Animation: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images
If you dwell in certain internet neighborhoods long enough, the rules of governing, however absurd or toxic, become second nature.
On X, the site formerly known as Twitter, harassment, racism, and hate speech had become so uniquely poisonous under the ownership of Elon Musk, that if you identified as Black, a woman, queer, trans, or disabled you were all but guaranteed to have a target on your back. The combative environment engendered a grim sort of gallows humor. Even fans of the platform would refer to it as “the hellsite.” But people stayed, largely because there didn’t seem to be a viable alternative. Threads was weird. Mastodon was complicated. For a long time, Bluesky was too quiet—until something flipped, as the US election came and went, and people had had enough.
Millions of users have decamped to Bluesky over the past couple of months. And while the platform isn’t perfect, many new arrivals are mystified by the platform’s disarmingly upbeat atmosphere. “Trying to find my niche subset of humor on here,” @lvteef posted on December 3, “because as of right now it’s very millennial happy go lucky on this app.”
“I’m like where’s the misery? the sick jokes? the hateration in this dancery?” responded @knoxdotmp3.
Clearly, some of us are struggling to shrug off the traumas of X. At the same time, longtime users of Bluesky also have questions about the future of the platform, and whether the environment they’ve created can withstand the influx of new people. It feels like social media is turning a page, and opening a new chapter. Only, this time, the architects of that not-so-faraway future are determined to get it right.
One of those vanguards is Rudy Fraser, a 30-year-old New York technologist with a background in enterprise IT and community organizing. He’s the creator of Blacksky, the custom feed and moderation service that is slowly turning into the main avenue for many Black users on Bluesky. If the phenomenon sounds familiar, that’s because it is. From the first flickers of internet exploration, Black people have searched for their own online oasis. It was true of NetNoir in 1996 and, more recently, of Black Twitter, the epicenter and engine of internet culture during the 2010s. And where those experiments failed—NetNoir fizzled out and Black Twitter, while still very active, lost any semblance of protection when Musk bought Twitter—Fraser wants to succeed. “Moderation,” he told me on a recent video call, “is a key piece of it.”
The running joke about Black Twitter was that there was no sign-up sheet to join. With Blacksky, it’s different.
Fraser has a knack for bringing people together. In addition to IT consulting, he’s worked as a lead organizer with We The People NYC, a grassroots mutual aid organization, since 2022, and also created Papertree, a digital mutual aid tool that allows large groups of people to share money. “I wanted to set up a community bank account for all of Bed-Stuy,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. When that didn’t pan out, Fraser reassessed.
It was the spring of 2023, not long after Bluesky invites started going out, and Fraser snagged one during its beta testing (he was user 51,921). He was already involved in some Web3-adjacent projects, and interested in questions around data ownership. Bluesky’s mission—to be a decentralized social media platform, and truly make the social internet a self-governing ecosystem—appealed to him for similar reasons. “The whole idea of AT protocol and the promise of an algorithmic custom feed seemed like a cool thing to jump into,” he said.
Fraser is a self-taught programmer, and he was eager to build an online space of his own, one oriented around healthier community. Less than a month later, on May 23, he launched Blacksky. Technically speaking, Blacksky is an app Fraser built into Bluesky that uses tailored algorithms and bots to weed out anti-Black harassment and misogynoir. Everything on the #Blacksky feed is there because it has passed Fraser’s litmus test for inclusion. And it worked. “The very first version—like 0.01 of the Blacksky feed—1,000 people used it,” he said. “I realized this was something I could keep building on.”
The running joke about Black Twitter, especially as it was subjected to more mainstream attention, was that there was no sign-up sheet to join; outsiders didn’t understand that Black Twitter was simply where conversation happened. With Blacksky, it’s different. Users choose to opt-in to Fraser’s networked moderation. It’s helpful to think of Blacksky as an infrastructure designed to keep Black users safe. “For me, that is the goal and vision and purpose of Blacksky: to decenter whiteness as the default and to provide a space for Black folk to discuss the Black everyday in a way that feels affirming,” Fraser wrote in a blog post in 2023.
Blacksky shares many commonalities with Black Twitter: spry discussion, divergent viewpoints, a singular sense of humor, sporadic nudity. But users on X never had complete control of who or what appeared in their timeline; you could block one racist who appeared on your For You feed, but then X’s algorithm might just serve you up another. Where Blacksky fundamentally differs from Black Twitter is in its offerings. Essentially, it is a tool that guarantees specific services. It aggregates content, provides moderation, and is a server that hosts users’ account data.
When you click subscribe on the @blacksky.app page, you give moderation control to the Blacksky team. Everything you report from then on—maybe you saw a post that demeaned Black women—is sent to Blacksky moderators. As with any other custom feed, you can follow along by adding Blacksky to your Feed toolbar on Bluesky. To join the conversation themselves, many users have included the hashtag #addtoblacksky on a selfie post. Fraser also curates skeets (user jargon for posts) into a custom timeline called “Blacksky: Trending,” where, of late, conversation bounced from generational social media habits—“30+ bluesky loves them a gif,” joked @danilalonders—to the alleged United Healthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione, whom many have christened an internet folk hero.
At first, Fraser moderated the Blacksky feed on his own. Today, he works alongside a team of five, all of whom are paid via donations and have backgrounds in trust and safety. They field about 500 reports a day, from more than 872,500 subscribers. As more users migrate from other platforms, a top priority is making sure that they understand the process.
“Billionaires broke social media.”Rudy Fraser, Blacksky creator
“Users need to feel like they can trust the moderation team—think of reports being handled timely, people not being able to disrupt, frustrate, or harass Black folks,” said JD Lauwerends, one of Blacksky’s moderators. “That’s not to say violence will disappear or stop developing, but that direct support to these types of violations could, hopefully, lead to a breakthrough in thinking. Just as much as the availability of such vile content made it easier for folks to express their hatred.”
Not everyone believes it will work. “Y’all don’t even have this much smoke to tell people what not to wear to your birthday event. I’m supposed to believe that you’ll actually [gate]keep blacksky? Lol,” @blaaksuedepumps posted this month. I myself wondered about the inherent risks when I spoke with Fraser. What happens when moderators have a disagreement? Is a council of six people really enough to watch over the entire feed? Fraser isn’t concerned. “You’re not always going to agree with my moderation decisions,” he has warned. When we spoke again, by email, he said the “processes and guidelines” are still a work in progress as he fully onboards the moderation team. And if disagreement does arise, it’s typically “for appeals where I’ll reach out to a mod if they didn’t put enough detail in the report,” which, so far, has not amounted to real conflict.
Fraser told me he wants Blacksky to be anti-ableist, queer-friendly, and open to Black people of all identities. Decentralized platforms like Bluesky, then, are a kind of safeguard for that inclusive future. Fraser isn’t interested in looking back. “Billionaires broke social media,” he said. The real power is with the people.
In the year and a half since Fraser launched Blacksky, he says there haven’t been many tentpole events, and certainly not on the level of the Black Lives Matter movement or #OscarsSoWhite. Still, Blacksky has had its moments. The surprise release of Kendrick Lamar’s latest album, GNX, was one. Netflix’s Mike Tyson–Jake Paul fight on November 15 was another. “We had a million views on the feed in a single day,” Fraser said. “I couldn’t really experience much of it because I was trying to keep the servers alive. Afterward people were saying that Blacksky survived its first cultural event. There were all these jokes about Netflix glitching more than Blacksky.”
As we are already seeing, the next era of social media is going to look a lot more segmented than before, but maybe that’s not so bad, because ownership is ultimately back where it is intended—in the hands of users. Right now, the question in front of Blacksky is a big one: What does a reimagining of collective power look like, and who gets to decide?
Fraser thinks some of it will mirror previous iterations, the way users leveraged Twitter with #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements. “It’ll be interesting to see what that looks like for AT Protocol,” he said, “which may offer new opportunities for coalition building—shared archival storage, networks of connected moderation services, open source tooling—and eliminate black box algorithms and advertiser interests.”
The belief that a reimagination can, and should, happen is what originally appealed to KáLyn Coghill, an educator with experience in online harm reduction, who joined Blacksky’s moderation team this year. Coghill wanted to know “what the process could look like if Black people had the power to remove toxic accounts from their zeitgeist.” What all might spring from that sort of environment? How would social media change? How would we?
We may know soon enough.