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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.