Very cool — a way to jump from one post onto a trail of related posts. Lots of possibility and opportunity to push beyond the feed interface!

Thanks! Vannevar Bush’s essay As We May Think is our main source for “trails” web.mit.edu/sts.035/www/...

bluesky is dying? Come to the Wait and See feed

So you can craft your feed as you like, and then jump onto trails if and when you choose. We see trails as an anti-paternalistic vision. Would be curious to hear what you think!

Thanks -- interestingly, this sentiment is part of our motivation. Social media, I think, has two functions: 1) help you see what you know you want, 2) connect you to things you didn't realize you wanted. Rather than try to solve both within the feed, we want to let users do (2) by choice.

glad you're enjoying!

so cool! over 20k trails to explore…and that's just based on a single week of bluesky posts!

fun to search trails & browse related ones…seems like a great way to find new folks to follow & prob closest thing I've seen to "collections" as @danabra.mov has been advocating for

I also think there could be a way for authors to directly select/unselect trails! Thanks for the questions, they're very generative/interesting to think through

I think very similar to hashtags, but I think hashtags are difficult from a coordination perspective (certain hashtags arise for certain topics on Bluesky, but I think this is a fraction of possible trails that could exist—basically, we could augment the hashtag functionality)

Re visibility, one interface we've played with lets the user to hover on a tag to preview a trail. Definitely would be curious about other ideas here.

Definitely see as complementarity to directed queries on the user's part (one thing we're trying to solve though is when users don't know a topic/trail exists; i.e., users may struggle to articulate destinations they don't yet know of)

Yeah, For You is very useful! We don’t see trails as a replacement, but as a way to augment, so that each post serves as a jumping off point. And I think a mix of semantic signal (as in skytrails) and co-like data is a natural start.

Loved reading this. The premise that social media should let us actively traverse it through connections, not just scroll a feed feels exactly right.

One thought it raised for me: Trails (& rabbit holes) are often spaces we wander through alone. What would a more social analogy get us?

Cool, enjoyed reading this, and agree that a more social vision of all of this important. I like the discussion of public spaces. In general, I’ve felt that our online experience lacks a “physicality,” in the sense that we often feel without “location.”

Sure! Will send you a message!

Cool, thanks for sharing! We also liked thinking about Wikipedia as a counterpoint to social media—our conclusion was that a key distinguishing feature of Wikipedia is the emphasis on hypertext as the interface.

Yes, our initial prototype was just on a static subset of data. We’re working on getting a live version though! Let us know if you have feedback.

skytrails · 20,000 trails through Bluesky Regaining freedom of movement on social media. Browse Bluesky via interconnected trails.

Would love to hear any thoughts! Incidentally, we did find an ao3 trail! www.skytrails.org?tag=6

Human involvement seems ideal, but I think some algorithmic involvement will be needed to handle the rate and scale of new posts on social media. Am very interested in what the right mix is. Hope to continue this discussion!

Thanks, really appreciate your comments! I think my main disagreement is I don’t think algorithmic curation will necessarily lead to false agency if we make the right design choices. That being said, the design space is huge and I think there is a lot of debate worth having.

I have really enjoyed talking with Kenny about his work on alternative rec system mechanisms. This work offers a vision of user-powered concept exploration: imagine the social media feed equivalent of the joy of exploring wikipedia by navigating trails of hyperlinks from one article to the next.

we could've called it the intertwingle? 😮

It was lovely to work on this all with @sjgreenwood.bsky.social, @ericachiang.bsky.social, Jon Kleinberg, and @nkgarg.bsky.social!

We would love to hear any thoughts!

The five of us have been working in this direction. We built a collection of 20K trails through Bluesky. Browsing through them reveals how big and diverse social media really is (skytrails.org)

Now, we have language models—and the opportunity to return to a vision of the internet that prioritizes agency and freedom of movement through an underlying infrastructure of trails.

So what happened to this vision? What Bush didn't realize is that the rate of information produced would far exceed what could be "trailblazed" by humans. And until recently, computers couldn't process text well enough to do this.

The idea goes back even earlier. Vannevar Bush, in his landmark essay As We May Think (1945), imagined "a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record."

An illustration from Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974). It depicts hypertext (interconnected information) and reads "EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED."

The key idea was hypertext: interconnected pieces of information. Ted Nelson, who wrote in his 1974 manifesto that “the purpose of computers is human freedom,” imagined a “grand hypertext … in which you may read in all the directions you wish to pursue.”

The early Web emphasized a kind of interaction quite different from social media. People jumped from page to page, freely traversing the world of information (rather than passively consuming it). This ethos is embodied in names like Internet Explorer. Browsers were for browsing.

From Feeds to Trails To design the future of social media, rethink the interface before the algorithm.

🧵 On social media, we feel trapped in “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” Often, we see this as a problem with the algorithm. Our new essay argues the problem is the feed interface itself: it constrains our movement—all we can do is scroll. We lay out an alternative vision: