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MEDLab recently concluded the Open Social Incubator, a 6-month long peer-learning program bringing together community builders from around the world united by a shared curiosity about open social media. 10 participants, selected from nearly 200 applicants, convened monthly to explore the possibilities and pitfalls of creating online spaces that are user owned and governed, designed to be accountable to the people who use and rely on them.

The topics that we touched on in the Incubator were varied. An early session featured guest speakers Rudy Fraser (establishing Blacksky on Bluesky), Christine Lemmer-Webber (a developer of the ActivityPub protocol underpinning Mastodon), and Rabble (an early Twitter engineer now building Nostr) discussing the potential of different technical infrastructure for various forms of open-source social spaces. As cohort members began to formalize their plans for creating their own open social communities, discussions expanded to include topics like:

• How do you convene community online in ways that are both efficient and caring?
• What makes new online spaces seductive – i.e., worth tolerating unfamiliarity and the effort of onboarding?
• How can friction draw our attention to the ways in which mainstream platforms are disempowering?
• How do you balance inclusivity with privacy and safety?
• What moderation practices facilitate the kind of social environment your community needs, and how does open-source infrastructure support this?

As the six-month process unfolded, we waded through the joys and difficulties of building something new. Participants wrestled with the stubborn forces that bind users to centralized platforms and navigated the messy, often invisible labor of community stewardship. Along the way, technical hurdles surfaced too: one participant faced recurring internet outages while setting up a self-hosted Mastodon server; others balanced the demands of daily life—jobs, caregiving, creative projects—with the steady work of tending to their communities. We tackled these challenges together, but they remain live questions for anyone engaged in building open social worlds.

As one way of continuing to engage with these questions, we're making a virtual publication. Over the course of the Incubator, the cohort coalesced around a shared project: the creation of an Open Social "Cookbook." This living publication will gather recipes—practical, adaptable instructions for launching and sustaining open social spaces—distilled from the conversations and practical exercises we've shared over the last six months.

In an era where social media platforms' enclosure and extraction poses a mounting threat, the Open Social Incubator offered some practical insight into other ways forward. Like any recipe worth making, the process, while messy at times, is vibrant and suffused with hope. The Open Social Cookbook will be published in the coming months as a free, open-access resource. Stay tuned for its release—and for possible opportunities to get involved.

The Incubator was made possible thanks to support from the Mask Network Academy and Colorado ReWild. It was stewarded by Adina Glickstein, Antoinette Kendrick, libi striegl, and Nathan Schneider.