It's obvious why we hate social media

We need better internet platforms. We're already building them.

This is the foreword to Internet Sovereignty, an essay collection and print pamphlet exploring the future of the internet. I am grateful to New_ Public who supported this series as a patron and whose head of editorial, Josh Kramer, wrote this foreword.

For years now, people have been “quitting social media” for a number of familiar and understandable reasons. These range from hating the experience of these apps and websites to feeling like they are unbearably ethically compromised.

What used to be empowering and liberating—a direct window to your friends and family or fascinating people from across the globe who share your interests—has tipped over into something stressful, gross, creepy, or even dangerous for many, many people.

And yet, it’s not like people have logged off completely and subscribed to their local paper. (I realize there is some irony in that many of you are reading this in a printed publication you’ve paid for, and good on you!) In many cases, instead of posting that joke to Twitter, a lot of folks are instead sharing it with a group chat or turning to a private space like Discord. The internet is dead, long live the internet!

The stakes are much lower: nothing’s going to go viral accidentally, no stranger will yell at you, and you don’t have to contend with a never-ending feed that’s primarily designed to maximize the ad revenue that can be generated from your time spent on the app.

I’ve seen this in my own life. My wife set up a Discord server for our friends early in the pandemic, and it has been an incredible resource for us. Even as we traveled abroad for an extended period, we were able to really stay involved in our friends’ lives—their hobbies, dreams, work dramas, children.

And yet, as I write this towards the end of 2025, Discord, which has never really found a way to make the kind of money a tech company’s investors expect, is moving closer to offering stock and becoming a publicly-traded company. It’s hard to imagine them escaping the cycle of enshittification as described by Cory Doctorow: provide real value to users, optimize for profit, and extract value from users.

So then, is there any other way? Can we, as the titles of this publication suggest, really share digital spaces that we collectively shape and even own? These possibilities exist if you know where to look. Digital sovereignty is not science fiction, or simply a utopian pipe dream. It’s being built right now, on a variety of scales.

Would you believe me if I told you that my favorite social media platform was built by a photographer in Japan, in about 10 hours, for around $75?

Craig Mod is a passionate artist, author, thinker, and walker. He may be best known for multi-day walking trips through stretches of Japan and elsewhere. I’ve really come to appreciate his curiosity and openness. He has a loyal following, and he has carved out a niche for himself in creating his own art books and bespoke pop-up newsletters. In early 2025, Craig used Claude Code, an AI tool that writes real, usable code, to build his fans a simple, custom social media interface called “The Good Place”.

The features are limited—Spartan by contemporary standards—but the space is what the nonprofit product studio I work for, New_ Public, would call “prosocial and public-spirited.” It’s about connection, rather than extracting data for profit. Posts and replies are limited, the feed is purely reverse chronological, and links are privileged on their own page.

Notably, The Good Place is supported by Craig’s monthly subscribers, not any sort of advertising. There is no data tracking, and posts disappear organically after a week. Craig takes feature requests directly, and his presence is visible to users—he’s paying attention, and he’s incentivized to make the experience as good and positive as possible.

The results are evident in the kind, compassionate discussion happening there daily. I’m making friends on The Good Place, and I have a lot of context for people. I value their opinions, and I feel seen there. I find the space to be useful, helpful, and fun. It’s not just recommendations for things like books and movies … someone even helped me pick out a new wallet! These experiences, unfortunately, are becoming rarer and rarer in the social media world.

And notably, new advances in technology have enabled this. As Craig wrote in a newsletter:

It’s no exaggeration to say that using Claude Code to build The Good Place (and also a bunch of other small tools and projects) is one of the most astonishing computing experiences of my life. It’s difficult to articulate how utterly empowering a tool like Claude Code (paired with malleable software, open software, open systems (i.e., not iOS/iPadOS)) is for someone like me: someone with a strong technical background who can guide the LLM, knows which questions to ask, and knows how to keep it from going off on weird tangents. (It’s like working with an eight-year-old who has a thousand years of knowledge.)

AI, like all technology, is not a panacea, and it obviously comes with a full suite of ethical and logistical considerations. But clearly, people who know how to leverage it are taking their prosocial, independent, alternate visions for social media to the next level. However, many of these projects are smaller scale, meant for a few hundred or thousand people.

Is this sort of thing scalable? Is it possible to reach the masses at the size of any of the dominant platforms? And if it is possible, I worry that if the internet becomes truly fractionalized into many, many small Good Places, we will lose some of the original value and promise of the internet. There is value to productive friction, where people can disagree in a constructive way. Beyond the filter bubbles we already have, do we risk separating into fully self-contained and self-reliant filter bubble city-states?

Maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to go fully into completely siloed communities in order to find some measure of sovereignty and ownership.

For Canadians, this question became pretty urgent recently. As President Trump seemed set on annexing Canada early in his second term, many Canadians realized their entire digital tech stack was based in the United States. Canadian designer and entrepreneur Ben Waldman told me in New_ Public’s newsletter, “annexation could really just look like an executive order that shuts down our entire cloud, or 95% of it.”

So as Canadian pride took center stage, Waldman got serious about starting an independent, Canadian social media platform, where the data and governance would reside completely within Canada’s borders.

Luckily, recently developed protocols, including Bluesky’s AT Protocol, make it possible for Waldman’s new app, Gander, to have literal sovereignty and self-ownership, and not cut itself off fully. Once set up as intended, Gander’s users will be able to post alongside the 40+ million users of Bluesky.

Eventually, they hope to expand this infrastructure to institutions across Canada, such as McGill University, in what they’re calling a “sovereign social cloud.” Similarly to The Good Place, Gander is funded by users, not venture capital, and recently raised over $2 million Canadian in a crowdfunding campaign.

This is the dream of decentralization—everyone in charge of and owning their social media experience, with connection to everyone else, on their own terms.

These new movements and technologies, including artificial intelligence and mature protocols like AT Proto, are growing in acceptance and enabling new experiments. People are eager for something new.

I don’t think we’ve gone as far in this direction as we probably should, or will. After all, as governance expert Nathan Schneider likes to point out, few online groups have as much organization as his mom’s neighborhood garden club (which has officers, bylaws, and decades of norms and expectations). What else is possible?

Could a Good Place of the future have its own constitution, with voting and elected officials and term limits? Could it be formally financialized for long-term sustainability? We’re barely scratching the surface, and so much can be done with the tech tools and ideas we already have right now.

We need far more experimentation and imagination along these lines, beginning right here, with this volume.

Josh Kramer
Head of Editorial, New_ Public
newpublic.org