arXiv subjects

Theia Henderson

Publications and source records attributed to Theia Henderson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Social.Wiki: A Web Held in Common

Many of the websites people depend on have owners whose interests are not fully aligned with their users. We address the root of this problem by presenting a reimagining of the web where sites are not owned at all but are instead collaboratively produced like Wikipedia articles. We call the system Social$.$Wiki because it supports the co-creation of interactive social sites, such as those for microblogging, messaging, dating, gaming, ride sharing, and so on. With off-the-shelf AI tools, people with little or no programming experience can edit these sites to better reflect the needs and preferences of their communities. Social$.$Wiki builds on ideas from collaborative malleable software systems such as Webstrates, but is designed for public participation rather than use only within small, trusted groups. To this end, Social$.$Wiki includes governance to mitigate conflict. To accommodate diverse governance preferences, our model of "plural governance" lets people independently choose the policies that determine which edits to a site they see. Social$.$Wiki also implements a granular security model to protect personal data in a malleable environment. Complementing the decentralized design and governance of Social$.$Wiki sites, both site edits and within-site data are stored on Graffiti, a decentralized infrastructure, decoupling the ownership of underlying servers from the ownership of sites. We evaluate Social$.$Wiki through case studies that demonstrate the range of sociotechnical structures it supports, as well as through deployments at a hackathon and in the wild.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges

People care about climate change, injustice, and humanitarian crises. The challenge is not apathy but capacity: sustained engagement with large-scale problems is psychologically costly, and social media architecture often amplifies awareness while providing few pathways to meaningful action. The result is rising distress, overwhelm, and disengagement -- particularly among young people who encounter global suffering through platforms designed for attention capture rather than constructive response. This workshop examines how social technology design shapes the conditions for sustained engagement with societal challenges. Drawing on Tronto's care ethics framework and research in moral psychology and platform studies, we ask why caring at scale is difficult and how social media can both exacerbate and potentially mitigate this difficulty. Tronto's framework shows that good care requires more than awareness: it demands responsibility, competence, and community. Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase. We invite researchers and designers to identify platform designs that deplete or support the capacity to care, and to develop design directions for sustainable care: engagement that people can maintain over time without burning out.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications

Most social applications, from Twitter to Wikipedia, have rigid one-size-fits-all designs, but building new social applications is both technically challenging and results in applications that are siloed away from existing communities. We present Graffiti, a system that can be used to build a wide variety of personalized social applications with relative ease that also interoperate with each other. People can freely move between a plurality of designs -- each with its own aesthetic, feature set, and moderation -- all without losing their friends or data. Our concept of total reification makes it possible for seemingly contradictory designs, including conflicting moderation rules, to interoperate. Conversely, our concept of channels prevents interoperation from occurring by accident, avoiding context collapse. Graffiti applications interact through a minimal client-side API, which we show admits at least two decentralized implementations. Above the API, we built a Vue plugin, which we use to develop applications similar to Twitter, Messenger, and Wikipedia using only client-side code. Our case studies explore how these and other novel applications interoperate, as well as the broader ecosystem that Graffiti enables.

cs.SI↗