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.”
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.