Researching Prosocial Design with Decentralized Social Platforms

​Large social media platforms hold power over data and resources, making studying prosocial design interventions through independent research an increasingly difficult task. However, the growing influx of decentralized social platforms (e.g., Mastodon, Bluesky) which aspire towards distributed servers, transparency, and user agency, create an opportunity for independent research

​Our speaker for this session, Will Schulz, studies this very technology to understand how decentralization creates new, exciting avenues to study prosocial design innovations. With the open web components of decentralization, researchers can customize feeds and structure affordances to study a variety of research questions. It also creates new ways to collect and analyze data, without the permissions of a centralized authority. Understanding how to study human behavior on these platforms also gives us a pulse for how users are interacting in these new online spaces.

​Join us for this session to explore how the decentralization of social platforms is changing the online ecosystem and the doors it opens to studying important social issues.

​PDN Prosocial Design Research Workshops are an informal meeting space where we will gather for a one-hour, interactive online session to learn more about new work in this area. Each workshop session begins with a presentation, followed by a Q&A that also encourages constructive feedback. We’ll end with breakout groups to dig deeper and build connections around our session’s topic.