Introducing Acorn: Community Infrastructure That Grows With You

All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Blacksky is excited to announce Acorn, a platform for growing and managing communities on decentralized infrastructure. It started, as most things do at Blacksky, with moderation. Our ethos is rooted in community care and what is moderation other than digital care work? Blacksky creates a space for Black people to be safe from the harassment so often present on the internet, a space only made possible by our moderators showing up, reviewing difficult cases, and absorbing the weight of protecting the space they love. Opposed to other moderation platforms who contract out third party moderators and surveil their work to ensure they hit their quotas, our design assumptions start from a different place. Our moderators care for the community; how can we care for them?

Community-centered moderation

We started by building a custom moderation interface built off of Bluesky’s open-source Ozone, with design and features specific to our needs. As a baseline, we needed to build our moderation platform to issue labels, add users to our mutelist, and ban offenders from our feeds. But more than that our moderators wanted an interface that felt friendly and approachable. They deserved the tools to be intentional with moderation, so we built in features to let them start and end moderation sessions so that they could check in with themselves before starting and choose how much work (and emotional burden) they felt capable of taking on. Moderation is a team effort, so we built an ability for moderators to tag each other on difficult cases that required more than one review. Moderators review cases on the go, so we built the site to be mobile friendly. We wanted Blacksky’s community ethos to be present throughout, so we created a friendly policy sidebar that lets their moderation work always be situated in the context of what they’re protecting against. 

Acorn’s long-term vision: nourish growing communities 

Octavia Butler published Parable of the Sower in 1993, but it is set in a version of America in 2024 with a dangerous demagogue at the helm of the country and community all but broken down. She was prophetic. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, develops Earthseed – a philosophy that worships change as the only true constant force in the world. The adherents of Earthseed worship by paying deep attention to the world around them, understanding the way that it changes, and learning to shape that change itself. This vision and the constant acts of care Lauren displays builds a community capable of adapting to the hostile world around them. She calls that community Acorn.

Our platform is named Acorn as an homage to this vision. Like the fictional Acorn community, Blacksky has survived through constant adaptation. We didn’t plan to build out the full infrastructure stack we have now – a stack that provides complete independence of Bluesky. Each step was adaptive. We built feeds, because Black users on Bluesky needed a way to find each other. We created a mute list, because Blacksky users deserved a way to easily know which accounts to avoid. We deployed a labeler, because the community needed a way to define its own policies and proactively filter out posts and accounts. We hosted a PDS, because our community members wanted to host their data with a service that they knew would protect them. We built an appview, because the community needed a view of the network that reflected our relationships and values. As the community grew, its needs changed and our infrastructure grew to fit those needs. Community need guided every step. 

Each step also required real engineering effort and expertise to build. This expertise should not be a barrier for other communities who are growing. We are working to make the full suite of infrastructure Blacksky built for itself available to other communities: custom feeds, context-specific badges, custom clients reflecting a community’s aesthetic, democratic polling through our governance pipeline, and a path toward a dedicated PDS as the community’s needs grow to require it. The social context that Acorn accumulates across these services — knowing who someone is across feeds, badges, governance participation, and hosting — is what makes each of them more powerful in combination than any of them would be alone. That richness is not yet fully realized, but the architecture makes it possible, and every service a community adds brings it closer. As we build out more services for our community, we want to make them deployable for others through Acorn.

Not every community will need all of this. A community just finding its legs doesn’t need a PDS. It might not need democratic polling on day one. What it needs is access to the pieces that are right for where it is, with the ability to grow into more as the community demands it. The vision of Acorn is to make that growth possible without requiring communities to first become developers. Pick what you need, when you need it. As the community changes, the infrastructure changes with it.

If you are the steward of a community that could benefit from these tools, please reach out to us at hello@blacksky.app! We’d love to hear from you to discuss what your community needs.