Built on the AT Protocol, Blacksky isn’t tethered to the Bluesky app or team. Founder Rudy Fraser is carving out an independent, replicable model—one made possible by the openness of a decentralized web.
What if your social media experience weren’t controlled by an algorithm or a corporation, but by your community? That’s the idea behind Blacksky, a decentralized project built on the AT Protocol — the same infrastructure powering Bluesky.
Though their names contain the same suffix, it’s important to know that Blacksky is not hitching its wagon to the Bluesky app, team or platform. The community, helmed by founder and CEO Rudy Fraser, is charting an independent and ideally replicable path, the kind that’s only possible in an open-source ecosystem.
In this episode of Dot Social, Fraser takes host Mike McCue under the hood of Blacksky’s infrastructure, philosophy, and future plans.
Highlights include discussions of:
Mentioned in this episode:
🔎 You can find Rudy at @rudyfraser.com.
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @mmccue.bsky.social.
🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new beta from the people at Flipboard. https://about.surf.social/
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
What if your social media feed wasn't controlled by an algorithm or a corporation, but by your community? That's the idea behind Blacksky, a decentralized project built on the app protocol, the same one that's powering Bluesky.
But make no mistake, Blacksky is not hitching its wagon to the Bluesky app. The community is charting an independent path, the kind that's only possible in a decentralized environment.
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement, someone who sees the better versus tremendous potential and understand that this could be the internet's next wave.
Today, Mike's talking to Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser, a technologist organizer and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Study. Fraser launched Blacksky in 2023 as a response to the challenges faced by Black users on traditional social platforms inspired by mutual aid systems and philosophies.
Fraser and his team don't just strive to create a safe, welcoming space for their community. They want to create a blueprint for how other mid-sized groups can build and sustain themselves in the internet's next era. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Rudy Fraser, welcome to Dot Social. It is so exciting to talk to you. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. And welcome back from the ATmosphere conference. I wasn't able to be there, but some of my team was, and they raved about it, and I got a chance to watch the talk that you gave there, and it was, I think, one of the most insightful talks I've heard so far about the future of the social, web and community building, and the work you're doing, and how you how you communicated it at atmosphere, I thought was amazing.
Rudy Fraser:
Yeah, thank you. And yeah, I was really trying to, I was trying to cause some trouble. I think it wasn't, didn't come across as it wasn't as as rebellious in the end as I wanted it to be. But I think it was good. I think people took inspiration from it. I essentially was trying. My talk was titled, beyond horseless carriages, building community in the decentralized era, because I think app protocol poses a good opportunity for building on what I call kind of internet forum size, communities, subreddit size, the one to 2 million sized of user base, which is where Blacksky is right now, we have, we've the feed has been used by over 1.5 million folks. And, you know, Bluesky, they're, they're paving the way for a billion people on the network, like a Facebook size social network, and I think the fediverse is very focused on, you know, couple hundreds, 1000s of folks, but this, this space of a few million is, is, I think there's lots to explore there. So I wanted to be like, Hey, y'all, you can, you can try to, you can do things besides just, you know, build like web. I was almost at web two. You can do besides build like a tick tock alternative, which the Tick Tock alternatives are great. But, you know, I want to see more than that, just those things being pursued. I want the weird old Internet back. And I think there's a you can do that on AT Protocol.
Mike McCue:
The whole concept of the horseless carriage, I thought was a very apt, you know, thing to raise to the to all the developers in the room, you know, we do have this sort of copying. You just, it's a it's a clone of x, clone of, you know, whatever, just with new technology. And while there's a lot of really cool things about that it doesn't really enable anything fundamentally new until we start actually building that stuff. And that was what I was really excited about, when, when you were talking is that you're thinking about, Okay, well, what do we build after the horseless carriage? How do we? How do we actually, what do we do with all this new technology? And one of the, and I'm really excited to get into that and talk a little bit about also your blog post on on how, you know, the internet really should be a collection of autonomous many autonomous communities. I thought that was also a fantastic blog post, by the way. I'll say for you know, people listening, if you want to understand the future of the social web. This is a must read blog post and a must watch talk, and we'll have the links in the show notes here. Really, really insightful stuff before we get into that, though, I wanted to try to get a little bit more insight from you in terms of how you're thinking about this philosophically you. Talk about the work you're doing on mutual aid groups, and thinking about mutual aid, could you explain that a little bit more, for people who aren't familiar with it.
Rudy Fraser:
The way I even got started in kind of all this stuff, is I spent about 10 years in the enterprise tech, IT kind of space, and the company I was at had a they had exited, and so I had a bit of some runway, and I was like, I'm gonna go out and, you know, do the startup founder thing was what I always wanted to do. And in doing so I felt like I tried the I tried the traditional, like, you know, startup advice kind of stuff. And it didn't feel like it was, it didn't feel right for me. Feel right for me. And I felt like I kind of took the approach of, you know, if most startups fail, most of this stuff fails, then I might as well just, I might as well fail in a way that feels good, in the way that, you know, I enjoy, enjoy the ride. And so I was like, Well, what feels most fulfilling to me? And that was always, it always kind of came back to community. And so one of the first ideas I pursued was like, you know, I really, I came into leadership in tech during the George Floyd uprisings, and I was, you know, I was doing all hands presentations and managing folks. And then I was going out right after and protesting. And while I was protesting, I was seeing these community fridges pop up. And these were initially, like a free a fridge you can just walk up to, it'll be outside of, like a deli or a clothing store, and then you could just take anything from it. Or you can leave. You can leave. You can drop off food. Or you can take food from it. You can it had this whole ethos of, you know, take a share, what you can take, what you need. And I was like, those are super cool. How come they don't, you know, it's been a couple years now, you know, post 2020, how come those aren't everywhere? And that led me to learning about, okay, who's, who are the folks who are setting up these community fridges? What are the challenges with them? They must have had some kind of challenge if they didn't end up, you know, scaling, right? And so what, who, and what was the philosophy behind those? And that's how I learned about mutual aid and these mutual aid organizations. And it was really interesting to me because, you know, I was trying to find my space in that, because it really spoke to me. And I found that these groups were really cool. They were horizontal, voluntary organizations, non hierarchical and and they also had some of them, you know, the ones that got pretty big, they got there were these groups, these informal groups, right, that formed around trying to get food to neighbors, like deliver food to folks who were immunocompromised during during the peak of the COVID pandemic, and they were delivering groceries to folks, and they were doing like, hundreds of these deliveries. And so they got, they were getting tons of donations. They're getting hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And then you had this, like, volunteer group of people who are going out and delivering, delivering food to folks. And they had to have systems to organize this on they were using open collective to collect the funds and do approvals. They were using signal group chats. They were or Slack or Discord for communication. Some of them had they were using airtable to like, gather like you know, resources to sign up folks like you, you, you're a family of three. You need this, you need that, and then building automations into airtable. They had GitHub repos with like with, with some of the like automations that they had built. So I thought all of this was really fascinating and, and that's how I ended up joining a local mutual aid group called We the People NYC and and, and I just kept finding as I was doing, as I was getting deeper into all this, it really the ethos behind it really spoke to me, and especially from, I think some people come to mutual aid, from a political ideology standpoint, there's some like, kind of, like European anarchism, kind of philosophy. But for me, it was, it felt a lot like how I grew up in I'm born and raised New Yorker, but I'm first generation American. My family is from Guyana in South America, and I always heard about my family's like, like, cultural practices, like sus are a thing that that folks do, where you have a group of friends, you all pool money together, and that one person gets that pile of money as like a windfall, and then you could use that to invest and and so all these kind of communal practices. And just how, like for me, growing up in New York, we had, like we faced food insecurity, housing insecurity, and I really felt like my neighborhood took care of me. And so this being able to see that from an early age, like, how communities can really coalesce around any problem I feel like, and start to figure it out and take care of each other. Yeah, I was like, How can I put my spin on this? How can I bring my you know. I there's this writer, Ruha Benjamin, she has in one of her works. I feel like she talks about, like, you know, anyone can participate in movement work. You just find your plot of land, and you just like, you just, you know, you work your plot. And I feel like technology is my plot. And so I was like, I'm going to try to get in where I fit in this. And so I draw lots of parallels in, in how mutual aid organizations work to open source and and how, like a social media group like Blacksky can can kind of build so that's kind of the where a lot of that philosophy kind of came from.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, and the concept of AT Proto and decentralized social media effectively enables the communities themselves to be in charge of the platform that they're on. Right is, that's the vision, and that's the thing that I think has been really amazing to see what you've done, you've effectively, you know, leveraged with, with AT Proto you've built effectively, a sort of, I guess, kind of Twitter esque community, but that's, you know, which can be viewed in Bluesky, but it's really owned By and powered by you and your team and the, you know, sort of influenced by that community, which we, you know, obviously, we've never had that before, right? It's, you know, it used to be, you'd had to lobby Twitter X to go, you know, make some change or handle. You know, they just created, you know, models that basically were the same for everyone, and they, you know, they really were not community specific. And I think that's the thing that has been really pretty amazing to see what you've done with Blacksky.
Rudy Fraser:
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the way and, and so what's been really interesting to me is that there we are. AT protocol is a decentralized protocol, and the way that I frame it, for folks who are unfamiliar, is that app protocol unbundled social media, so that each part of it can be ran by a different organization, so the the company that holds your data and is what you use when you log in, that's one company, the app that you downloaded on your phone, that's another company. The feed that you're scrolling and the feeds that you can switch to are different companies. And then if you encounter some harmful content you want to report it, you can choose which company you report that to as your moderator. And so with Blacksky, a lot of what we've built is building a lot of that from scratch. We're owning and hosting different parts of that. So we built our own personal data server. We built our we started with a custom feed. We run a moderation service with a eight person volunteer mod team that are also compensated. And and we're building our own relay. We're building all this infrastructure. And I find what's really cool with with Blacksky as a community that is different from the average Bluesky user is that folks understand implicitly the decentralized nature of of app protocol as a Blacksky user, and they they pitch. I even heard today from someone, I was speaking to someone from free our feeds, and they're like, oh, this person was like, they're they, they're a community member of Blacksky. They they contribute money, they support it, they understand it. They explain the moderation, the feed that. And I was like, I don't even know who this person is. I probably should as as they are paying and supporting, supporting us, but, um, but yeah, and I've but there's 100 stories of that there's in that blog post at the very end, I include one of my favorite threads of someone unprompted, like I didn't ask them. I just they tagged me in the post, but they were explaining to folks that Blacksky is like an app within an app, and so like, folks implicitly understand that Blacksky could not exist in a centralized app, and so it's, you know, decentralization. It's like, you don't have to for Blacksky. We don't have to pitch anyone on decentralization, because they just know that there would never be a place there. There was no other app that would ever do something like this would allow a black community to own their own infrastructure and, like, set their own moderation rules and and do whatever they want, you know, so it's that's super powerful to me, that, like, people just implicitly getting the value of and the benefit of building on a decentralized protocol.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, sometimes when there's these new protocols that come along, or new standards, people say, well, what's the killer app? Right? What's the thing that's going to make all of this, you know, new technology popularized, right? What I think is so powerful about what you've been, what you've really tapped into, is that it's not about the killer app anymore. Right? It's about the great communities that people can join. Those are what are enabled by this protocol. And in fact, you can experience this community and participate in this community from a number of different apps, right? Doesn't matter. And, and that is the thing that is, I just think, when you look at, you know, with your blog post about, you know, how you see the social web, really, as a collection of, you know, all these different autonomous communities, loosely, even loosely organized, right? And sort of porous so people can sort of explore other communities. They don't have to just use one app, just for this community, right? I think those, those insights that you are having as you've been building this community and building the technology to support it, are are really it's what's so exciting to me is that that is the first time I can say I've seen somebody actually thinking past the horseless carriage, actually thinking into, really where the future is going here and building it. When you look at the the work you're doing for, for enabling these communities at or, I guess it's you think of Blacksky as one community. Or that do you have now sort of sub communities within Blacksky,
Rudy Fraser:
There are sub communities for sure. So there's like a Blacksky travel, Blacksky, like gardening, people, people have reached out. There's black med sky, black edu sky, blackadamics. And so we host those feeds as well under us. And folks reach out every now and then for doing additional feeds, one of the interesting ones that is kind of TBD is like, once if Spark or Skylight pop off, will it be black Spark, or will it still just be Blacksky? I'm leaning towards just keeping it Blacksky, because that was kind of the whole point to me, is like you keep the community across the different apps, yeah?
Mike McCue:
And you're, the Blacksky Video feed is fantastic, right? That, there you go, right? That's that. That is that, you know, the fact that we've been building communities based on media type, you know, is crazy, when you really think about it, right?
Rudy Fraser:
You're the same person. You probably know this. Maybe, maybe it's different, only in that maybe this person started, maybe they're younger, and they weren't on Twitter as much, and they didn't build a file on Twitter, but they built it over here. Maybe there's that distinction, but ultimately, like, there's really no separation, and you it's it sucks, and tie your community and identity to a corporate entity, right?
Mike McCue:
Yeah, that's, yeah, exactly. You know, communities have been fragmented and held back by the fact that they've had to organize around a particular media type or a particular app or a particular platform. This is one of the first times I've seen where it's really independent of those things, and leveraging the strength of those things too, right? You know, particularly from a moderation point of view. So when you think so, one of the thoughts you have in your blog post is this concept of these sort of dotted line communities, the you know, in other words, you don't necessarily post directly into Blacksky, like, it's not like a Facebook group in that sense, right? Or it's not really like a subreddit. But, you know, I heard you say you kind of know when you're posting that it's going to show up in Blacksky on that feed. Explain a little bit more about how you see these communities being these dotted line communities.
Rudy Fraser:
Yeah, I think the dotted line community is important. I think both are important. Actually. I think the whole like dark social the social networking that happens, the relationships that build that are not necessarily public and and like, you know, they're not like marketers can't find them like a discord or a private Facebook group or or a group chat. I think those are important. We actually, I actually have found that Blacksky often one of the top two requests is that kind of space for Blacksky. And so that's something we're actively working on. It's a project called cipher, and you'll still log in with your Bluesky identity, which is this goes into the value of the portable identity. You just use OAuth, and then you'll be able to you'll be able to make the public posts from this other app, but then you'll also make posts that are only visible to other people in your community. So in this case, other folks who are in Blacksky. Because I do think the, yeah, the private spaces are important in addition. And then the I think the public spaces are valuable as well, because I explained that I kind of view like custom feeds, like a magazine, and that you and the other important thing, I guess, too, is that, like you, not all of your posts will end up on. On the Blacksky feed, because there is stuff that we automatically remove, and we do, kind of do some automated curation and filtering, and then what shows up on the chronological feed may be different than what shows up on the trending feed. So you never necessarily guaranteed, but you do know that you have an awareness that you are a part of this community I mentioned in the blog post that I want to see, I want to be able to give people like badges and kind of a community, some kind of community validation, so that you're not just, I want to get beyond you use a hashtag, you know. I want to get us beyond hashtags. I want to get to we're now at custom fees and servers that we own. And then I want like ways to display that, so that you can really feel like you can, you can, kind of wave the Blacksky flag, because some folks put it in their bio, put it in their handles, they say that the governor of Blacksky. They say they're the one person she does a lot of she does daily. I think her name is Nah. She does daily. Kind of question answer posts that folks respond to in the quote posts. And that's very specific to Blacksky. Don't see anyone else on, on on the app doing that, and and she, like, she calls herself. Her Display Name is Nye, the foremother of Blacksky. So I think, like, I want people to be able to, yeah, keep engaging with the community, and feel, feel like they they own a part of it themselves. And I think there's cool, interesting ways that that the protocol allows for for for us to do that. And then I think about like being a part of multiple communities. So being a part of, like Blacksky and North sky, North sky is is confining in in taking inspiration from what we did with Blacksky, and they're doing it for the LGBTQIA+ community, and I think that's really cool. And so you can be, and I think you should be able to be a part of multiple communities, represent both all and participate in the ones that you want to. So that's some of the stuff that I think I'm seeing.
Mike McCue:
And is there an explicit way to join the community?
Rudy Fraser:
With Blacksky, it's using the hashtag, add to Blacksky,
Mike McCue:
…to add your account, to add your profile, and then you decide you have a you decide whether you're going to enable that person to join the community, or are they automatically added?
Rudy Fraser:
They're automatically added. And so we want people to feel free. I didn't want to get to the point where I'm like, policing blackness and so people, but the community is very vigilant, so I wouldn't recommend anyone to try and just like, you know, we catch all that right away, and if it looks like abuse, we have, we built ways to ban people from viewing the feed, right? So there have been who like, try to use the hashtag they join, and then they try to spew hateful messages. We have automated filtering that you know you won't even if you use, like, the hard rsler Like, it will appear in the feed. But then, if we retroactively, like, this is where the the content moderation and the custom feeds come into play because we also run a mod service, and a lot of the folks who use the custom feed, they also use the moderation service, to the point where some folks they only use, they only interact with, like Blacksky, and they refer to the app as Blacksky. That's why things are good opportunity to then create a Blacksky app. But, but, yeah, so if, so, if they're infiltrators on the feed, then people will report it to the Blacksky moderation service. And we have, we have our own kind of custom workflows in the back end, where we get a specific we have a specific queue and a specific alert if someone is if a if content is reported, and it's showing on the Blacksky feed, because that's a bit more urgent. It's getting amplified to all the people viewing the feed. I get on those right away. I get I put, I put those. I get to those quicker, for example, than if it's just somewhere else on the Bluesky app where hate is reported.
Mike McCue:
Yeah. So, so what have you learned is, you've been in the middle of all of this, you know, you've been thinking about, you know, okay, where, where should AT Proto go? Where, Why should, where should moderation go? How should we be thinking about these community models, you know, on the social web? What are some of your top learnings there that that you're excited about pursuing?
Rudy Fraser:
Some of the top learnings. I feel like that we're pursuing, I think, the the private spaces and building beyond the Bluesky app. And that's something that I'm that I'm really interested in, because I'm I find more and more that blue skies corporate interests are maybe just naturally diverging from the communities and ecosystems interests, and that's just the way it's going to be. I think we had a lot of conversations over atmosphere, atmosphere conference about some of those things, like, Will Bluesky be the browser for app protocol where we all just build our lexicons, and Bluesky will be the distribution mechanism? Them for it. And so, because there is still an adoption problem, like, I don't know that the switching problem has been solved yet, necessarily. Like, can you, you know, app protocol has 35 million users. Can Can you spin up a new app and get, like, 10 million of those users overnight? I don't know that that has necessarily been solved yet. And so for me, I view it as like, that's not even necessarily my concern. I'm more like, interested in like, Will Blacksky the community come over to the next thing that we build? And I think that is true. And so, yeah, we're looking to build that, build out that, that kind of private space, and build out the features that we don't think Bluesky will build out. So like the community badges or or like, you know, there's some cool stuff that folks have built around more democratic forms of governance, around moderation, that has been really cool. So Natalie Davis built this tool called Safe Skies for us. And so right now, I'm the only one that could take stuff off of the feed, and so I want to make that because that's not necessarily like moderation governance. Like when Bluesky designed moderation, they were more thinking of like content that gets reported to you. And we've done we flip that on its head in a couple ways. One, I view moderation also as like curating the content that gets shown to folks. And so safe skies allows me to promote certain people to moderation roles where they can, they can remove content from the feed. And that's built. That's only made possible because of the custom way, the custom stuff we've built for how our feed works. And then we know the other piece too is like we do automated reporting, so like, anytime a slur is used, like, anywhere on the app, we we can, we can respond to that. So there's kind of those, those those tools, right, that we're building safe skies, the auto reporter cipher is the name. And so we're also wanting to, like, bring that to other groups and other communities. So I think that's the other avenue that we're kind of exploring. So like black skies business model, we are supported via open collective from our own community. It'll be interesting. I think Bluesky is talking about building in, did to, did payments, like a kind of payment rails for app protocol. We'll see how that kind of lands, especially if they end up trying to take a cut on those transactions. We'll see how that goes. But this kind of suite of tools that we're providing could be used by other communities. So we've had folks approach Blacksky to use, you know, help them set up labelers. Help them set up moderation services. Ultimately, like a big thing is that the problem with the decentralized web is, yeah, decentralization is great, and it can great create these, like, cool mechanisms, like being able to have your own community, but the person who's a community builder is not necessarily the same person who can set up a server and do and, like, configure environment variables, and, you know, do the whole deployment process. And so, you know, I think there's an opportunity there for just making that easier for people. And so that's a role that we've kind of stepped in in certain capacities. So hosting services for folks, whether that's, you know, maybe it's we're in conversations with some researchers about building auto reporting services that can detect health misinformation content, and then, kind of like feeding that into a service where they could then reach out to folks to do certain research, certain interventions, or it's like a certain campaign for a foundation, you know, people who have started using labelers as badges, because, you know, they have a badge mechanism, but you could do a labeler that's like, I have, like, a pronoun labeler. So, or it's not my labeler, but I subscribe to the the pronouns labeler, and I click the I hit, like on a post, it said, like this post, if you want to get the he, him label on your profile, and now on all my posts that shows up. So we did something for a group called Schott Foundation for their public school grad labeler, for example. So doing stuff like that, I think is really cool and really fun and so, yeah, so organizations with their own, whatever their interests, are adopting some of these tools to help further whatever their goals. I think that's another cool and interesting opportunity. And then, and then, yeah, lastly, I guess it is around like, yeah, it's these new experiences that folks can can hopefully end up building. I think I'm a big like in that same blog that I use, if you scroll to the end, you can see a bunch of buys from folks, but those aren't comments on the post. Those are replies to a Bluesky thread that looks like comments blog posts. And so I want to see more of that kind of exploration.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, you know, with all this technology, it's easy to lose sight of some of the really powerful kind of first principles that. That can now be applied to communities, right? And one of the, one of the first principles, is you got to care about the people who are in the community. Need to know who they are and trust that you know, you build relationships with those people over time, maybe even across communities. And this idea of a, of a, you know, a did an actual identity that you care about as somebody who is posting. You know, within these communities, you're going to care about your reputation more. You're going to care about other people. You're going to treat them, I think, with more respect over time, as people build these identities and they realize these aren't just like, you know, it's not just another handle on, just another app with, you know, it's like, this is your identity on the social web, yeah, do you feel like that? Is that? Is that something that you feel like is happening yet, or is it happening yet?
Rudy Fraser:
I think there's more to do on that front. I think once people start to do like, the login to other apps with like, I think that's what's been cool about seeing like Skylight look off and because that's just the one I've used. And like they you log in with the Bluesky, I think it needs to be rebranded a little bit so it's not logging with Bluesky. It's maybe log in with atmosphere or app protocol or something to make it more generic. But and then maybe the PDF starts to feel like, more like a home, like a home server, but just more separate, like pulling it out a little bit more from Bluesky, I think will help people feel like, okay, this is an identity that I control when you tie the domains to it. I think that also helps a little bit with that. So there's, there's a little bit, and I've already started thinking about it from this angle of, like, I don't know if it I think what will be interesting is like, what is an anti pattern and what is a maybe a good thing, like reputation scores could be good or bad, depending on how they implemented and how they kind of feed into content moderation or feed rankings and things like that. But it is possible, to your point, because it is, like, a likely going to be a stable identity that someone has, and you do it, and it's done without the Facebook way of like, Hey, you have to upload your ID. You could still be, like, anonymous, but like, well known for like, your your internet persona. And I think that's really cool.
Mike McCue:
A lot of the infrastructure that you're building is designed to give people with those identities or agency
Rudy Fraser:
that that goes into like us, building our custom personal data server, our own own relay we want. We basically the story behind that is just wanting to there's, there's all these, even for the funders that I pitched this on is that, uh, there's all these people who have now identified as being a part of Blacksky. I would hate, I would really hate, for after people made all these tick tock saying that they're like, come to Blacksky, or a part of Blacksky, people like, went on like, CNN saying, like, black Skies is cool thing. People like, for people to I people made custom, a custom logo for us, for Black History Month. I didn't ask anyone to do that. They just did it. And so, like, I would hate for after everyone did all this work and, like, really labor, like, kind of cultural labor, and putting their their names, their names and reputations online, behind something and they didn't even know, probably didn't even know who I was when they were doing that. I don't want that to be taken away by some corporation. I don't even want Blacksky failing. I view Blacksky as a threat, like Blacksky algorithms as a threat to Blacksky the community. And so as I build things, I want it to be I think of both of those failure modes in mind that I want. I really do want the community to outlive either these corporations. And so the infrastructure we're building is so that if Bluesky goes away, we it doesn't even affect us, because we were already building all our own stuff anyways. And hopefully, even if, if I go away, or Blacksky goes away, there's all these people who are a part of the process and creating it. Because we never knew anything closed source. It was always open from the start, and we never really, you know anyone who wants to contribute can contribute. There's this, there's a eco, there's a community and ecosystem that would keep it going.
Mike McCue:
Not only, I think, will that happen in terms of the infrastructure that you're building, but also the ideas that you're putting out there, right? I think, seems to me like you're already influencing some of the roadmap and thinking at Bluesky. And I think for a lot of other product developers, certainly I can speak for myself, like you know, lot of the things that you're doing are very, I think, very prescient for the future of how these products should work. So, yeah, man, you're you're charting the future. You really are. I think that when people start to realize it's about the communities, it's not about the apps, not about the protocols, not about the platform, it's about the communities, and how healthy those communities are, how safe. People feel in those communities. How effective are those communities and what they're trying to do? You know, are the tools and capabilities there to enable things like mutual aid to happen? You know, from an architectural point of view, and as you, as you establish that. I think, you know, not only I think, are you, are you building something that's going to be lasting from an infrastructure point of view, but also from a, you know, how people think of things point of view?
Rudy Fraser:
Yeah, I've been telling folks that, like my, my worst fear, after all, if, uh, well, not my worst fear, but a fear I have is that, after all this, it's just like, like a little Wikipedia entry for Blacksky, the thing that has, like me, has made an impact and made a difference in folks lives. And again, like, all the stuff I said before, like, it can keep going beyond what we got and, and, yeah, I also, yeah, it feels good to it feels really good to be able to put some of these ideals, like into practice, right? Like, it's like, it's not just kind of like one of my own, like personal principles is kind of like, show, don't tell. And so I yeah, all the things that I believe, I hope also come through in the stuff that we build. And I've heard that from folks that, like people kind of jive with with Blacksky, and they get a certain vibe from, from the brand, I guess, from the from the community, from from everything, like every all this stuff that I believe comes through in the work. And so, yeah, I hope it's like, it's not just a superficial, you know, like veneer and then some of the like, open source or or mutual mutualistic principles. It's also, like, built into the into the way that we work.
Mike McCue:
There’s a lot of community builders out there, and there's a lot of developers out there. There's not very many people who do both. And, you know, so that's, I think, something that is I find really inspiring about, you know, the work you're doing, because you're able to learn by doing and then actually build to, you know, address the things that you've learned.
Rudy Fraser:
Another reason why I'm also kind of hopeful for other folks to kind of, I guess, just like, adopt this kind of like way of thinking is we also face challenges that I don't think any I know no one else faces, because I'm the only one that like faces it, and I don't see other people talk about the similar challenges. You know, one of those that I'm curious of how it kind of plays out is, and I'll give this specific example of where it can be a problem, but in like issues between communities. So like, when, if we have, let's say there's another dominant community on the on the platform, that kind of follows the same ways that Blacksky does. We saw early on that they were sometimes like, kind of Blacksky kind of started in, in conflict with with with other users on the Bluesky app. And that's where, like, safety features kind of started getting built from the very beginning, like we built our own blacklist called the Green list, the ban from TV features, from being able to view the feed, all that kind of came very early, because we faced harassment very early. I think it'd be interesting if they're like other communities, and then how, how those communities interact with each other could be, could be interesting. You could kind of see this happening if, like, the fandom community starts up, and then there's like, issues between those two and and how you kind of handle, yeah, we just handle the diplomacy between between those two. A lot of that stuff kind of happens off protocol, and it's just, but it's just, it's, I think it's not really a technical thing. It's just more like how it speaks to the health of the broader platform. And to get really even specific of like, the example I was going to give there is like block lists. So I think Bluesky actually addressed this today. Of block lists being as harassment vectors, they were similar to what we have with the green list. Other folks were doing similar blacklists, and they're being like, we're blocking transphobic people or bigots of some kind, and then you find that, like, they would maybe have, like, half a Blacksky on there at a certain whatever, certain when maybe you could have half a Blacksky on a blacklist. So I think stuff like that will be, will be interesting. It's like how the features that people roll out in the protocol, how they could maybe the anti patterns, and how they, how they, how different communities relate to each other. And then there's intra community stuff that we, we just we also deal with.
Mike McCue:
One of the things you talk about is the importance of trusting people, right? Giving, giving people trust is a lot easier than sort of a trustless world, right? And sort of designing around not trusting anyone, designing around, designing systems around trusting people is a very seems like an incredibly important thing to be thinking through. Yeah,
Rudy Fraser:
I really did, like Dan Holmgren's reference to lazy trust in his presentation, which is basically saying, like, the human has to trust their PDS and has to trust the app that they're that those services are doing what they're supposed to be doing, and the only trustless relationship is between the between the computers. That the computers don't have to trust each other, that's cool, but the human does have to trust those services, and then it's lazy trust, because like, you trust it, and then if it violates your trust, then you have the freedom to move your data to another service, and you it doesn't impact your experience. And so I that is really what I like. And there's actually this New Yorker article that came out that I kind of disagree with parts of the language of how it used, how it did this, where it kind of framed that Bluesky doesn't have to worry. It doesn't have to police free speech, because services like Blacksky would do. And I a, you know, I don't like police being referenced anywhere near or my work. But it's also not necessarily policing free speech, because you still, you still have freedom of speech, you just don't have freedom of reach, and so the listener gets to choose what service how they receive that content, and that's done through the custom feeds, and that's done through the moderation services. And even if someone is trusting Blacksky with that mod moderation, they have the option of choosing like do they ignore the labels we apply like they could. You know, you could, maybe you automatically hide anything we label as anti black, but you show a warning label for misogynoir. The user still has a choice there, and it is lazy trust. And then if they don't like our moderation, you know, if they disagree with most of it, then they can just stop using our moderation, right? Sometimes, there's been folks who are like, like, non Blacksky users who use our moderation service, and they're like, why did you label such and such content? I'm like, but you're not necessarily our intended audience. Like you don't see the harm here, because you're not the one who would be harmed. And so, so yeah, and so that person has the freedom to like, if you keep disagreeing with us, then you could just not use our service. So I think that's kind of like, I really like that, that lazy trust model, where you can trust us up until the point where you don't want to anymore, and then you're, you're not locked in.
Mike McCue:
You can, you can migrate this point that you mentioned earlier around how do we enable these different kinds of communities that are moderated in different ways to not just wall themselves off? I mean, if that's what they want to do, that, of course, is their choice. They can do that. But there's also a lot of value in these communities being able to, you know, engage with each other. They may have different moderation standards from one community to another community, right? Um, but you want to announce, but you still want to enable the ability for people to communicate, right? And so that is, that's a fascinating problem to try to solve.
Rudy Fraser:
The other number two behind private spaces, complaint that we get from from Blacksky users is that there's too much sexual content in the feed after a certain time. And one of the ways I've tried to address that is listening to. So there's the fire hose that people know about that like that's where all the posts and follows and stuff came from, and that's how you can build a custom feed. Each moderation service has their own fire hose as well. So we started listening to the Bluesky fire hose and anything that they label as sexual content, because they use AI for that will store that label in our database, and then when you're viewing the Blacksky, feed anything that was labeled as sexual by Bluesky, we just won't show and so you can kind of expand that to like any other community, as if you want to remove anti black content, you could subscribe to the Blacksky moderation service. And so there's It also enables this kind of coordination behind communities, and then that plays into the feeds that you build all this stuff. So I think there's, there's really, there's really cool possibilities. So another way that we're trying to help with that is like we're trying to build a moderation relay where you can just go to, you know, it's black skies relay website, you know, subscribe to that, and that's going to spit out all the moderation labels from the entire network to make that really easy for people to do. But yeah, I think there's, there's all this, like, cool protocol level stuff that enables collaboration and coordination between communities. And really, you. Enables more user agency, like I do, like that, that phrase giving people more agency
Mike McCue:
In your blog post, you had what looked like, I don't know if this was a mock up that you did, or this is actually something that's being built into safe skies, but the ability, for example, to say anyone can reply, or just my followers, can the people I follow can reply? Or just people on Blacksky could reply to a post. I thought that was a very interesting idea.
Rudy Fraser:
Yeah, I would. So this goes back into the like Bluesky as a browser, or Bluesky as the micro blogging site, because there are features that I would like to see built that better capitalize on some of these other things. Like, you know, you already have reply gates, you already have moderation services. It would be cool if you could bring them together, because then, I mean, maybe I don't need to build like the local only posting app, if you can make it so that just within the Bluesky app, you can say, hey, this mod service is, is what I'm delegating to control who can reply to this. And then we can programmatically build stuff. I think you can also do interesting things where like that could allow for more creativity. Like you could build something that you know. You could build something for Lizzo, or like celebrities, where only, only people with a certain maybe you don't use reputation score, but you're like, you know, you find some way to filter out trolls. And so they by default, now they have a troll free interaction experience. I think, I think delegated moderation is a idea I'd like to see explored. It is possible. So it's possible. You could, you then go into like, you can build this on a different app, but it would be cool if, like, Bluesky is already kind of functioning as this distribution mechanism to get you in front of millions of users, if you just already, if they just had that component in there. So delegated moderation is a cool one. The badges, the community verification, is one that I would like to see. I don't believe it's going to happen, but I think that's where we might end up doing that on our own, separately, because that one's easy enough, but yeah, I would like delegated moderation as a future. I think that would be really cool.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, it seems like what you're starting to, you know, talk about, are some kind of best practices for if you're building a client, you should build these capabilities in right to benefit from all of the decentralized moderation that's happening out there on Bluesky. And if you're running a PDS, here are some you know best practices and so on, right? There's like, you know, as we start to think about like, We're not just building Twitter clones. We're building apps that are really designed to enable people to participate and engage with communities in different ways and different lenses, but they don't want to lose all their moderation in the process. That's very, I think, very, very important new phase that we're in, and
Rudy Fraser:
for folks building apps, I think there's a kind of, there's a hesitancy to do moderation. And I think part of my pitch, also in my talk, was that there are weird people like me who like, for a certain community, they are willing to do the moderation for and so, you know, if you maybe, you know, you still need to do some platform moderation, don't get me wrong, but like, if you enable the features that allow communities to moderate themselves, you do kind of a little bit of, maybe what that New York article is getting at is that you do, you get a little bit of a cop out where, like you can, you don't have to do moderation for everybody. You allow people to do moderation for themselves, but those features do have to,
Mike McCue:
Yeah, increasingly, I think if you're building an app here, you really do need to embrace this, this composable moderation work. I mean, it's, it's really hard to, you know, if you've got an identity and you're, you know, just using, looking at the world of the social web through a different app, you know, all of the other elements that you expect to be there around moderation should really travel with you, right? Otherwise, it's gonna make a lot harder to adapt, to adopt other apps, right? You know, if you have to start from scratch on moderation and now you're not safe at all using this app, right? That's a big that's a big issue.
Rudy Fraser:
Yeah, I think there's lots of conversation and debate around like, what carries over right now? I think we're all still in the very early phases of building stuff. So, like, one conversation today was like, should your should new apps like, keep the Bluesky follows? Should your follows from Bluesky be? Like, you know, if I have 32,000 followers on Bluesky, should I have 32,000 followers on skylight or spark? And some people are like, well, you know, maybe I don't want to have the same audience from the other app on this app. But then, if you're creating you're a certain type of personality, then maybe you do want to have like your audience translate to another app or. A medium I think a lot about, like, sensible, practical defaults, which is why I even wanted, you know, we have starter packs on Bluesky. I was like, maybe starter packs should also come with labelers. So like, if you, if you, if you signed up using the Blacksky starter pack, because I can see who signed up with it, and then you followed all the people, and then you subscribe to the Blacksky feeds. Maybe you should also have the labeler in there, so you can also, by default, when you sign up, you get the label or the feed the community of people you followed be a sense of sent better, sensible defaults.
Mike McCue:
I think that's something we have to figure out as a community. And I know you're supporting all this work right now with open collective. That is that the primary fundraising model that you've been using?
Rudy Fraser:
in I got approached by someone who is an early Blacksky user, Mika Okaraki, who is like, what would you know? What would it take for you to work on this full time? And he gave, he gave us our first investment check. And so at that point, I incorporated, and we moved from being fiscally hosted, from open source collective, to being an independent collective. So we still use the open collective app as like, a clear accounting layer. And then folks who do dev work or moderation moderation work can submit expenses, and our supporters can still kind of subscribe to it. So it's no longer a donation model, but more like a Patreon, like GitHub sponsors, subscriber model for folks, and so that that is a big source for us. Folks are giving about like $1,200 a month through that. And then we have also gotten dev grants. So we got a dev grant from skyseed for 30k that's what's supporting our work on the on the relay hired a part time rush dev who just started a couple weeks ago, Utkarsh Gupta, he's working on that. And then, yeah, we've gotten a couple other like, it's been basically a mixture of DEV grants and kind of the angel checks and but for the longest it was just community contributions.
Mike McCue:
What are your thoughts on, ultimately, how this proceeds into the future in terms of monetization. Are you looking at any kind of monetization scenarios, or, you know, things like, for example, how discord works, or advertising, or other kinds of models to help subsidize some of the work that's happening?
Rudy Fraser:
Yeah, ultimately, everything I want to, I want to lean into communities, is like the send the at the center of everything. So whether that is supporting other communities and hosting the same kind of infrastructure we have, but configuring it for them, that's something that we're exploring and then leaning into our own community. So I would like to do things like the DIS I'd like, I really like the discord server model, like the concept of boosting your server, you know, buying flair and stuff like that. But maybe it goes, maybe that's custom to your server, without being extractive. It's more like, I think the community wants to find, I think the community would find ways to continue to support us and keep everything running, especially there's so much hot, there's so much active like hostility towards ads. We wouldn't, we wouldn't go that route. But, yeah, finding ways for folks to contribute to and, like, get something in return, I think that would be really cool and then. But I think, I think for monetizing wise, helping other communities get set up is, is very promising right now. I do really like that model, and they also contribute in other ways. I'm sure, like those folks. Maybe they aren't, you know, boosting the server, but they're answering every question coming into the you know thing. And so there's that that's also plays into, like, wait, I want to be able to reciprocate that support. There's tons of people who are like, I can't support financially right now. But can I do moderation? Can I do this for Fiat? Can I make documentation? So, yeah, I also want to reward those, those folks and so to make them feel as well, like, because it's true. Like, you know, it's not just financial compensation that keeps us going. It's all this other stuff that has built up the community too. But, but yes, monetization important. The servers do cost money. I would say the revolution ain't free. How big is your team now we have eight person volunteer mod team, and then we've had, like, about, think we have seven or eight contributors on the on the open source side, on the rescue repo, yeah, that's, that's, that's the team with air quotes.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, it was very evident in the in your Bluesky talk how much you care about your team and how much you value all their contributions. It is. It's a great thing to see. Yeah,
Rudy Fraser:
I genuinely, I'm like, I it's not even, uh. Yeah, it is with full sincerity that I'm like, I could not do this if it wasn't for like, there's folks who've built, like, Yes, I built like, maybe, like, the first 100,000 something lines of the risky repo, but they're folks who did like, 30,000 and who've really, like, built out a lot of these features. And I'm just, I'm just so excited. I'm like, and they're, they're rooting for the project. They're like, you know, some of them are like, like, yes, please go find funding, because then I'll work on this full time. So I'm really, yeah, I'm really trying to, I just, I just, I'm so grateful for everyone who has contributed. Natalie Clinton, Daniel, yeah, cars, everyone who, who shares our story. You know, there's, there's way too many, but yeah, it would not be Blacksky with without those folks. I just, I just fought the the the uphill battle in the first year.
Mike McCue:
It gives me a lot of hope to see what you and your team and your community have been building collectively together. And, you know, I hope that a lot of other people learn from the work you're doing and can incorporate it in, you know, the apps or the backend services or or if they're building communities on their own. It really is, I think there's a lot to learn from here. So yeah, Rudy, I just want to say again, thank you for the work you're doing, for taking time and talking about it here and with me. You really are an inspiration. And it's, it's just been an absolute pleasure to talk about all this.
Rudy Fraser:
Very flattering, no, very, very much appreciate, very much appreciate the platform and the ability to to tell Blacksky story, because I do think, I do believe in what we're working on. And I do hope that, you know, if folks, you know, I hope folks, check out, you know, check out the Rsky Repo, see how you can contribute. Check out Safe Skies, see how you can contribute. And then, if not just, you know, get in the dev ecosystem. Put something out there, build stuff, you know, write, write blog posts, tell, tell, tell the different stories, do weird stuff and and, you know, I hope there are people who just hack on things, and, you know, not necessarily chase after. We have to. We do have to balance the money with with the stuff that we're building. But, you know, at the very at a minimum, I guess, is just keep like, you mentioned, like, keep people like, from first principles. Like, if you're building, you're building on the social internet, you know, build pro social things. You know, there's a bunch of stuff out there now. There's like, AI social networks that's like, the, the complete opposite of, like, you know, of what we're trying to more human networks, more human connections. We there's so much stuff that people find that like social media is like linked to prop various problems in our society. And I think there's like with thAT Proto I genuinely do believe we have like tools to build different things and hopefully get different outcomes as a result of that.
Mike McCue:
So yeah, and like you said at the beginning, take what you need, share what you can it is that is very, very, very cool and very much needed right now.
Well, thanks so much for listening. You can find Rudy on Bluesky at @rudyfraser.com
You can find Mike at @mmccue.bsky.social.
Big thanks to our editors, Rosana Caban and Anh Le.
If you're interested in the topics covered in this podcast, check out Surf, a new product from Flipboard that lets you surf the social web and create your own custom feeds. Learn more at surf.social. Until next time, we'll see you in the fediverse!