search, AI, or media products: is their power legible? Are they accountable to their users, and to legitimate governance?
With that in mind, Modal has been collaborating with the Social Web Foundation, Project Liberty, and Public AI on a series of workshops that explore how social tech and AI will interact. We published our first paper, AI, Agency, and Protocols: Power and Governance in Open Social Networks, in April, based on discussions held during the AI Summit in Delhi. And last week at Public Spaces in Amsterdam, we held our second workshop, together with Waag FutureLab and the Evens Foundation.
In the coming months we’ll be rolling out other products, services, initiatives, and research collaborations. We realize that we are far from the pinnacle of social and information technology experiences and services. The internet is still in its adolescence. We have every reason to continue exploring new modalities for how we come together to talk, plan, learn, and govern ourselves, and we look forward to doing it with you.