This is what solidarity looks like

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Blacksky has continued to progress by leaps and bounds in the months since I first wrote “Decentralization” and erasure: Blacksky, Bluesky, and the ATmosphere, expanding the team and executing on the path that Rudy Fraser laid out in 2024.

• Hundreds of people have set up accounts on the blacksky.app PDS (personal data server) – including me.
• The blacksky.community app has the outstanding Blacksky Moderation service enabled by default, and the also-outstanding Blacksky: Trending as the feed for new users instead of Bluesky's crappy Discover feed).
• Behind the scenes, the Blacksky feeds use the Blacksky relay at atproto.africa, which extends relay functionality by including a "mod relay" - and other ATmosphere software is starting to use it as well.
• Blacksky is now hosting almost all of their own infrastructure.¹ Here's a recent post from Rudy with the list

And Bluesky's horrible moderation in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting (Nathan Grayson's Bluesky Really Doesn’t Want People To Say ‘Rest In Piss’ About Charlie Kirk has some of the lowlights) is yet another great advertisement for Blacksky's ability to make its own moderation decisions. Over the last few months, Blacksky has also (unlike Bluesky) decided not to block Mississippi and not to require identity documents, biometrics, or credit cards to access DMs in the United Kingdom. Here's a late-August post from international humanitarian aid worker in the Balkans who couldn't get to their DMs because Bluesky thought they were in the UK.

As dapurplesharpie says, this is what solidarity looks like. And speaking of solidarity ...

Please join me in supporting Bluesky!

The gorgeous Blacksky Algorithms website at blacksky.xyz, Rudy's recent 🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable on New Public (with Josh Kramer), Nodestar: Building Blacksky w/ Rudy Fraser (with Alix Dunn), Stats on Stats' Blacksky Algorithms: Building Decentralized Social Media with Rudy Fraser (below), the podcast with TechDirt founder (and Bluesky board member) Mike Masnick, and the Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power Blacksky Algorithms memo to investors are good overview of where things are in early September 2025.

Meanwhile, in the ATmosphere ...

Meanwhile, the developer ecosystem in the ATmosphere (the ecosystem of software built around the AT Protocol, including Blacksky and Bluesky) is thriving with a lot of collaboration and synergies. Northsky Social (in Canada) focusing on the 2SLGBTQIA2S+ community – and is currently testing a PDS migration tool as well. Skylight Social, Streamplace, and Spark (in Brazil) are focusing on video. Gander (also in Canada) is planning on launching this fall. There's a lot of energy behind Eurosky. The AT Protocol dev community, after several successful conferences on multiple continents and both coasts of North America, is starting up a working group on bringing private data to the ATmosphere, a project that Rudy added to Blacksky's roadmap several months ago. Smoke Signal (events), Flashes (an Instagram alternative), Leaflet and Offprint for long-form text ...

The list goes on and on and on, and Laurens Hof's weekly ATmosphere report keeps getting longer and longer. That's a good thing!

And all of these projects are learning from each other, building off each others successes, and working together to improve the platform. One good example: dapurplesharpie's excellent short video demonstrating how to use independent developer Bailey Townsend's PDS Moover to migrate accounts from Bluesky to Blacksky.

As Rudy says, "You'd think Bailey was on payroll the amount of work he puts in for Blacksky. With all the hats I have to wear daily, stuff like this means a lot." Blacksky's Tektite.cc is now another good migration option, although currently available on Chrome; sprout's How to Migrate to Blacksky and Clinton Bowen's also-excellent short video have more.

As other non-Bluesky PDSs and migration tools start to become available they'll be able to leverage all this work. Solidarity in action!

So while Bluesky is still largely centralized in some important ways (99%+ of users are still on Bluesky infrastructure and most of them don't have backups, Bluesky still controls the PLC directory that most ATmosphere software depends on and the magic "rotation keys" ) that's clearly in the process of changing. As inquiline says in Yo computer touchers, as part of a thread on assemblag.es about the "long history of Black inventors' ingenuity being denied at a systemic level"

"Whatever one thinks of Bluesky, *the* most innovative cultural and technical experimental space there right now is Blacksky; *and* it’s also the clearest example of decentralized possibility on the AT protocol. When people double down saying “AT isn’t decentralized”, they are denying that Blacksky exists."

And yet ...

But the main topic of my late-2024 post was the erasure of Blacksky and ...well let's just say things haven't progressed quite as much on this front over the last nine months in the ActivityPub Fediverse as one might have hoped. A couple of examples:

• Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko's post "And this is why real decentralization matters" and the discussion thread that followed. There were plenty of others in the ActivityPub Fediverse as well – enough that I wound up doing a post Can we please stop arguing about whether Bluesky is decentralized?
• Fediverse influencer Chris Trottier's claim that "Communities built around interests are something #Twitter never offered, and #Bluesky still doesn’t." Blacksky bets to differ!
• The suggestion by ActivityPub spec co-editor Evan Prodromou (whose biography on the Social Web Foundation site notes that he's sometimes called “The Father of the Fediverse") that "Competing protocols are not good for the space. They divide the community and prevent reaching critical mass." Hmm. Once again, Blacksky begs to differ.

At some level, who cares. Evan, Eugen, and their allies have (at least for now) blocked the official W3C SWICG standards body from endorsing the Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol that long-time ActivityPub developer and trust and safety expert Emelia Smith organized, but whatever – quite a few key Fediverse and ATmosphere developers and influencers have signed on.

A great learning opportunity for the ActivityPub Fediverse

"[D]ismissing Bluesky without even considering Blacksky isn't just erasure, it's also missing out on something very important. Especially for people in the ActivityPub Fediverse – with its long history of whiteness, anti-Blackness, and misogynoir – there's a lot to learn here....

But it's really hard to learn from Blacksky if you're pretending it doesn't exist."

– “Decentralization” and erasure:

Still, all of this erasure and dismissiveness – and the endless discourse about decentralization – really does have a huge cost to the Fediverse.

There's a lot to learn from Blacksky, starting with the way Rudy listens to the community; check out the excellent feedback in Blacksky Assembly for the next iteration of the Community Guidelines. And in a post on kolektiva.social, ophiocephalic (curator of the Free Fediverse wiki) makes an important point about another important thing the ActivityPub Fediverse could be learning here:

"Relatively few of us care about decentralization as a purely technical architectural principle. It matters because it sets the stage for the horizontal redistribution of agency and power, and thus the subversion of hierarchy in and democratization of online space. Suggestion here that what we should be paying attention to first and foremost is the power analysis.

While decentralist AT developers have a long way to go to get to where we already are, they're at least moving in the right direction. Meanwhile, the same cannot necessarily be said of the fediverse. In fact, power is concentrating here, largely due to the centralizing megaservers, the Zuckerberg incursion, and the wrongheaded failures of "leadership" ensconced in the SWICG/SWF silo."

Yeah really. The sooner people in the Fediverse stop listening to people like Evan the better.

And more positively, despite all the naysayers, there's also a much broader awareness of and respect for the importance of Blacksky in the Fediverse – and a realization that people trying to redistribute power and agency in the different ecosystems really are on the same side.

As Spritely Labs executive director (and ActivityPub spec co-editor) Christine Lemmer-Webber says on social.coop, "our communities do both face major threats which I believe we are ideologically aligned in wanting to face" – including "the rise of techno-fascism and omnisurveillance."

"These are our existential threats, not each other. And we need to figure out how to work together."

All credit to Rudy, all credit to the team!

At the end of the day, though, what's really important here? As Laurens Hof says in On discourse and decentralisation

"What fundamentally matters most is that communities can own and control their own places on the internet. Blacksky provides a clear example of this: That Black people can build their own social place on the internet, where the community can set their own rules, have their own moderation, and their own methods for governance is incredibly meaningful in itself, and an example for what self-governing communities can look like on the open social web."

And while Rudy deserves every bit of the credit he's getting for Blacksky's success, as he consistently points out it has been very much a team effort – and the team also collectively deserve every bit of the credit.

What next? Well, Blacksky's mobile apps will be available "soon-ish," and they're working on their own AppView implmentation as well – which will enable Blacksky-only posts, functionality the community is very very eager for. Venture capital firms in the US almost never fund Black-led companies, but at some point hopefully some angel investors will wake up and start throwing some money Blacksky's way and further accelerate progress. And whether or not that happens, the community is incredibly supportive – and growing rapidly. So I'm confident that Rudy and the team will continue to innovate and execute on their really amazing vision.

As somebody who's believed in the liberatory powers of social networks for decades, I've never been as excited about a project as I am about Blacksky. And I for one am very much looking forward to what comes next – and looking for ways to help!

Speaking of which, at the risk of repeating myself ... please join me in supporting Blacsky!

Notes

¹ In the discussions of the first version of this article, several people asked how much it costs Blacksky to host their infrastructure. Currently, the two biggest components are

• PDS storage, with the data for all the people on blacksky.app (as well as supporters with accounts on myatprotocol.social). This is running on a digitalocean storage optimized droplet at $262 /month, and Rudy expects this can scale to a million users (Bluesky scaled their PDS to 500K users before they split it). As of late August the PDS required 328GB of blob storage; it's $0.02 / GB for more, so while that number's likely to increase significantly it's not going to break the bank.
• the africa.proto relay. This is running on a $66/month bare metal OVH instance (with unlimited bandwidth): 2 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 66GB storage for PLC directory cache + ~200GB per 24hrs of backfill replay window. Relays need to crawl the entire network, so if Bluesky's number of active users increases by an order of magnitude, so will storage requirements ... again though, it's not going to be hugely expensive.

It's hard to project the AppView costs, although it's likely to be more expensive than the Relay. In July, futur.blue noted that the total cost for running a copy of Bluesky's AppView was $200, primarily for 16TB of storage (he entire history of all posts ever made on the network). Of course, there may well be ways to optimize that; then again, the non-storage costs of an AppView are likely scales at least linearly with the number of users. So time will tell!

Update log

Ongoing: typo fixes, cleanups, additional links

September 12: add link to Bluesky Really Doesn’t Want People To Say ‘Rest In Piss’ About Charlie Kirk with deets about Bluesky moderation issues in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting. Bluesky and The Battle of Wormtongue has background about Bluesky's long history of anti-Black and anti-trans moderation.

September 14: add footnote on costs.

September 15: add Rudy's skeet listing the current infrastructure.