Blacksky

🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable

How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

Blacksky

Blacksky is a social network. It is developed and maintained by Blacksky Algorithms. The project provides curated feeds and moderation tools to support Black social media users, many of whom previously used Black Twitter.

Overview

What is Blacksky? Blacksky Algorithms is building the future of self-governable online communities with tools that make complex infrastructure simple to deploy. Most social platforms control what users see, how communities operate, and who gets to feel safe online. Blacksky changes that by providing one-click infrastructure for independent, self-governed digital spaces. Our platform lets communities […]

W-Social: What does sovereignty mean for social media? – Open Future

The European Commission’s move to W-Social frames it as a European alternative to X, but its closed-source code and reliance on Bluesky’s infrastructure show that sovereign social media requires open infrastructure—not European ownership alone.

The Root – Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture

Bluesky is what Tumblr was

Over the past several months I have watched carefully as leftists have migrated over to Bluesky from X/twitter.

Building a Culture of (Digital) Safety

Black culture is in a lot of ways synonymous with how internet culture exists writ large. From what is now described as “Gen-Z slang” (or as Black people have always known it, AAVE) to our methods of organizing (Black feminists starting hashtag activism and creating movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #SayHerName) and even how we […]

The Ultimate Directory of tools and applications for Bluesky

A curated collection of all things relating to the Bluesky social media platform.

Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how

"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."

Bluesky

Social media as it should be. Find your community among millions of users, unleash your creativity, and have some fun again.

Bluesky

Social media as it should be. Find your community among millions of users, unleash your creativity, and have some fun again.

The Paradox of Open

Numerous organisations and initiatives have been launched with a belief in openness and free knowledge. Their proponents placed their bets on the combined power of networked information services and new governance models for the production and sharing of content and data. We – as members of this broad movement – were among those who believed it possible to leverage this combination of power and opportunity to build a more democratic society, unleashing the power of the internet to create universal access to knowledge and culture. For us, such openness meant not only freedom, but also presented a path to justice and equality.

The AT Protocol's interesting design - LittleBit

Bluesky's backend was made to be more than a social network

Governable Stacks against Digital Colonialism

Critics have been converging around the logic of colonialism to describe the Internet economy. If we are serious about the laden language of the colonial, we should be ready to learn from struggles against pre-digital empires and colonial regimes. Although acts of insurrection may attract more attention, one thing leaders and theorists of anticolonial resistance have stressed persistently is the centrality of self-governance in everyday life as both a means and end of their movements. But the dominant platforms for online communities are not well-suited for durable self-governing. Resistance often relies on the same colonial firms it opposes. What would community-governed technologies look like? This paper introduces the concept of “governable stacks”, a framework for self-governing as resistance to digital colonialism.

Implicit Feudalism — Rushkoff Archive

Too many of us think it doesn’t matter when a platform like X/Twitter has a single, all-powerful owner. Most of our online worlds are simply run by what we hope are benevolent dictators. After all, we figure, if we don’t like what they’re doing or allowing, we can just leave, right? But in most cases we’re just jumping from one rich dude’s idea for how the world should be to another rich dude’s idea for how the world should be.

New report on alternative social media

Exploring a transition to alternative social media platforms for social justice organizations in the Majority World