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We are at a tipping point where “digital convenience” has become a trap for community memory. For archives and ongoing movements, the corporate cloud is no longer a neutral storage locker — it is a liability.

Blacksky Algorithms has announced an amazing new initiative to support mutual aid called BlackSky Cash. It's a thought-provoking effort with impressive goals, and it's exciting to see what's coming here.

Mutual aid has always been about more than money. But money, shared intentionally, can be a powerful expression of solidarity. This is us building toward that future.

A year ago, an investor asked what I'd build if I had the freedom. This is the answer: blacksky.cash for private payments and blacksky.tech for one-click infrastructure. We're just getting started.

Sovereignty is not an aesthetic. It is infrastructure." In a digital landscape defined by extraction and surveillance, true autonomy requires owning the platform, not just the profile. In Episode 18, we sit down with Rudy Fraser, founder of Blacksky Algorithms, to dismantle the current state of the internet. We discuss the creation of sovereign internet communities and the unique challenges faced by Black leaders in tech. This is not just about coding; it is about the "praxis of autonomy"—building open-source, community-driven platforms that prioritize privacy over profit.

Rudy Fraser, Founder & CEO of Blacksky Algorithms shares how Blacksky grew into the largest Black community on the decentralized web, with custom feeds used by over 2.5M people. He explains how their toolkit lets communities control algorithms, moderation, governance, and pooled funds while staying connected to a global social media ecosystem. Rudy talks about mutual aid roots, open-source development, community-written guidelines, the impact of US politics and free-speech crackdowns, and why privacy-preserving, community-run spaces are essential for Black autonomy and modern cypherpunk organizing.

PDS MOOver is a portability suite (with a cute cow logo) that lets you move your PDS between any two providers, plus useful stuff like backup and restore. And Blacksky has added PDS hosting to their suite of alternate ATProtocol services, with a tool called Tektite for the migration process. This is all pretty nascent – one estimate from August was that only about 1% of PDS were outside Bluesky servers. That was before Blacksky ramped up, so the number is probably higher now. And the vision of portable, personal storage is clear. Someday, you may be able to move your PDS around at least as easily as moving your money to a new bank.

It would have been better if the open networking sector had longer to build—just another year or two before Musk’s acquisition of Twitter or before the acceleration of the global authoritarian slide. But the ecosystems we have today offer plentiful ways for people who care about community self-governance to support the work of building out viable systems for high-context governance and connecting them together, by supporting efforts like Blacksky Algorithms and Northsky Social, which are building AT Protocol-based social networking stacks centering Black and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities

That is a growing concern among developers who say there are now too many social networking apps that have a poor understanding of social dynamics. Like Sora, they are “inherently antisocial and nihilistic,” says Rudy Fraser, the creator of Blacksky, the custom feed and moderation service for Black users on Bluesky. “They’ve given up on fostering real human connection and are looking to profit on supplying people with artificial connection and manufactured dopamine.”

“We’re demonstrating with AT Protocol that you can have a great user experience, have a good time again on the internet, and have real autonomy the entire time,” Fraser said.

Creators and users are locked in digital “serfdom” by corporate social media’s algorithms and business models. Rabble, Bridget Todd, and Rudy Fraser will tackle how to break free from the feudal overlords of tech, and explain why Musk buying Twitter aided the move to decentralized apps. They’ll dig into new financial models, open protocols, and new community apps that empower creators and users without enriching platform owners. Learn how to create strategies that sustain social communities, and why open, user-first social apps are gaining in popularity with creators and audiences alike.

There’s a new movement on the block. I like to call it “open social”. There are competing visions for what “open social” should be like. I think the AT Protocol created by Bluesky is the most convincing take on it so far. It’s not perfect, and it’s a work in progress, but there’s nothing I know quite like it.

Rudy Fraser is the founder of Blacksky, a community-driven project building on top of the AT Protocol while remaining independent of Bluesky, where that protocol originated. At Blacksky, he and his team are applying the principles of mutual aid and community ownership to algorithms, moderation teams, and governance tools for the Black community, giving users more control over their means of communication. “For me, community really means mutual accountability between the one and the many,” Rudy

This is part two of Nodestar, our three-part series on decentralisation. Blacksky is a community built using the AT Protocol by Rudy Fraser. Rudy built this both out of a creative drive to make something new using protocol thinking, and out of frustration over a lack of safe community spaces for black folks where they could be themselves, and not have to experience anti-black racism or misogynoir as a price of entry. Rudy and Alix discuss curation as moderation, the future of community stewardship, freeing ourselves from centralised content decision-making, how technology might connect with mutual aid, and the beauty of what he refers to as ‘dotted-line communities’.

An overly broad age assurance law in Mississippi is leading to arguments about which platforms — Bluesky, Mastodon, or others — offer the best solution for avoiding crackdowns on internet freedoms.

The goal of Bluesky and the ATProtocol, and of the push for protocols over platforms in general, has always been to see more people building their own communities in a modular fashion. One of the most interesting projects demonstrating this potential is Blacksky, created by Rudy Fraser, which started as a custom feed within Bluesky but has grown into something much bigger. Today, Rudy joins the podcast for a conversation all about Blacksky and what it teaches us about open social media protocols.

A startup called Skylight is taking a different approach to short-form video. Instead of restricting users to an algorithmic main feed, as is common on social apps, Skylight is building a community around human curators who post and repost videos to build out their own custom feeds others can subscribe to.

How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

Join Communia at Soho Works for a forward looking panel discussion on creating a better digital world! ​Featuring a panel with a variety of industry expertise: ​Amrapali Gan (Recent OF CEO, Communia Strategic Partner, Stealth), Vlad Litinetsky (SnapChat Entertainment Talent Partnerships Lead), Rudy Fraser (Blacksky founder and Harvard Berkman Klein fellow bringing a decentralized perspective), and Dominc Madori-Davis (TechCrunch journalist covering the issues and on the frontlines of social media) ​Moderated by Olivia DeRamus (Communia founder and ethical tech advocat

In this episode of Stats On Stats, we’re joined by Rudy Fraser, founder of Blacksky Algorithms and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. Rudy unpacks his journey from growing up in Queens to leading one of the most innovative decentralized social projects online. He explains how Blacksky, a Black-led community built on the BlueSky protocol, is reimagining content moderation, data ownership, and online safety

in the geopolitics and tech sovereignty session, BKC’s Applied Social Media Lab Fellow Rudy Fraser remarked on how relevant the conversations were to his own work in the tech space. “It covered increasing US isolationism and the push for independent tech stacks… The global appetite for community sovereignty is real.”

Blacksky Algorithms builds infrastructure for social groups to control how they show up online: how their feeds work, how harm is addressed, and how costs are covered.

Blacksky is often recognized for fostering an inclusive online space for Black community building through culturally relevant social feeds and context-aware moderation against anti-Black harassment and misogynoir.

What if your social media experience weren’t controlled by an algorithm or a corporation, but by your community? That’s the idea behind Blacksky, a decentralized project built on the AT Protocol — the same infrastructure powering Bluesky.

If you're anywhere near work on the AT Protocol (opens new window) then you surely know Rudy Fraser, among other things for his work on BlackSky (opens new window) and the rsky (opens new window) (say "risky") projects. The grant will go to rsky-satnav (opens new window) (Structured Archive Traversal, Navigation And Verification — we do appreciate a quality acronym), a local-first and user-friendly CAR (opens new window) explorer for AT Protocol.

In 2023, Fraser launched Blacksky, the custom feed and moderation service that quickly turned into the central meeting ground for many Black users on Bluesky. He tells me he also views Blacksky as a living archive. Currently its database holds 17 million posts from Black users over the last two years (excluding deletions and moderation removals). “Because the AT Protocol is public and Blacksky’s implementation is open source, anyone with the technical chops could reconstruct the dataset—minus moderation actions—even if our primary databases disappeared,” he says. “Open source, decentralized tooling ensures that, if any single company becomes a nation-state target, the communities that rely on its infrastructure can keep operating.”

One of the platform’s most prominent feeds, Blacksky, which draws more than three hundred thousand users a month, offers a tool to identify and block racism and misogynoir ... [Rudy] told me 'If anyone uses a slur ... in a username, bio, in a post—we can get automatically alerted and take action.'

BlackSky: A community-focused platform that offers moderation and support that makes social media a safer place for Black users, including those migrating from the online community known as Black Twitter.

Making communities a true part of the protocol will encourage others to build things for those communities, start new communities, and hopefully foster models for self-sustainability.

BlackSky founder Rudy Fraser hit an emotional note on Saturday when talking about using ATProto to build communities. His project today offers moderation and support that makes social media a safer place for Black users, including those migrating from the online community known as Black Twitter. Eventually, BlackSky may run on all of its own ATProto-based infrastructure and offer its own consumer-facing client.

For instance, Blacksky was founded by one of Bluesky’s early adopters as a feed for Black users, but it has evolved into its own community with moderation standards and 350,000 monthly active visitors, all on the AT Protocol.

In this episode, you’ll hear a discussion with one entrepreneur building middleware for Bluesky: Rudy Fraser, the founder of Blacksky Algorithms and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Fraser is a young technologist and organizer whose ambitious side project has become building Blacksky into something much more ambitious than an ephemeral hashtag. He wants to create a thriving, safe Black online community.

This week we're talking to Rudy Fraser, the developer behind BlackSky, a community he carved out of BlueSky. Using custom feeds, labelers and everything the platform has to offer, BlackSky offers a safe space for Black communities to share their stories and connect. In the process he's dealt with funding, scaling, and building out his own tools on top of ATProto, the tech behind BlueSky.

The curated feed, now run by a team of six moderators, is the meeting ground for hundreds of thousands of Black users on Bluesky. Is it ready to meet the moment?

What sets Blacksky apart technically is its innovative use of the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol), Bluesky’s decentralized social networking standard. Unlike traditional social networks, where a single company controls all user data and interactions, the AT Protocol allows users to own their identity and move their data between apps and services – similar to how email works across different providers.

What I’m learning is n----s don’t like Blacksky and I’m fine with it, I’ll push the line with it

From the very beginning, the internet was antiblack.

We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology. - Black Panther Party 10 Point Program

A sophisticated exercise in Blackness.

I felt too young, and too cool, and too Black to be on Bluesky.