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“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.

How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

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.”