Press

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.

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.”

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.

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.