Traditional social media has failed. Generating massive negative consequences and unmet promises. It is time to move beyond them, and make a leap toward a new era of more open, transparent, healthier, and structurally better applications.

The next wave of social media will not come from traditional approaches, but from new decentralized open technologies, different organizational models, and a better overall sociopolitical framework.

The platform-centric worldview promoted by traditional big tech have enshittified the social media ecosystem. We need to return to the internet's original ideals: decentralization, users, protocols, and real connections.

We need a new place for public discussion: to debate, share, have fun, and encounter one another. Inspired by a genderless internationalization of the word "plaza" (town square), Plaz aims to be that space as a next-generation microblogging (multiformat) platform, and a leap towards the new social media ecosystem.

Social media's problems are widely recognized, yet many emerging "alternatives" simply copy and paste (brandwash) the traditional platforms structures and the business models behind them. Plaz is not that. Instead of implementing pseudo-solutions, it is built on novel approaches that rethink the problem through new technologies and better organizational models.

Not everything should be for-profit or managed by a few, especially places that aim to be neutral digital spaces for gathering and connection. In a broader sense, their very nature is public.

Plaz is a product of its own community of users: no founders, no shareholders, and no billionaires behind it. Just dedicated compromised users, workers, and collaborators building a better well-functioning platform-space.

Unlike traditional all-in-one (glued) architectures, Plaz separates the key elements of the system: user data spaces, streams and relays, moderation, feed generation, and algorithms can all be changed and customized through user preferences or alternative eleemnts in the ecosystem.

Plaz does not store user data. Instead, it fetches it from Portable Data Storages (PDSs), which belong to the users themselves and can be used across a wide range of compatible independent applications and platforms.

Unlike traditional siloed platforms, where users can only see the content of a single space, Plaz works through the ActivityPub protocol and bridges that make it possible to view content from other spaces and applications directly.

No owners or unaccountable CEOs define what the platform is. Its community of users does that instead, through participatory action using digital democracy tools.

No hidden source code or algorithms, no unchecked decision-making processes, and no shady organizational accounting. Transparency should be built into the structure from the ground up.

Plaz combines the global scope with the local level existance of life. That means balancing the broad-macro perspective, with what happens at the nearer level. Through a multi-layer approach.