Being a black person on the Internet, you just anticipate that.

There are no girls on the Internet.

As a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridge tad and this is there are no girls on the Internet.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, many users left the platform searching for alternatives, and one platform that gained attention early is blue Sky.

At first glance, blue Sky looks a lot like classic Twitter, short posts, replies, and reposts, but underneath, it's very different because blue Sky is built on a decentralized system, meaning no single company controls your data or the network.

Folks on blue Sky can choose the algorithms that shape their feeds, and developers can build their own versions of the app.

Blue Sky has become kind of a unique space online.

Some users associate it with more progressive voices, and the most followed individual on blue Sky right now is AOC.

As of August twenty twenty five, blue Sky had just under forty million registered users, and just last week, the Trump administration joined the platform, posting can't wait to spend more quality time together.

Unsurprisingly, absolutely no one wanted this, and according to the blue Sky block tracking site, clear Sky The White House is now the second most blocked account on blue Sky, just behind Vice President j d Vance.

Controversial moderation decisions have led some to wonder if Blue Sky is just another version of the same old social media battles, but the platform's decentralized nature has allowed for powerful pockets of community to emerge, like black Sky, a custom feed and moderation service, gradually becoming a key space online for black folks.

To date, black Sky is the largest and most successful effort to take advantage of Blue Sky's decentralization, and it's all being led by Rudy Fraser, a technologist who was committed to building resilient, independent infrastructure that can be a home for black voices.

During a session at right Sex Tech, the growing community form that brings together technologists and movement leaders to explore the intersections of technology and power, I had the chance to sit down with black Sky founder Rudy Fraser to talk through blue Sky, Black Sky, and the future of Black voices online.

I want to start with a question, Am I the only one that is kind of feeling a bit I guess I would say burnt out by our current social media and technology landscape.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to get kind of caught up in false nostalgia for the old days.

I know social media has never been perfect, but to me lately it feels like a slog And I remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter.

I had all of these deep, deep, fond.

Memories of cutting it out on the og black Twitter.

Some of my best days spent procrastinating at my office job on the.

Computer were spent on black Twitter.

And so it was very tough for me to kind of accept that that time was over and I probably was not going to be experiencing these feelings of genuine connection and joy and humor and community on a social media platform run by Elon Musk, right, And so as we think about the future of social platforms, today's conversation really invites us to, I guess, do a bit of speculative world building, imagining what it would take to unbreak social networks and rebuild online spaces rooted in things like care, dignity, connection, community, and freedom.

Now, to get into all of this, we'll be speaking to Rudy Fraser.

Rudy is a technologist, community organizer, and the founder of Black Sky algorithms where he develops open source infrastructure that lets communities shape their social media experience, govern their own data, and fund their collective needs.

In this conversation, we'll be packling questions like how does Blue Sky reimagine the role of a public square online compared to legacy platforms like Twitter or x or whatever we're.

Calling it these days.

What does community ownership of data mean in practice?

And how could it transform our relationship to digital platforms?

And really, where do we see opportunities for decentralized platforms to resist things like harassment, surveillance and disinformation Rudy, I know that these are questions that you spend I would assume a fair amount of time really wrestling with.

So I want to kick it over to you.

I have been following along with a conversation happening, so I know that it has been an interesting few weeks over at Blue Sky and Black Sky.

But before I get into all of that, I want to take it back.

What were your early experiences like on social media?

Like where did you go online to experience things like joy and connection and community?

Yeah?

Hey, Bridlett, So I would say the platforms I think of are not platforms folks like consider social media platforms, I think of early I do think of like early internet forums.

I was big into video game moding and and kind of like hacker culture at a young age, and so like those old video game modding forms like seven sins, I felt like that was I don't know that that was where I find community and online gaming.

You know, I've made the same way I make friends on Black Sky and Blue Sky and then meet them in person is the same experience I used to have as a teenager playing online video games.

Yeah, and so that and then I think my traditional social media experience was very much folks who already kind of knew online like Facebook, MySpace era, and yeah, just being able to stay in touch with people like family members across the world that my family's from Guyana and South America, I can stay in touch with them via face book stuff like that.

I gotta say, the kind of person that is the person that you just described who was making internet friends using technology and you know, old school platforms, and then was like I'm going to go meet these people in person.

That's a unique personality type.

I feel, hm, I feel like it's so normal now I met my you know, like my wife we got married last year.

We met on bumble and so, like the I feel like it's become where it used to be strange.

I feel like internet culture is very just like ingrained in at least a certain generation.

There's like rappers who are constantly wrapping about things that happen on the Internet, and you know, and so yeah, I think it's like become it's it's it used to be a weird thing, like it used to be like a weird, separate world.

Now I feel like a lot of us understand that it is.

It's a part of how we stay connected with people.

Totally.

You were I feel like you were an early to be clear, you were like an early adopter of that.

I have a very clear memory of being quite young.

And a teacher in my school met her husband on an online dating site and it was the biggest scandal in our town.

And now it's so commonplace.

It feels like that level of connection that you were seeking on those early days of social media and platforms like that, you were an early adopter for what would become commonplace today in twenty twenty five.

Yeah, for sure.

And I think I had like relatives who were very you know, folks like a lot of my closest friends and family members, they're like creatives, and so they were using those social media platforms to try to like build their careers on.

And so I think I also got inspired a little bit like that.

So you mentioned that you, you know, experienced the sort of social media platforms that we were all probably on MySpace side note, there was no better platform.

That's how I learned how to code.

When you went to my MySpace page, a panic at the Disco song played very loud, and then the pause button was hidden, So I was like, no, you were gonna listen to this Panic at the Disco song?

It would definitely crash your browser with like falling glitter stars.

So I loved those platforms as well.

I'm curious about your journey with more sort of traditional social media platforms.

When you were on platforms like Twitter, was there a moment or a red line that made.

You say, no more, this is not gonna work for me anymore.

I actually came to this work from a different place.

It's kind of funny, like I was never really big on Twitter.

I was.

I used it early on and to like follow like like artists and stuff, like that, but I never actually encountered myself the kinds of like challenges you would face from like having a big platform on those spaces.

So I kind of came I think that probably maybe helped in some ways because I came into working on Black Sky with just like fresh eyes in terms of what are the what are my expectations of how a community should work, And that was heavily influenced by my in real life organizing work, and so I tried to like replicate the things that I was seeing and experiencing in real life because for me, like I guess, bigger than just like the apps, it's the kind of like this kind of definition of community I have that is between like mutual accountability.

And before working on Black Sky, I was working on a project called paper Tree that was a way for folks to kind of practice mutual aid and that'sy be able to pool funds together and be able to buy like pay for each other's groceries essentially.

And so in kind of as I kept doing mutual aid organizing and learning about mutual aid, I thought it was very I wanted to technology was my thing, and so that was the way that I saw myself fitting into too that world and not wanting to be like their techno solutionists person who's like I'm going to like, you know, revolutionize mutual aid by like building some app.

It was more like I just wanted to like find my way of being seen and being able to contribute to what I saw as a movement that kind of came out of twenty twenty here in New York where I'm based at and building.

Yeah, like you kind of find that, like social media is actually a really great place both for real life community to be developed and for people to even practice like these kinds of like care practices like mutual aid.

But it's the it's it's then seeing that you can't really do something like that in the traditional platforms, right.

It's more that like that I saw with this new wave of decentralized social media protocols, I saw an opportunity to be able to like execute against that.

Let's take a quick break at our back.

It's so interesting to me that you say that the way that your expectations for what being on a social media platform could feel like should feel like we're really rooted in your ir L experiences around things like mutual aids So for you, what are the expectations that you have in your mind for what it can feel like or be like to try to find community on social media platforms.

What is that experience like for you?

And what have you taken from your work and mutual aid to inform that.

Yeah, I think the Internet is interesting because there's and there's people who have like all different kinds of like philosophies and ideas around how the Internet should work.

I think, for one, I take like a you know, I think there's some people who view, for example, that like there's this like instrumentalist kind of view of technology, where technology is it is kind of like impartial, it's non biased.

It can't be you know, it's it's a hammer is just a hammer, And I kind of reject that.

I think tools tend to better, they tend to like align with power structures, and they benefit they benefit someone usually, and they harm they often harm someone usually.

And so I think in real life organizing you start to acknowledge some things like that.

You also kind of you also recognize that there's this like kind of philosophy that like every cook can govern, but like really anyone can can contribute.

There's not it's not like there's there's maybe specialized knowledge that's needed to set up technical infrastructure, but there's a role that everyone can play in like content moderation, in community building, in getting people into physical spaces together, like event planning.

It's like a thing that I'm not really good at that there's folks in the community who are good at.

There's folks in the community who are creators who are like like that idea that everyone can come in and just as long as you make it so that this is not like this closed off thing that you own that like you have this kind of abundance mindset that there's enough to go around that everyone can play a role that I think that some of that is the kind of thing that influences and I do think you get that from like community forms where it was like, you know, there was a space created and then people came in and gave that space value, and then those people were rewarded with reputation and respect to a degree, you know, and like that's the thing you can get on the Internet.

There's like a kind of respect capital that gets associated with with someone.

People sometimes use that with like followers or they try to like hack it with followers, but there's kind of a you know, we pour a lot into our online identities and then you know, part of the problem is that you don't actually own that identity, like a corporation owns that and they can just take that handle away from you at any point they could shut your account down or if they want to.

But yeah, and so those fun the mentals I think are some of the things that like you see that in like in real life organizing where you're doing work and then people, you know, that kind of brings people in and they make it their own and then it becomes this new thing.

That's kind of how I think of like spaces created online.

Boy you said it, and especially you know, maybe one day a billionaire buys the platform where you've spent most of your time building up your capital and followers and relationships and connections, and it's not a fun place to hang out anymore.

So that's just that maybe something us what happens.

Yeah, and you know, I think that can happen in real life spaces as well.

But yeah, like trying to how do you build the stuff that makes that less possible exactly?

Let's talk about that.

So give us a so I'm curious what drew you to looking at decentralized platforms.

And for folks who might not know, can you give us sort of a quick and dirty rundown of decentralization.

Yeah.

Yeah, So so the analogy I give a lot of analogies with this stuff.

I'll give an analogy for decentralization in general, and then I'll give one for decentralization and interoperability, which are big big words.

But then and then then one specifically for app protocol.

So decentralization, I would say, is like a lot of folks, you know, put together, are used to buying furniture from some store Ikia target wherever, I don't know, and then like it, often there's an Alan wrench you know that that like hexagon shape that you use to screw in the bolts together.

Uh.

Usually it's funny.

They usually send a lot of Alan wrenches with like a lot of the furniture you put together, and then if you keep them, it can work on the next thing that you buy.

And so that's that's an example of interoperability.

All these if you think about it, all these people who produced this furniture decided that they were going to use the same hexagon shape and you know, now the tools work between each other.

That's an example of interoperability and decentralization, where like decentralization like kind of requires interoperability.

It requires for two things to be able to work together without those two people speaking.

And right now it's like you can't you cannot, you can't be on Instagram.

Like let's say you were just on Instagram.

You can't from your Instagram account dm someone on Twitter.

You can't export you can export your data in a lot of these places, and then it's just like a dead set of data, like you can't take that and put it anywhere.

You can't leave and keep your followers.

Right, that's how they that's how they get you.

And folks call this like a walled garden, and so decentralization eliminates that.

It makes it so that you have some kind of data portability.

You can pick up where you were, and if you don't like it anymore, you can take it somewhere else.

And then you still have your your identity stays the same, you still have your followers, you still have your posts.

You didn't lose anything, you're just under new management.

And so so that's like decentralization broadly, and then there's lots of different ways people have approached designing decentralized systems.

You know, the one that I the space that I work in is particularly at protocol, which the experience of that from a user is like if every piece, if you download a social media app, if you download blue Sky, for example, everything is ran by different It's one app, but everything is ran by a different company.

You could have downloaded blue Sky, you could have downloaded something else another app.

Skylight is another example.

They're like a TikTok version of blue Sky, and your account will work with both.

You can sign up on either in your account will work with both, and then you know, then there's your social media feed, right, Folks are usually used to just like a following feed and then a kind of recommendation algorithm, a for you page, a discover feed.

Blue Sky may come with those by default, and then you can switch to another algorithm or feed that was designed by someone else.

So we have ones designed specifically for showcasing black content.

There's a trending version, there's a chronological version, there's a there's a TikTok like version of videos.

There's one for just images like Instagram and uh and yeah, and then if you encounterure some harmful content, you can choose who your moderators are.

You can choose where your data is hosted.

That is, that's the experience of at protocol and I think where it comes into like the you mentioned earlier that there's been a lot of stuff going on in the in the ecosystem.

Uh, there was an incident that I addressed yesterday where a user who was he had his account hosted by black Sky, but he was suspended from Blue Sky.

Uh.

And so folks are kind of had the reaction of like, well, what's the point then of decentralization If you can be you can maybe move your account, but then they can like they can this other company can still suspending You're still subject to the moderation rooms of the other company.

But it's really like the way app protocol is kind of set up is that your data.

It's if you imagine publishing as an example, Right, you're a writer and you want you write a manuscript, right, the PDS or some of the infrastructure black Sky runs is a safe space to store your manuscript.

But then Blue Sky, what they also had running is kind of this the distribution it is the It's kind of like the Barnes and Noble, the bookstore, the publishing house, the thing that gets your manuscript from just your hands into the hands of millions of people.

And so this person was banned from the bookstore essentially, but even though he was banned from the bookstore, there are different apps that people have built that instead of going to the bookstore to find the manuscript, it goes directly to the author.

So that's kind of the example of like what decentralization can allow.

You can still maintain your data and your ownership and not have it deleted because typically when Blue Sky, if you're only if you're only on the Blue Sky infrastructure and they suspended you, they would also delete all your data.

But so some of these conversations around data sovereignty is that like you should be able to maintain your identity.

An app can suspend you because they have their rules right.

They may you may just be promoting something that they don't want to help distribute to millions of people.

That's their right.

You basically have freedom of speech but not freedom of reach.

Is kind of the example that folks talk about, like you know, that's why.

And there's other ways that can kind of explain how that plays out in the ecosystem.

But you really should always be able to publish whatever you want.

And then but people who govern certain spaces, like blue Sky governs their space, Black skuy governs our space, those organizations and anyone can start that up.

You know, it takes some technical infrastructure or some money, but like you can start to create the spaces and to kind of design the experience you want in there without infringing on other people's you know, ability to speak.

I was quite surprised at how people reacted to that user that you described their experience on the platform, and I wondered, do you think that users are Do you think that response was rooted in a sort of anxiety about the kind of things that maybe are the reason why they left Twitter for Blue Sky or other platforms in the first place, That concern about how these platforms are moderated and what's showing up their means.

Like, I was genuinely surprised at the reaction to what you just described happening, And maybe you weren't surprised.

But what do you think was going on there?

There's a there's a lot.

I think there's some folks who say, like, I think I agree with some people in the ecosystem that's like model is your product, like if you like in a traditional social media experience, their business model is ad driven, right, And so that's why the experience of a social media app kind of plays out the way it does because they need they make money by having you scroll the feed and stay on their app or as long as possible.

That's why TikTok is super addictive.

They've done it's all weird to say they've done a great job at their algorithm, but they've they've done a great job of keeping you glued to the screen.

Twitter also has that for folks.

And there's like a ton of research.

There's like books written.

I have a book here called like hook, like people have.

There's people have done research on how to keep you addicted to and to these applications.

It's science, and so that's why they keep you locked in.

They don't want you to be able to leave.

They don't want you to be able to take your data.

They want you to be able to keep scrolling.

In a decentralized protocol, you don't have the same incentives like so the users are not the product.

In that case, you have to find some other revenue stream.

And so like blue Sky, I think there's a lot of when there's an absence of information, people fill that in with assumptions their own anxieties.

Like you mentioned, so people are like, how will blue Sky make their money?

So we don't know, you know, probably blue Sky doesn't know, and so people fill that in with like are they training are they taking our data to like train an AI model?

Are they are they trying to pander to like these right wing conservative folks, Like why are they doing that?

Like all these different things kind of come into play because things are not made explicit.

Uh, it's kind of like I'm sure there's some theory of this.

There's like the tyranny of structurelessness, where it's like there's if there's like a vacuum or like an unclear there's no clarity around a power structure of power stars which are kind of forms.

It's just a little unaccountable.

I think the same thing kind of happens with like the fact that there's no clear business model and things like that, and so people just kind of fill in those blanks.

So for me, I wasn't as surprised because a lot of the users who were on blue Sky as well, they vibrated from Twitter, and so I think some of them without even really recognizing they thought it was blue Sky was just Twitter but ran by you know, not Elon.

And so the expectations, like the user education, there's a lot of stuff that's like not there.

So a lot of what I just tried to do that seem to have gotten positive responses for is just try to like break things down for people, be really clear, be really transparent, be really honest about where stuff is at, and like what we're planning to do next.

That makes a lot of sense.

I was one of those people who just thought, screw Elon Musk, I'm going over to the Twitter that he doesn't own.

And then someone was like, oh, you should try mask it on if you're looking for a decentralized experience, and that didn't work out for me, But like there is I think there has been a user education piece of it that I think your work at black Sky has been so instrumental in being a foundation of can you walk us through black Sky how it works and what makes it different from centralized platforms.

So if you visit black sky dot Community, which is our web app, that's where you could sign up for an account, and you'll notice immediately that like if you want to, it looks similar to blue Sky, which looks similar to Twitter, but it's branded as our thing.

And when you create an account on blacks dot dot community, you will be under the black Sky terms of service and privacy policy.

You'll have a handle that's like bridget dot blacksky dot app, for example, but the feed that you see immediately is black Sky, the black Sky community itself.

So this is an algorithm that is just of the black users on the platform who've opted in voluntarily to be a part of black Sky as a community.

From there, you know, and I think even just stopping there, if you can imagine, we sometimes get this question from folks of like what will stop black Sky from being overran by bad actors?

And I think the last two years of us running the platform has been the demonstration of that, the like we can't stop you can't stop other people's hate, but we have.

We've put up a really good fight.

I would say I've been docks by white supremacists because of my work on black Sky.

We've had people try to like raid the feed and do all kinds of crazy things, but we built in systems to actively prevent that harm.

And not only do we have the automated systems to do that, we also have a team of all black moderation team, you know, very familiar with with the the kind of context that we work within that's always there, and so folks, folks feel attended to, folks feel heard.

The We strike this balance of trying to create a space where you can have fun and like not care about all this super technical like all this infrastructure that we're running in the background, but we're there when you need it, right, So like we're there when you want to speak truth to power and then you feel like Blue Sky the company may censor you for that right or take your account down.

We're there.

You know, if you encounter there's maybe there is some bad actor that rolls up and they're like, what the fuck is Black Sky.

You know, we can you can still do the like three hundred quote posts on that person, like feel free, but you could also just quietly and discreetly hit the report post button and our team will will handle that and yeah, and then all your data is hosted by us, So that's just all governed by ours and for us, we're looking to like the next thing that we want to do is kind of create these community only spaces.

So I believe that you should have control over your speech on these platforms, like be able to modulate your speech.

So right, like every time you make a post, it's kind of a megaphone.

You know.

Sometimes for me, I'm trying to whisper and it ends up being a shout because there's no really there's no way to distinguish that I maybe replying to someone, and then people will be like, oh, he was saying this really low key.

I'm just like, yeah, I was trying to just say this to this one person.

I guess I should have the ended, but but yeah, and so we sometimes you want to just speak to a more closed off group of friends.

On other platforms, you have the opportunity to do stuff like private posts.

In the way the protocol is designed, you enter into these tricky situations where things that should be obvious are just difficult to do.

So like boost in ship with private accounts, you can't like lock your account down to just be you know, just your followers.

We're introducing something that will allow you to like be able to make public posts.

You can speak to the megaphone because like sometimes it's weird misunderstanding that like we just want to like create another bubble for people that I don't think that's true.

I think people have group chats, right, you have one on one conversations with friends.

Sometimes you have a group chat.

We're trying to create a big group chat where you can come in and be a part of a community and meet people.

And you'll have that and then you we also have created a platform for you if you really want to speak to thousands of people, Like there's been millions of people who have viewed the Black Sky feeds.

This is also your way to get an audience.

You know, whether there's it's some important issue, you just want to make some jokes, you want to build a following, whatever that whatever that thing is, like you should have these options.

We want to give people options that keep them allowed them to have fun and be able to also you know, not face harassment when they want to speak out against white supremacy and then ultimately too like we really want to create in a long term, we want to become like the Reddit frapp protocol.

We want to be able to anyone can come.

People have been inspired by our work already, there's Latin Sky we're you know, doing the not even using our tools, but replicating how we do things.

Because there's a barrier to that, right there's today there's a barrier to like using the stuff that we've built.

All of our code is open source.

It's very transparent.

You can you can jump in and contribute to the code if you want to to written a rust.

That's also another barrier.

We're trying to break down the barriers we want.

We want the most amount of people to be able to participate and co create this with us as possible.

Uh you know, but but yeah, so we want we want people to go to come and take their communities.

Latin skuy that North Sky has followed in our footsteps and they're doing similar things for the LGBTQ community.

And yeah, and so we want anyone to be able to just come in and take our tools quick a button and then get a whole community infrastructure and community app setup that is not closed off.

It's still like it has a quiet space for your community, and then it has a you also have this like public global social media infrastructure, so you know, you can still we like like app protocol wants to get to four billion people whatever number of Facebook has, but on a decentralized protocol that no one knoweds And so that's the vision, that's the goal.

More after a quick break, let's get right back into it, Rudy, I did have a question for you.

I think it's somebody mentioned this in the chat, and I do think it's worth kind of plus plusing the way that you were very intentional about things like moderation from the beginning of starting this process.

And I've often wondered, is there a bad lens to be had between scale and making the biggest platform that you can have with the most amount of users and saying, well, there might be some value in intimacy, there might be some value in us intentionally curating a smaller set of users.

Do you have is there is there a tension with what you're doing at Black Sky in that Yeah.

I talk about this and some presentations I give where I think there's you know, you mentioned Macedon.

I think Macedon is a good example.

If you want like maybe one hundred people in a community and you want like infrastructure that's like owned by you, and then maybe you selectively connect with some other one hundred person communities and stuff.

I think that's good.

Uh, that is a use case.

I think we want to have the fun the like the funnest block party in the city is kind of the experience, and I think that needs a lot of people.

And so I think for the kind of experience and stuff that we want to build, I think you need to be looking to scale.

You know, we spend a lot of money and time on creating scalable infrastructure for communities.

Blacks di again has been used by millions of people, and we want to help out the other folks, you know.

I think that's why I use Reddit as the example, Like there are some breadits that are used by millions of people, Like that is the It's it's a technically challenging thing to do that though as a decentralized service.

So that's where there's some of the technical tensions.

Uh.

There's also moderation challenges.

I think after a certain number you do encounter like there's there's a question that's come up in the community that we're working through to resolve.

But like moderation, people are very anti AI.

But what do you do when you have one hundred thig people, like one hundred thousand images and videos being uploaded to a platform every month.

A lot of them are going to be sexual content, and you have to be able to distinguish against like what's not okay or at least just even this label that content so that people.

So then end users can make their choice of like do I want to see sexual content?

Do want a HI day?

Do you want to have a blur of to the warning label?

People get that control on that protocol, and so I think some of that is a bit of attention because some people are like, well someone should manually review all those images, and it's like, well, then you have to have then you have to have a smaller space.

And so I think like we want we don't want to be like we don't want to just have like the billion person one space, billion person in this space.

We do want to foster communities of millions of people, and I think we can.

I think you can do that with the with the tools that we've created.

There's also like one thing we didn't talk too much about, but like we want our It's weird that people make community guidelines but their communities don't influenced the guidelines.

And so that's something we did where we try to co create our community guidelines with our community.

We have this tool called the black Sky People's Assembly that is a deliberation tool where people can weigh in submit statements.

So we had one was like what should be our community guidelines, and six hundred people submitted over I think about five hundred statements of what should go into our community guidelines, over twenty thousand votes submitted on the different things of like what people agree with, what people disagree with.

So these are the things where it's like, you know, if you were if you want to do this at scale, there's tools that need to be built to allow you to do this kind of decentralized community governance at scale.

I think that's just a very interesting space for us to work here.

Yeah, I mean that speaks to the question that we got from John who says it's worth highlighting that black Sky is incredibly unusual complimentary for focusing on moderation upfront and having a moderation expert as a core member of the team.

How many other social networks have ever done that.

I don't know any Rudy, I don't know if that's a question that you have any insight into, but I do think it highlights exactly what you were just speaking about the importance of having these decisions be things that are bought a very early on and foundational to the experience of being on this platform.

Yeah, I think that comes from like, honestly, I mean that's more like sometimes I think people have this like superficial understanding of like why Black Sky is important.

And I think that, like being a black person on the Internet, you just anticipate that, you know, like you just anticipate we will get attacked.

And so for me, I'm always just like, Okay, I know this is going to happen, so I'll have a plan for when it happens, and then when it happens, then I can just immediately drop the thing.

Like we have a feature called band from TV that stops people from being able to view the Black Sky Feed, and I knew that that was going to be a thing that we were going to want to do at some point.

And then there was an issue where people were like trolling the Black skyfeed to find they weren't posting to the Black skyfeet but they're finding people and then harassing them.

So it was like, oh, like now this is happening, so now let me ship this.

And that was like the second month that we were in operation of the Black skyfeed.

So it happened.

It all happened very quickly, but we've been battle tested over time, and then, yeah, I've always wanted our community moderators.

There's folks who used to work at places like TikTok, There's people who worked at doing trust and safety there, there's folks who have done research on misogynal war shouted doctor K.

Yeah.

So we've got a team of folks who all have done community moderation in other spaces before and now do it for Black scot They've done it for Masterton, etc.

It kind of makes me I haven't took a bittersweet thing to hear you describe this, because on the one hand, what a tired story that it's like, oh, you're a black person or some sort of a traditionally marginalized person in a digital space, get ready.

For harassment, you know.

But also part of me is like, well, I'm glad that people in charge have that historical and cultural knowledge or that they didn't have to go through the thing of being like, oh, we are shocked this happened and are not prepared for it, which I feel that so often is the case on social media platforms where people don't necessarily have that cultural background.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, absolutely, there's always like, yeah, the shocked Pikachu face every time someone abuses your platform.

It's just like I don't know, like we I don't know even what practice of I don't know.

I always find it dishonest because like even if you're if you put a server up on the Internet, it's getting scanned by like attackers immediately, like and so this just kind of like defensive posture without having it take without having it be a burden of you know, we still have this.

We have a move fast break chains ethos at Black Sky, which is that like, like I think there are some folks who are like, I don't know, there is a lot going on, or there's always this, uh so there's kind of like a move slow ethos.

Sometimes with social justice spaceism, I'm like, if you believe the problems are urgent, I feel like you should move fast, Like if you think that like we're in like late stage capitalism and we're under fascism, Like why would you be chill about that?

And so that's why we want to build things as quickly as possible for like private spaces for people, for people to be able to yet fuild communities, send money to each other, practice mutual aid because we think it's urgent.

And then there's the break change part, which is that like we are going to be encounter We know that we are encountering, like we're fighting an uphill battle, and we should just be prepared for that, like you kind of just kind of know what comes with it.

My own team sends it back to me, it's like you named your you name the company Black Sky, Like it's gonna like get attacked.

Yeah, can you this is a personal question.

Can you put move fast and Break chains on a T shirt?

For me?

Or perhaps some so, I mean soon soon?

How these shirts?

I mean that that doesn't even One of my kind of questions is how do you think about balancing things like freedom of expression with genuine, meaningful, community driven safety in decentralized environments.

Yeah, I think of uh, I think of their people often because of I Like, I guess there's some people who have this like understanding of like okay, well you know black Scott, so it will be attacked.

There's like, uh, there's issue, there's like outside attackers, right, and then there's community conflict, and I think of like the outside attackers we have generally you know, knock on wood.

But like so far has been a solve problem for us.

The really interesting challenges do come with Okay, now there's intracommunal conflict, not intercommunal, intercommunal, and so it's like, do you something there's you know, like generally our approaches to be hands off, like let the community sort itself out, because conflict can be generative at times as long as folks aren't demonstrating forms of like internal internalized anti blackness or or misogynal war.

You know, as long as you aren't breaking our community guidelines again, which we develop with the community.

So like now there's going to be things around like fat phobia and and like and and and all these other protections, but as long as you are following the community guidelines, go off.

You know, we want to be we want to leave space for people to get creative, have fun sometimes you know, sometimes sometimes the jokes are a dicks, so someone but I think there's still like I think that's still like a worthwhile experience that you can have in a communal space and then you brush it off, you come back the next day.

And it's a kind of I mean, haven't we all been roasted by our cousins where it's like, or are you laugh a little too hard at a joke?

And someone is like, I know you're not laughing and you're like, oh no.

They got it, Like I posted by listening to the young Thug and someone was like, I hope you heal And I'm like, do you know I can't.

I'm like, even I'm getting cooked on my own app So.

And I think, I mean having folks who know folks who know our communities at the helm is important.

This is gonna be a weird analogy, but there's a scene in the movie Mean.

Girls with the popular girls.

They all have to.

Have like a like a girl student wide me like needing to discuss tensions, and the popular girls realize, oh, the drama girls have their own little, you know, conflict.

In the softball team, they have their own little conflict.

Then there's all these other little micro conflicts in these communities that people might not know the norms that dictate those communities that you just sort of have to let them talk it out and work it out amongst themselves because that's the only way they're going to get anywhere.

It kind of seems like that of there is some value in just sort of letting folks settle being tensions and conflict in their own community via their own norms that like you might not necessarily know the ins and outs of.

Yeah, and I think that, like, I think that's like super important.

Community norms are Like sometimes people are like, what's this hard and fast rule that you're going to put in place to stop this thing from happening.

I'm like, well, I feel like we have norms for that.

Like there's there's laws, and then there's norms.

And I don't want to make a law for like something that could just be resolved with a norm and the community should organically come up with that community norm to like enforce that behavior.

And yeah, and I think that, like you, yeah, you see that within in real life groups all the time, like that that conflict resolution is uh And I think you have to draw a line.

You have to be able to draw a line around a space, So there's a question around here about like the public square conversation, and I've I really I think the public square is somebody else's problem.

I am trying to create community spaces.

I'm trying to make the hangout spot.

And you know, we got some bouncers here.

We got uh you know, they're just on the outside garden the door.

Folks on the inside are figuring themselves out.

We have some music playing.

We want and and you know, and it's a voluntary association.

You want to you want to come kick it with us, Come kick it with us.

That is what we're trying to solve for.

And then you also have like maybe a mega uh you know, we have like I guess a loud speaker outside if you want to go reach everybody else feel free.

But the public square has been dominated by people trying to fight it out in the marketplace of ideas and algorithms like trying to influence people in all kinds of ways and so like that is a different problem that someone else may be trying to solve.

But I'm trying to solve for communal spaces where you come, you have a good time.

More.

After a quick break, let's get right back into it.

This conversation is all about sort of how we are trying to unbreak social networks.

How do you think Blue Sky helps move us more toward those community centered digital spaces.

I think that Black skies more so the ones like helping to demonstrate what that can look like.

I think Blue Sky wants to invest more into the creation of commune unity.

There's been conversations about like turning kind of following again following and offert steps of like combining a feed with a moderation service and then calling that like a particular space and so there's a place where you can go you can post to a feed.

I think there's like some of that work being done.

I'm personally really there's some like under explored areas with a at protocol in Blue Sky that I'm that we're interested in, Like we we just we just got this fellowship, this cipherpunk fellowship to help kind of develop private payments, you know.

I think that's a very I think it's again practice of mutual aid.

It's important Black Sky as a community have done that for a while from the very beginning.

But then also creators being able to like monetize their content.

There's someone on on Black Skuy who the name is ni.

Every every day they post like a they call it question Sky and they post like these like twenty questions that people all quote post and reply and it's always like a different theme and then they end it with like their cash app, and so like people should be able to like help, you know, support the creators in there in these spaces, and then like you know, sex workers as well should be able to be able to monetize their content without you know, worrying about all kinds of restrictions that could end up being placed on them.

The other thing is reputation so verification.

The conversation around this has subsided a little bit, but folks were a little disappointed that Blue Sky's model for verification ended up being that like blue Sky gives out the blue checks.

There are more interesting versions of this that could be built out with like web of trust kind of models.

So basically, like I think of like, I really I don't think it's perfect, but Reddit's karma score is very interesting.

So, like, are there ways for you to create a decentralized is reputation system for people?

Because I do think that like, once you online identities cost nothing to create and so there should be some way for you to be able to build up reputation on against a certain identity over time and know that this is like a trusted a trusted thing they have like domain, Like you can like make your domain your handle on blue scar and that's like that was like the original form of verification.

So you know, fake CNN dot BSk dot social is clearly distinguished from CNN dot com or like rudipraser dot com versus fake Rudy dot Biski dot social.

But I think there's like more that could be explored there, and I think communities can verify people like it.

You know, I've always like Black Skys should be able to hand out verifications so like key members of their community badging, you know, being able to say that like I'm a sucker for like get hub, you get a certain amount of stars, you get like a gold medal, you get a silver medal.

Being able to incorporate stuff like that, like if you're a black Sky supporter, be able to show like a badgering and profile.

I think stuff like that is really cool and interesting to build, to be able to take to basically build on the decentralized identity layer, which is like way in the background for a lot of people, but there's interesting stuff there.

There's a meeting with someone from the Applied Social Media Lab, where I was a fellow earlier this year.

They want to work on verified credentials, so you can basically say that like connect to your Blue Sky identity to this account on Instagram and Twitter and stuff like that.

So I think that's those are like interesting spaces to work on.

Yeah, I'm curious, do you see all of these so both with the success of Black Sky and then the smaller decentralized platforms and communities popping up, do you see this as the way of the future that we genuinely can help reset or unbreak kind of our default settings and default learnings of social media platforms and what they can be.

Yeah, I think there's a strong signal there.

Even even Facebook, to their credit like build threads and they're trying to integrate with the fediverse.

I think there is.

It's like a half hearted attempt, but I do think that like that's acknowledgment that you know, maybe that's like Zuckerberg in the back of his head, like not wanting to be disrupted in the future.

But yeah, I think it lets you unlock way more creativity around around the stuff that you're that you're doing, being able to like and I've been asked a lot about like our niche online spaces the future of social media.

I want, I personally want it both ways.

I want you to be able to have a cozy corner to hang out in and for you to be able to because organize again with organizing right like we have we We the People NYC, which I'm a lead organizer for, is a mu mutual aid group in New York.

We have a like one hundred person signal group chat where we're like organizing and talking about stuff.

And then we like if like the cops, you know, arrest us at our mutual aid distro, we then do want to post on Instagram and TikTok and get one hundred thousand views because that's what brings the news crews around and then we can like get our message out and you know, and so like, I think you need both.

I think you need private spaces and you need to be able to have like a global reach, especially if you think about internationally, like folks who are like facing like these real life crises around the world.

Like they they need a global reach.

They need people who understand their context, right, Like if you think of like Facebook's role in genocides globally like meandmar and stuff like, some of that was because there are the moderators did not have a local context and they didn't have the tool.

They had the option to use the tools to translate it, but they didn't, Right.

And there's like a world where you know, there weren't seeing this yet, but we're actually we're actually seeing with the europe I guess there's some folks trying to create Eurosky.

There's like building tools that are specific to the regulations and norms of your physical geolocation and then still being able to reach everyone around the world.

You know, I do think that is the future.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I want to sort of click into that because you know, I think back to all the different very impactful social and political movements that were started on social media platforms, things like me Too, things like Black Lives Matter, the racial justice, autriety uprisings that we saw in twenty twenty.

Do you think that have we Because in some ways what you're saying makes me feel hopeful.

I sometimes get a little pessimistic and think, oh, we'll never see another global movement pop off on social media as effectively as we once did.

But when you were speaking, I thought, maybe it won't look like it did, or maybe it won't be on the platform that it happened in in twenty twenty or twenty sixteen, But that doesn't mean it can't still happen.

What do you think about that?

Yeah, I mean it's nowhere near those other movements, But like the Tesla takedown thing did start on blue scar look like a blue Sky post, and then I do think that it won't look like how they did it, how it looked in the past.

I think I think it will look differently.

I can't speak for the early Black Lives Matter protests that started on Twitter, but I do know that, like I do know how it felt for like twenty twenty in the George Floyd uprisings, and we did use Instagram, Like Instagram kept me informed on lots of things.

Instagram is still like useful for a lot of that and like getting people out in the street.

But I think I do like, I don't know how it will look, but people are actually matter of we have current examples Nepal.

They're like using tools like Jack Dorsey's Bitchat, the one of the noster devs like shared this chart that's like he he knows that he knows when there's a social uprising because he sees like installs from certain locations with like the Bitchat installs go out.

So like me and mar had a bunch of installs recently because they have are not me, I'm sorry, Matta Gascar had something going on recently Nepal like they they also the Neapolo Journal was interesting because like I wasn't they voted in their prime minister like in discord and so like, you know, I'm like for meo, like why didn't they I think that's like a damning thing, Like why didn't they use these other so called decentralized social media platforms like to do that on you know, And so I think there's a lot there that is like under explored.

So yes, I don't think it will look the same.

What is giving you hope about building the the healthier community centered online spaces these days?

I'm always just really everyone that's joined the team has joined like voluntarily or like the fact that like people just kind of come into Black Sky like make it their own.

There's a very common narrative I think in like like particularly like white tech circles that like the founder is just like visionary who like charts this course and like really I think of first myself as just practicing, you know, like being influenced by the black radical tradition and being influenced by my cultural upbringing and like literally like how I grew up, as like the way I think about the stuff that I build and seeing people then come into Like someone made a fellowship to get people to get Black Sky members to the app protocol conference earlier this year.

Shout out to Linda there.

Otherwise I would have probably been one of the two black people there if it wasn't for Linden and the fellows.

One of those fellows became is now like a core team member.

The other fellow has been like a contributor to our documentation which has helped other people learn about the tools.

There's folks who have built like entire applications for us, and some of this tool called safe Skies.

That is a way for us to even further decentralize our moderation so that the other moderators on the team can come in and control the feed, the algorithm of the feed, and so like the I'm like and just being able to have this kind of like black Tech project, open source all the ethos behind it, and see that reach people and see how that inspires them to like how it changes them a bit.

It's that's what keeps me going and makes it worth it for me.

Wow, what a beautiful vision.

I mean, I started this conversation saying that I wasn't feeling great about our current social media landscape and tech landscape, but ending it there with what's making you feel hope, what's giving you motivation and what keeps you in this work and in this fight that we all know sometimes can feel.

Like uslog I think is really beautiful.

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi?

You can read us at Hello at tegody dot com.

You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com.

There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me bridget Toad.

It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed creative.

Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Almato is our contributing producer.

I'm your host, Bridget Todd.

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