When you say two million users, how is that counted? Who counts as a user? Is it user accounts hosted? People who subscribe to a Blacksky feed? Something else?
"We’ve since scaled from 0 to two million users with $0 spent out of pocket and 100% organic growth. Decentralization has made that possible."
How is Blacksky running their own global relay at https://atproto.africa that stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting with $0 spent out of pocket?
We spent $0 on growth marketing (ads, hiring someone to do outreach, etc.) and instead grew to well over 2M users of our feeds and moderation service completely organically.
Largely through the contributions of our community via our open collective (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) we can now take more recent initiatives like hosting a global relay to ensure we can stay independent of Bluesky's stack.
Great, timely report on how open, interconnected community infrastructure and a networked ecosystem of social mediation is the still-possible and emerging future of healthy online discourse. Thanks Rudy Fraser for this exemplary effort and New Public for bringing this to us. For background on why this redirection from centralized platforms is so important, see my reframing piece in Tech Policy Press (https://www.techpolicy.press/three-pillars-of-human-discourse-and-how-social-media-middleware-can-support-all-three/) and other related pieces listed on my blog (https://ucm.teleshuttle.com/p/items.html).
When you say two million users, how is that counted? Who counts as a user? Is it user accounts hosted? People who subscribe to a Blacksky feed? Something else?
Feed subscribers + moderation service subscribers
We only opened up for account hosting in the last couple weeks which can be viewed here: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses
That sounds great, is there a way to connect it to masodon>
Via tools like https://fed.brid.gy/
🤯
Great writeup. Curious about this statement:
"We’ve since scaled from 0 to two million users with $0 spent out of pocket and 100% organic growth. Decentralization has made that possible."
How is Blacksky running their own global relay at https://atproto.africa that stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting with $0 spent out of pocket?
We spent $0 on growth marketing (ads, hiring someone to do outreach, etc.) and instead grew to well over 2M users of our feeds and moderation service completely organically.
Largely through the contributions of our community via our open collective (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) we can now take more recent initiatives like hosting a global relay to ensure we can stay independent of Bluesky's stack.
Our relay implementation is quite cheap to host: https://docs.blackskyweb.xyz/docs/blacksky-tech/deploying-a-relay
Invite–only, not the account creation graphic shown.
Invite codes are there temporarily to keep bad actors out. If interested in signing up, please email support@blacksky.app for a code