if you live For a long time now, in some Internet neighborhoods, governing rules, no matter how absurd or toxic, have become second nature.
On X, the site formerly known as Twitter became the site of harassment, racism and hate speech particularly poisonous Owned by Elon Musk, that if you identify as black, female, gay, trans or disabled you are almost guaranteed to have a target on your back. The combative atmosphere created a grim kind of gallows humor. Even fans of the platform would refer to it as “hell place”. But people stayed, mainly because there appeared to be no viable alternatives. The threads were strange. Mastodon was complicated. For a long time, there was Bluesky too quiet-Until some reversal happened, like the US elections came and went, and people had enough.
Millions of users have switched to BlueSky over the past few months. And while the platform isn’t perfect, many new arrivals become confused by the platform’s disarmingly enthusiastic atmosphere. “Trying to find my specific subset of humor here,” @lvteef posted on December 3. “Because millennials continue to be very happy and lucky to be on this app right now.”
“I feel like where is the sadness? Sick jokes? Hate in this choreography?” express reaction @knoxdotmp3.
Clearly, some of us are struggling to recover from the trauma of exes. At the same time, even longtime users of Bluesky have questions about the future of the platform, and whether the environment they have created can withstand the influx of newcomers. It seems as if social media is turning a page, and opening a new chapterOnly, this time, the creators of that far-off future are determined to get it right.
is one of those pawns Rudy Fraser30 year old New York technologist with a background in enterprise IT and community organizing. he is the creator of blackskyThe Custom feed and moderation service It is slowly becoming the main medium for many black users on BlueSky. If the phenomenon sounds familiar, that’s because it is. From the first flickers of Internet exploration, black people have discovered their own online oasis. it was true Netnoir in 1996 and, more recently, of black twitterThe center and engine of Internet culture during the 2010s. And where those experiments failed – Netnoir failed and Black Twitter, while still very active, lost any degree of security When Musk bought Twitter—Fraser wants to succeed. “Restraint,” he told me on a recent video call, “is a key part of this.”
Fraser has the ability to bring people together. In addition to IT consulting, he has worked as a lead organizer with We the People NYC, a grassroots mutual aid organization since 2022, and also created Peppertree, a digital mutual aid tool that connects large groups of people Allows to share money. “I wanted to set up a community bank account for all of Bed-Stuy,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. When that didn’t work out, Fraser re-evaluated.
It was the spring of 2023, shortly after Bluesky invitations started being released, and Fraser nabbed one during its beta testing (he was user 51,921). He was already involved in some Web3-adjacent projects, and was interested in questions related to data ownership. Bluesky’s mission – to become a decentralized social media platform, and truly make the social internet a self-governing ecosystem – appealed to him for similar reasons. “The whole idea of the AT protocol and the promise of algorithmic custom feeds seemed like a cool thing to get into,” he said.
