Blacksky is nothing like black Twitter – and it doesn’t need to be

Yes you are in some quarters of the internet long enough, the rules to govern, however absurd or toxic, become second nature.

On X, the site formerly known as Twitter, harassment, racism and hate speech had become so. only poisonous under the ownership of Elon Musk, that if you identified as Black, a woman, queer, trans, or disabled, you were guaranteed to have a target on your back. The combat environment generated a kind of gallows mood. Even fans of the platform will refer to it as “the site of hell”. But people stayed, largely because there didn’t seem to be a viable alternative. The wires were strange. Mastodon was complicated. For a long time, Bluesky was too quiet-until something turned around, like the US elections came and went, and people had had enough.

Millions of users have migrated to Bluesky in the last two months. And while the platform is not perfect, many newcomers are mystified by the disarming atmosphere of the platform. “Try to find my subset of niche humor here,” @lvteef posted on Dec. 3, “because now a lot of millennials are happy to be lucky enough to be on this app.”

“I’m like where’s the misery? the sick jokes? the hatred in this dancer?” answered @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 have created can support the influx of new people. It feels like social media is turning a page, and open a new chapter. Only, this time, the architects of that not-so-distant future are determined to do well.

One of those vanguards is Rudy Frasera 30-year-old New York technologist with a background in enterprise computing and community organizing. He is the creator of Blackskyu personalized food and moderation service which is slowly turning into the main route for many Black users on Bluesky. If the phenomenon sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Since the first flickers of Internet exploration, Black people have sought their own online oasis. It was true NetNoir in 1996 and, more recently, of Black Twitterthe epicenter and engine of internet culture during the 2010s. And where those experiments failed – NetNoir fizzled out and Black Twitter, while it was 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 this.”

Fraser has a knack for bringing people together. In addition to IT consulting, he has 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 create a community bank account for all of Bed-Stuy,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. When that didn’t happen, Fraser reassessed.

It was the spring of 2023, shortly after the Bluesky invites started going out, and Fraser snagged one during his beta test (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 ​​the AT protocol and the promise of algorithmic personalized food seemed like a great thing to jump on,” he said.