Blacksky isn’t like Black Twitter — and it doesn’t need to be

If you live in certain internet neighborhoods long enough, the rules of governance, no matter how absurd or toxic, become second nature.

On X, the site formerly known as Twitter, harassment, racism and hate speech have become so uniquely poisonous under Elon Musk’s ownership, that if you identify as black, female, queer, trans, or disabled, you’re almost guaranteed to have a target on your back. The warring environment gave rise to a dark kind of gallows humor. Even fans of the platform would call it “the place of hell”. But people stayed, largely because it didn’t seem like a viable alternative. The themes were strange. Mastodon was complicated. For a long time Blueski was too quiet– until something went wrong when the US election came and went and people had had enough.

Millions of users have ditched Bluesky in the past few months. And while the platform isn’t perfect, many newcomers are baffled by the platform’s disarmingly optimistic vibe. “Trying to find my humor niche here,” @lvteef posted on Dec. 3, “because right now this app is very millennial happy, good luck.”

“I don’t care where the misery is?” sick jokes? the hate in this dance?’ answered @knoxdotmp3.

It’s clear that some of us are struggling to ignore the trauma of X. At the same time, longtime Bluesky users also have questions about the future of the platform and whether the environment they’ve created can withstand the influx of new people. It feels like social media is turning a page and opening a new chapter. Only this time, the architects of this not-so-distant future are determined to fix it.

One of these vanguards is Rudy Fraser30-year-old technologist from New York with a background in corporate IT and community organizing. He is the creator of Blackskyon personalized feed and moderation service which is slowly becoming the main route for many black Bluesky users. If the phenomenon sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Since the first glimmers of internet exploration, black people have sought their own online oasis. It was true for NetNoir in 1996 and lately on Black Twitterthe epicenter and engine of internet culture in the 2010s. And where these experiments failed – NetNoir failed and Black Twitter, while still very active, lost some semblance of protection when Musk bought Twitter – Fraser wanted to succeed. “Moderation,” he told me in a recent video call, “is a key part of it.”

Fraser has a knack for bringing people together. In addition to IT consulting, he has worked as a lead organizer with We The People NYC, a grassroots charity, since 2022. and has also created Papertree, a digital peer-to-peer tool that allows large groups of people to share money. “I wanted to create a community bank account for all of Bed-Stuy,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. When that didn’t work out, Fraser reassessed.

It was the spring of 2023, shortly after the Bluesky invites started going out, and Fraser snagged one during beta testing (he was user 51,921). He was already involved in some Web3-related projects and was interested in data ownership issues. Bluesky’s mission—to be a decentralized social media platform and truly transform the social internet into a self-governing ecosystem—attracted him for similar reasons. “The whole idea of ​​the AT protocol and the promise of an algorithmic personalized feed seemed like a great thing to go for,” he said.