The World Wide Web is called a web for good reason. We navigate this web of interconnected websites by clicking hyperlinks and opening new tabs in tools called browsers. This kind of browsing experience is defined by its open-endedness and interwoveness; every website we visit becomes a step along a path.

With the rise of social media, we lost touch with this vast trail network. Rather than creating a social web where our trails got woven onto a shared map, they were instead paved over by information superhighways: the algorithmic feeds. Hyper-scaled social media platforms reduced the vast web of interconnected pages into a stripped down ad-ridden and attention-extracting monoculture. Our online experiences became reduced to the flick of a finger, the doom scroll.

With the rise of open social protocols, like ATProto, we have an opportunity to leave these misaligned profit-driven and ad-based feeds behind and rediscover the magic of shared knowledge trails.

what might that look like?

In this lightning talk I’ll share insights and lessons my team and I have learned from building Semble, a community knowledge garden built on ATProto. Semble is an open social network based on knowledge trails rather than feeds. I’ll explore what trail-based social networks of the future could look like, grounded in features and use-cases we’ve uncovered while building Semble.

In the transition from feeds back to trails, we aim to co-create an open social web that centres the value of human attention and sparks a new era of collective wisdom.

This lightning talk is an invitation to co-create this future together.

It will similar to a prior lightning talk we gave at ATmosphereConf 2026, adapted for DWeb Camp.