ONA26 Unconference - Session 4: Cut the Algorithm: Why Your Newsroom Should Run Its Own Social Server

Speaker: Evol Johnson, Communitv

Every platform pivot costs newsrooms audience. Facebook killed reach. X imploded. Now we're all on Bluesky — but we're still tenants on someone else's platform. Bluesky's AT Protocol lets any organization run its own server for about $30 a month. Your reporters get handles like @maria.yournewsroom.org. You control the feed algorithm. You own the audience data. In this session we'll break down what it actually takes to stand up a newsroom-owned social server — the costs, the tradeoffs, the minimum viable setup for a team of five with no engineering budget — and decide together whether this is for you.

Unconference sessions are attendee-generated and voted-upon programming that are less formal and require less planning than traditional conference offerings. Running in sequential hour blocks from 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM and 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM on Wednesday, April 1, these open-source concepts will close the ONA26 conference.