if you live In certain neighborhoods of the Internet, governing rules, no matter how absurd or toxic, have long become second nature.
On . have a target on your back. The combative atmosphere engendered a kind of dark humor. Even fans of the platform would refer to it as “the place from hell.” But people stayed, largely because there didn’t seem to be a viable alternative. The threads were strange. Mastodon was complicated. For a long time, Bluesky was too quiet, until something changed, when the US elections came and went, and people had had enough.
Millions of users have moved to Bluesky over the past few months. And although the platform is not perfect, many newcomers are taken aback by the platform’s charmingly optimistic atmosphere. “I’m trying to find my humor niche here,” @lvteef posted on December 3, “because as of now it’s very happy for millennials, good luck with this app.”
“I wonder where is the misery? the sick jokes? Hate in this dance? responded @knoxdotmp3.
Clearly, some of us are struggling to shrug off the traumas of new people It feels like social media is turning the page and opening a new chapter. Only this time the architects of that not-so-distant future are determined to get it right.
One of those vanguards is Rudy Frasera 30-year-old New York technologist with experience in enterprise IT and community organizing. He is the creator of black skyhe moderation and personalized food service which is slowly becoming the main avenue for many black Bluesky users. If the phenomenon sounds familiar to you, that’s because it is. Since the first glimmers of Internet exploration, Black people have sought their own online oasis. The same thing happened with NetNoir in 1996 and, more recently, with Black Twitter, the epicenter and engine of Internet culture during the 2010s. And where those experiments failed (NetNoir failed and Black Twitter, although still very active, lost any protection appearance when Musk bought Twitter), Fraser wants to succeed. “Moderation,” he told me in a recent video call, “is a key piece.”
Fraser has a knack for bringing 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 Papertree, a digital mutual aid tool that allows large groups of people to share money. “I wanted to open a community bank account for all of Bed-Stuy,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. When that didn’t work, Fraser reassessed.
It was spring 2023, shortly after Bluesky invites started going out, and Fraser got one during his beta test (he was user 51,921). I was already involved in some Web3-adjacent projects and was interested in data ownership issues. Bluesky’s mission – to be a decentralized social media platform and truly make the social internet an autonomous ecosystem – appealed to him for similar reasons. “The general idea of the AT protocol and the promise of a custom algorithmic feed seemed like a cool thing to jump into,” he said.