Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be

if you live In some online communities, given enough time, governance rules, no matter how ridiculous or toxic, become second nature.

Harassment, racism and hate speech have become so serious on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Uniquely poisonous Under Elon Musk, if you identify as black, female, queer, trans, or disabled, you will almost certainly be a target. The combative environment produced a grim gallows humor. Even fans of the platform refer to it as a “hell site.” But people stay, mostly because there seems to be no viable alternative. Threads are weird. Mastodons are complex. For a long time, the blue sky too quiet—until things took a turn for the worse, with the U.S. election coming and going, and people had had enough.

Over the past few months, millions of users have been moved to Bluesky. While the platform isn’t perfect, many newcomers are confused by its disarmingly upbeat vibe. “Trying to find my niche subset of humor here,” @lvteef posted on December 3, “because as of now, Millennials are lucky on this app.”

“I thought, where’s the pain? The sick jokes? The hatred in this ball? responded @knoxdotmp3.

Clearly some of us are struggling to move past the trauma of X. It feels like social media is turning a new page Start a new chapter. Only, this time, the architect of that not-so-distant future was determined to get it right.

One of these pioneers is Rudy Fraziera 30-year-old New York technologist with a background in enterprise IT and community organizing. he is the creator of Krishnathis Customized dynamic and review services This is slowly becoming the primary avenue for many black users on Bluesky. If this phenomenon sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Since the earliest dawn of online exploration, Black people have been looking for their own online oases. it’s true Internet noir in 1996 And, recently, black twitterthe center and engine of Internet culture in the 2010s. These experiments failed – NetNoir failed, and Black Twitter, while still very active, also failed any form of protection When Musk bought Twitter, Fraser wanted to succeed. “Moderation,” he told me during a recent video call, “is a key part of it.”

Fraser had a knack for bringing people together. In addition to IT consulting, since 2022 he has been the lead organizer of the grassroots mutual aid organization We The People NYC and created Papertree, a digital mutual aid tool that allows a large group of people to share money. “I want 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 pan out, Fraser reassessed.

It was the spring of 2023, not long after Bluesky invites started going out, and Frazier got one during beta testing (he had 51,921 users). He has been involved in a number of Web3-related projects and is interested in issues related to data ownership. Bluesky’s mission—to be a decentralized social media platform that truly makes the social Internet an autonomous ecosystem—attracted him for similar reasons. “The whole idea of ​​the AT protocol and the promise of algorithmic custom feeds seems like a cool thing,” he said.