“Good Moderation” is one of the key promises that we make here at Darcy. But what does this mean? Who will do this work, and how? This blogpost tries to give an overview of what we are planning. While community moderation is usually about deleting content, Darcy focuses on preserving spaces instead. With all the […]
Fake news and fact checking
Over the past half dozen years or so, people everywhere have expressed a growing concern about disinformation. Conspiracy theories abound, people start to doubt things that have been settled for centuries now, and rumour has it that if you leave YouTube on autoplay for a night, you’ll wake up as a Nazi. And then, with […]
Thinking about permissions
During the development of our second prototype “Shepherd”, we realised that permissions for truly distributed social media are a thorny thing. Within the decentralised design of Solid, we have to define how spaces are controlled in interactions between users. We also have to be mindful of preserving the context of the interaction, while also respecting […]
Winning a Mozilla Seed award
Some good news in these gloomy times. I’m excited to announce that we have received a $10,000 USD open source seed award granted by the Mozilla Foundation through Open Collective. Earlier this year, Darcy participated in a prototype funding contest at FOSDEM. We won thanks to the very good representation of our project by Karen […]
The commercial side of social media
People publish content to the internet, and especially to social media, for a variety of reasons. From the point of view of the platform it is quite important to know why people use it. This article focuses on commercial usage of social media: Commercial usage is done by people who create content with the intent […]
The Bedroom to Broadcast Scale of communication spaces
To design a social space, we have to reflect on what kind of space we want to create. I myself like to explain how we think certain spaces work with a series of analogies I call “Bedroom to Broadcast”. Bedroom Let’s start with the Bedroom: It is the place where we are (usually) the most […]
What makes Darcy unique?
When building a new social media software, a lot of things have to be considered. How to make it work, how to make it safe, but also: Why should people use it, what makes it unique and useful? Darcy aims to be the online space of choice for people who are interested in good content. […]
Meet the Team: Karsten
Born a nerd in rural Germany, Karsten used computers to connect to others from the very beginning – well, almost, his first computer was a Commodore C16! And that’s his story: While the net moved from Usenet to forum to social media, I was a very active user loving the way the technical infrastructure was […]
Meet the Team: Nada
As a teenager in Lebanon, on the margins of this globalized world, I fell in love with the Internet because it offered me a window to the magic of the ‘outside world’. The beautiful kinship-based chaos of early-days social media and chat rooms is also how I discovered amazing global and local communities of people […]
Wanted: Part time PR Volunteer
The Darcy Project, an initiative to build a decentralized social media platform, is looking for a part time PR Volunteer to join our global team. We’re a team of people trying to offer a social media alternative that would be driven by research and the need to make social media a safe space for everyone. We’re […]
Online Advertising and Social
We are quite busy writing concepts, specifications and needs assessments for Darcy. And to do that, we read everything we can that others write about these topics. Thankfully, we are not alone in thinking about these things, so interesting articles pop up on a regular basis. Last week, this included mathew’s largely excellent take on […]