If you haven’t been watching closely, you could be forgiven for assuming that Bluesky is a just liberal Twitter clone, or a newfangled imitator of Mastodon.
But under the surface, something fascinating has been happening: this is the first time ever that a public benefit corporation with a small team has quickly scaled an open source social network, built on top of decentralized infrastructure, to tens of millions of users. For us at New_ Public, nothing illustrates the potential of this model better than Blacksky, created by Rudy Fraser and his team.
Below, Rudy will take you through what Blacksky is, how it works, and why this is so important. In order to bring digital public spaces to everyone, we need it to be a lot easier to create far more communities like Blacksky. Bluesky and its AT Protocol are not a panacea or silver bullet for everything that ails social media — but we think there’s so much more to be learned, tried, and built this way.
–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public
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Black folks have always been huge culture drivers on social media platforms and other tech products. Systemically excluded from access to capital and distribution, Black folks leverage creativity to make social media platforms their “own” without ever having true ownership. Decentralization, through technology like the AT Protocol, offers a new path forward.
Consider a non-technological example of decentralized, interoperable standards (where two or more differently designed systems can work together): the Allen wrench. Probably every piece of furniture I’ve put together comes with and is compatible with one. Manufacturers and customers all benefit from being aligned on using the same standard tool — not squares, not triangles, but hexagons. We live in a social media environment where every company ships a product with the equivalent of their own distinct key shape and we just accept it.
AT Protocol could be that kind of standard for social media. The technology, developed by Bluesky, makes new kinds of global, self-governed communities possible that weren’t before. One of the best examples of the power of this technology is Blacksky, which began as a custom feed and has always been a collective effort between myself, close collaborators, and the broader Black userbase. It began as an experiment in designing an algorithm that centered Black voices, prioritizing community safety and self-governance. We’ve since scaled from 0 to two million users with $0 spent out of pocket and 100% organic growth. Decentralization has made that possible.
Centralized vs. decentralized social media
Most of the billions of people using social media today interact with closed source, proprietary, centralized social media applications. Users exchange autonomy and ownership over their digital selves in exchange for a “free” service that offers convenience and participation in large network effects or interesting social innovations.
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