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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.

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.