🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable

How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

If you haven’t been watching closely, you could be forgiven for assuming that Bluesky is a just liberal Twitter clone, or a newfangled imitator of Mastodon.

But under the surface, something fascinating has been happening: this is the first time ever that a public benefit corporation with a small team has quickly scaled an open source social network, built on top of decentralized infrastructure, to tens of millions of users. For us at New_ Public, nothing illustrates the potential of this model better than Blacksky, created by Rudy Fraser and his team.

Below, Rudy will take you through what Blacksky is, how it works, and why this is so important. In order to bring digital public spaces to everyone, we need it to be a lot easier to create far more communities like Blacksky. Bluesky and its AT Protocol are not a panacea or silver bullet for everything that ails social media — but we think there’s so much more to be learned, tried, and built this way.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Black folks have always been huge culture drivers on social media platforms and other tech products. Systemically excluded from access to capital and distribution, Black folks leverage creativity to make social media platforms their “own” without ever having true ownership. Decentralization, through technology like the AT Protocol, offers a new path forward.

Consider a non-technological example of decentralized, interoperable standards (where two or more differently designed systems can work together): the Allen wrench. Probably every piece of furniture I’ve put together comes with and is compatible with one. Manufacturers and customers all benefit from being aligned on using the same standard tool — not squares, not triangles, but hexagons. We live in a social media environment where every company ships a product with the equivalent of their own distinct key shape and we just accept it.

AT Protocol could be that kind of standard for social media. The technology, developed by Bluesky, makes new kinds of global, self-governed communities possible that weren’t before. One of the best examples of the power of this technology is Blacksky, which began as a custom feed and has always been a collective effort between myself, close collaborators, and the broader Black userbase. It began as an experiment in designing an algorithm that centered Black voices, prioritizing community safety and self-governance. 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.

Centralized vs. decentralized social media

Most of the billions of people using social media today interact with closed source, proprietary, centralized social media applications. Users exchange autonomy and ownership over their digital selves in exchange for a “free” service that offers convenience and participation in large network effects or interesting social innovations.

Projects built on the AT Protocol aspire to be different. Mike Masnick’s foundational essay “Protocols, Not Platforms” is still the best writing on this topic and is what inspired the creation of AT Protocol. Bluesky’s CTO Paul Frazee also has a great writeup about “Information Civics”, which is a great framework for looking at what decentralization should be in service of.

We can see the boundaries, limitations, and risks of centralized social media apps, as well as the possibilities of decentralized social media, through user experience:

Email, in theory, is decentralized, but at least in the US, Gmail captures 75.78% of the market, including both personal and work emails. A better recent example is probably phone numbers and texting. Starting in 2003, you could change plans and keep your cellphone number, but it wasn’t until last year that the infamous “green bubble” dispute between Android and iPhone was resolved by Apple, finally making it possible to share read receipts and emoji reactions between iPhone and Android users.

On social media, you can’t even DM someone on Twitter from your Instagram account! The only platforms that play nicely are ones owned by the same company, like Threads and Instagram. Whereas decentralized platforms, like Bluesky and Blacksky, can talk to each other without difficulty — AT Protocol is the Allen wrench.

How does Blacksky work?

It’s easiest to understand the user experience of Blacksky by looking at our new Community app: all of the infrastructure and algorithms we’ve designed are the default experience for new users, while still being fully interoperable with the rest of Bluesky. We launched the app publicly at the beginning of August.

We started out by developing our own custom feeds (the ‘algorithms’ in Blacksky Algorithms). For our app, the Blacksky Trending feed is the default feed for new users — showcasing popular content from the Blacksky community. When new users sign up and create an account, their data will be hosted by us, and they will agree to our Terms of Service and privacy policy, and not Bluesky’s. Existing users can migrate their account to our servers, but they can use Blacksky no matter who is hosting their account!

Account creation flow in Blacksky’s Community app

And although our users’ accounts and data are on our server, they can seamlessly interact with any Bluesky user, and vice-versa. Borders in AT Protocol cyberspace are just like borders in the real world — imaginary. When you cross a border in real life, you wouldn't even notice without signs. Similarly, when you go to an account on At Protocol, you can't tell what organization hosts it unless you look. The only difference is jurisdiction (TOS, privacy policy, community guidelines, governance etc.).

Moderation on Blacksky

Whether using our app or not, users can choose whether to opt-in to Blacksky’s moderation. By subscribing to our mod service and configuring their settings, users will see when we take a moderation action against an account, a post, or other content (usually labeled as anti-Black or misogynoir).

One advantage of the AT Protocol is that we can make our own moderation choices and grant a high level of autonomy and agency to Blacksky users. If you want a warning on anti-Black harassment but you just wanna hide misogynoir completely, you can set that up easily.

User settings for the Blacksky moderation service

Blacksky is often recognized for fostering an inclusive online space for Black community-building through culturally-relevant social feeds. The feeds also have built-in moderation against toxic content, including anti-Black harassment and misogynoir. But Blacksky Algorithms’ work also functions as memory work — preserving the shared narratives and collective decision-making of the largest Black community on the decentralized web.

We’re also offering these tools to other autonomous communities. While there are many interpretations of the word “community,” we specifically refer to mutual accountability and/or dependency between the one and the many.

Behind the scenes, our infrastructure and operations team work hand-in-hand to provide our users with a sense of safety and give them confidence that we can continue running, independent of Bluesky. We have a ten-person volunteer moderation team recruited directly from our community. All of them have done community moderation on other platforms previously. For us, experience in this is important, as moderation can be traumatizing work and lead to burnout.

Unlike platform moderation, which is often largely legal and reputational protection for corporations, and is responsible for things like CSAM and illegal content takedowns, our community mods are stewards for the wellbeing of our community. They ensure that users of our tools have what they need in order to navigate the ATmosphere (the whole AT Protocol ecosystem) free from the kinds of anti-Blackness that runs rampant on other apps.

This also means our moderators must have a shared understanding of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, internalized racism, how online misogynoir can lead to violence in the real world, etc. Our processes are adaptive to current events (US presidential elections, Daniel Penny trial, etc.) and constantly evolving. We codify our rules in an internal SOP document after we reach consensus.

Our moderation tech stack currently consists of a few things:

• Ozone: We self-host an instance of this open source software, where our mods can label and tag posts, and take down accounts on our PDS (where user data is stored), and email accounts

• rsky-labeler: An automated labeler service that scans every post, username, and profile that’s created or updated to identify anti-Black slurs and alert our team for manual review

• Alerting system: A queue-based email alert (normal report, post showing in Blacksky feed, etc.)

• “Ban From TV”: A feature that prevents known abusers from being able to view the Blacksky feeds at all

• The “Green List”: AT Protocol allows us to create and share block lists, which users can subscribe to and automatically block bad actors on the list, like those harassing Black users

• SAFEskies app: Our way of allowing moderators to reorder and remove posts from the feed(s) without seeking admin approval, giving them more agency and control over the Blacksky algorithm.

• Documentation: A site with user-friendly descriptions of Blacksky’s infrastructure

Building out the infrastructure

In the early days of Bluesky, Black users felt they were being pushed off. Blacksky became a platform for Black users to feel heard and seen. To create Blacksky, we wrote our own implementation of AT Protocol (called “rsky” and pronounced “risky”). An underlying premise of Blacksky’s rsky is to not only “seize the means of production,” as well as the distribution, but to also act as a “dual power” structure.

Blacksky’s rsky guarantees our community a seat at the table, and ensures that we can leave and easily make our own table if we need to. That’s the true promise of decentralized social media.

Clearly I think that decentralization is great, not only for the problems it prevents, but also the new possibilities it creates. But if everyone’s running their own servers, apps, and moderation teams, how do we do global social media? That’s where our vibrant open source developer community comes in.

Blacksky runs our own global relay at https://atproto.africa, which we built from scratch. Every day, our relay stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting. We also developed what we call our “moderation relay,” which lets us know about all of the moderation decisions ever made by all mod teams globally.

This helps us combine efforts with other community moderators, keeping our feeds free of things like transphobia or unwanted sexual content, in addition to anti-Blackness.

We do this because it ensures the independence of Blacksky, and it builds in some redundancy that makes the whole AT Protocol ecosystem more resilient overall and less reliant on the company running Bluesky. Otherwise, the whole ATmosphere could end up becoming too similar to a centralized app with an API, like a client app connected to Instagram.

Because of our relay, you can create a post on Bluesky, using a Bluesky hosted account, and it will be able to show up in the Blacksky feed, on the Blacksky Community app. For network governance purposes, it’s important to the future of the ecosystem that other independent organizations create and maintain global services like this. Other orgs and initiatives in this spirit are Zeppelin.social, Free Our Feeds, and Microcosm.

Over the last two years, Blacksky has organically grown into a thriving community. Powering that is a passionate community of moderators, developers, financial contributors, and other volunteers who have made Blacksky into the experience that it is today.

You can help make a better, more equitable internet, not just for Black folks (though we think that’s a good enough cause) but also for other autonomous communities being developed using AT Protocol and our custom-built, open source tools and resources.

By becoming a regular contributor to our Open Collective, you can receive updates on our progress and directly support our work.

–Rudy Fraser, Founder, Blacksky Algorithms

Thanks Rudy!

If you missed this fun video from our Operations Fellow, Miriam Tinberg, it’s worth checking out.

Trying to get to the pool before the end of summer,

–Josh