AHOY! 2025 - Aendra Rininsland on Queer Resilience on the Social Web

Aendra Rininsland ( @aendra.com ) gives a talk at AHOY! European Social Web Day in Hamburg in 2025 called Towards a New Queer Resilience on the Social Web.

Hi everyone, thanks for coming to AHOY today. My name is Aendra Rininsland — pronouns she/her or ze/zer, if you’re feeling fancy. I’ll be talking about query resilience on the social web, and hopefully talking into the mic correctly. Bear with me.

Just a couple quick content warnings: I’ll be talking about transphobia and mental health topics, and I might swear a little. So CW for all of that. God, what are they doing giving us thought this early? This is more cows than the Mastodon post. Don’t worry — I’m not here to depress you. I’m here to energize you. I’m here to call you to action.

I talked about the queer community here, but we’re not the only community experiencing oppression in 2025. The sense I’ve gotten is that we’re all desperately needing some resilience right now — so hopefully everyone can take something from this talk.

How do I navigate? There we go. A bit about me: in case you’re unaware, I’m a Bluesky early adopter who had the ratchet-crazy idea of creating a custom feed with the world’s news media. My requirements for the feed were that news orgs self-verify by setting their handles to their domain names and produce original journalism. Somehow, despite my best efforts, it’s managed to become the primary source of news on Bluesky — managing about 100,000 to 120,000 daily average users. It’s hosted on Graze.Social, which I’ve used to start monetizing it by adding a limited curation of promoted posts. I’ve learned about half a dozen campaigns so far. It’s small, but it’s a start.

I’m also the creator of X Block — the first third-party moderation service rolled out on Bluesky. It’s a third-party tool that adds warning labels to screenshots of social media — like Twitter, Threads, or similar platforms. I think it’s a very good mental health tool for users on the platform.

I’m also working on Blue Moji — my kind of stalled attempt to add custom emoji on Bluesky. I’ll get back to that eventually, maybe when the world’s a little less terrible. And yeah — I’m Andrea Dacom on Bluesky.

Thanks. Is this a little bit better? Yeah, it’s a little better. Cool — I’m not cutting out as much. Great.

I occasionally write a blog on my eponymous blog, aendra.com, but mostly I just microblog on Bluesky, Sick Transit, Gloria, GO, subscription fees — whatever. I do all this development work so I can effectively do better writing, do better journalism. I kind of think you really need to build things using a technology to really understand its vibe — and that’s a big part of why I build all these things.

I wrote this presentation on Easter Sunday, so please forgive me if this comes off a little more like a sermon than a tech talk. The quote on the screen is from Canadian post-punk band The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra. Their track “Built Then Burnt Hurrah” is the track I always play whenever I suffer some kind of political defeat in my life as an immigrant trans woman in the UK — which is frequently.

The track starts with a child’s voice speaking a monologue, which goes something like: “To brothers and sisters, to your enemies and friends — why are we all so alone here? All we need is a little more hope, a little more joy, a little less weight, a little more light, a little more freedom.”

In the other utterly horrifying first quarter of this year — and it’s been particularly horrifying for the trans community — I think we all need a little more joy, a little more light, a little more hope, a little more freedom.

Let’s focus on the “little less weight” line for a moment. Here’s what weighs on me: this map is one of a series by Aaron Morning talking about the legislative impacts of anti-trans legislation in the US right now. Some parts are definitely “do not go” zones — Texas and Florida especially. I’m not going to go too deep into detail about what’s happening in the states right now. If you’re not aware, you should follow Aaron in the Morning, Assign Media, or Query.

But yeah — it’s scary out there. I’m from Canada originally, an 11 in the UK, but I’m originally from Canada and I also spent some time in Idaho. I’ve crossed the American border dozens and dozens of times. Going to Atmosphere a few weeks ago was the first time I’ve ever been genuinely concerned crossing the American border — and that was in Vancouver, on Canadian soil, as a Canadian citizen. If I’m feeling that much anxiety about the state of affairs in the US right now — can you imagine what it’s like to be a trans kid in Florida? A trans kid in Texas?

The transgender community is the subject of a global moral panic. We are in crisis. The forces arrayed against us want to see us erased from public life. It’s not much of a stretch to see they want to see us gone.

As a non-American trans woman — I’m British at this point — I have my own set of things to worry about. A week ago today, basically the UK Supreme Court unanimously declared that I’m neither a woman nor a lesbian. In one fell swoop, effectively denied me my gender identity as well as my sexual identity.

This week is Lesbian Visibility Week — and I want to make it clear: I’m not going to let a room of disconnected, old, privileged people tell me what my sexual identity is or what my gender identity is. I’m a legal woman and I’m a legal lesbian — and I’m super proud of being both those things.

Thank you.

How do we get here, though? The chart on the right is the number of articles published in the UK media about trans people since 2012 — goes all the way to 2022. I wasn’t able to find a more recent chart, but you can kind of see: starting around 2017, a massive spike in the number of articles published about trans people. The UK media at the moment — there’s about 5 or 6 a day published. Almost none of them are written by trans people. Almost all of them are negative.

Although the British public remained broadly in support of trans rights, there has been a massive rollback — particularly since Labour took power. They are trying to push a little more to the center and kind of court more of the Tory vote — which, in conjunction with the moral panic being presented by the British media, has been terrible for my community.

Me and my friends struggled to find medication. We have to fight the NHS to get renewals. We have heartedly planned escape routes in case things get really, really bad. We lose sleep at night waiting for the other shoe to drop. We protested into tens of thousands — like we did last Saturday — and politicians largely ignore us and pretend we’re just an inconvenience. But we’re not going away — and we’ll keep fighting.

So let me bring this back a little, because we’re here for the conference — both social media and about decentralized social media in particular. I’m sorry to be such a huge downer for the first bit of that, but I think it’s important — because social media is important, especially for people like me. It’s more than just a website or an app. Like we used to waste time — for trans people like me, social media is where we find our community. It’s the shoulder we cry on every time life punches us in the teeth.

For many of us — especially for those from rural communities like the one I grew up in — it’s sometimes the only place where we can legitimately be ourselves. It’s more than just a thing that queer people do online. It’s a lifeline for my community. I honestly wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the open social web.

In 2017 I stumbled across Mastodon and started spending a lot of time on it — and that’s how I started meeting other trans people. It’s the first space I ever took selfies for. It’s where I learned to navigate queer communities. It’s where I learned to shut up and listen to people — to seriously think about the words that I say.

I grew up in a small rural Canadian town and in a very evangelical household — and I didn’t have a single queer influence growing up. It took me a lot in my 30s to discover people actually liked me — who felt and thought like I do — to get to know people like Zoe and Mira. Rest in peace, both of them. These experiences really helped me forge my identity — and it gave me the courage to come out — as a somewhat clocky 6-foot-3 neon-green-wearing, middle-aged trans woman — in an extremely trans-hostile British media environment where I work. And I’ll be forever grateful for those experiences — even though Mastodon’s completely understandable hostility towards news media is kind of what ultimately drove me towards Bluesky. I particularly like — sorry — the Mastodon queer communities’ hostility towards news media. That’s another story for another time.

So here’s a version of a question I asked on Bluesky this week: What does queer resilience look like during a time when our very existence is under attack? I got some really good responses — both from users on Bluesky as well as people in my life. I pulled out some themes from those responses — in the hope that doing so can help us build better tools, communities, and organizations.

And as the primary tool that the queer community uses to communicate and build community — how can social media foster quiet resilience? And how can we make social better — not just for queer people, but for everybody?

The first of these themes I’m going to discuss is expression. Some of us build tools for social media — Typescript is my passion. Others use social media to distribute their music, some their photography, some showcase their recipes, some showcase their paintings, their pottery.

For many trans people, dressing up — being able to dress up and post selfies of ourselves — is kind of how we find our sense of style. It’s how we develop our sense of identity, our sense of fashion — because we actually have an audience that’s not going to like the crap out of us just for being ourselves.

We need these public spaces — dangerous as they sometimes are — because they’re still a hell of a lot safer than wearing makeup in a small rural community for the first time. And for the record — NSFW content and loads are also a form of queer expression. For many of us, it’s the first time we feel comfortable expressing our bodies — it’s in our bodies.

In my mind, NSFW trans content is the sign of a healthy social network. There was a moment on Mastodon — kind of earlier, towards 2018 or so — where there was a lot of trans annuity on Mastodon. But then Gab joined the Fediverse — and all of that sort of receded. There was a sense of danger — suddenly being able to post that content on Mastodon. And when queer people no longer feel comfortable expressing their bodies in this way — I think something deeply intrinsic to the soul of social media is lost — because trans bodies aren’t just political — they’re profound. They’re sexual. They’re expressive.

So yeah — Bluesky has this automated labeling system that labels nudity — and it gets a lot of flack from the trans community. But I think it’s kind of a decent midway point — between CW and everything like we have on the Fediverse — and just completely prohibiting all kinds of NSFW content like you have on mainstream platforms.

It’s great because a lot of people — the trans community — can still publish things on Bluesky that are expressive for them — but it also means that people who want to avoid that content have the ability to do so using the built-in moderation tools.

It has always been — and will always be — fairly dangerous to post photos of yourself as a trans person on a social network with a public firehose. We desperately need private accounts and private posting on Bluesky. There are a few initiatives to try and improve that. Rudy from Black Skies is working on something called “Offer” — an attempt to create local-only posting — similar to how the Hometown Mastodon software kind of works — and I think that’s just brilliant. I’m hoping it’s a useful stopgap until first-party private posting — or at least audience-grouping posting — is more of a thing on Bluesky.

Yeah — and honestly, everything that Rudy and Blacksky does is really inspiring. I draw a lot of inspiration from the work that they do. And I think everyone at Northsky — which I’ll be talking about in a little bit — draws inspiration from what Blacksky is doing.

Of course, visibility: trans creators continue to provide a normal center of gravity for conversation and discourse on the platform. I think that’s important — because in an era where bigots are working tirelessly to remove trans people from public life — being able to live our truth so vocally and so visibly is nothing short of radical.

I took political science during my undergrad — and Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” is something that weighs very heavily on my mind in 2025. In it, she describes how one of the conditions for genocide is to remove the group from public life — to force it to draw into itself and be insular — present them as pariahs.

If the intense lack of trans voices in the media is intended to make the trans community look like an inconsequential fringe issue — not deserving of sensitivity or column inches — then the sheer vibrancy of trans culture on Bluesky stands apart as an unqualified reminder that the trans community has always been here — and we’re not going away.

I think it’s also really cool — out with my newsfeed, I’m able to uplift queer voices such as Query If — which is a UK trans-focused media source. I’m working with them next month for Transitory Week to try and promote some of their posts and give them a wider audience — and I think it’s really cool I’m able to do that by running a newsfeed on Bluesky. Might even get some cool analytics out of it — who knows.

Alliance is also connection. It’s feeling a kinship with people you relate to — who you come back to day after day — the relations you create with people on these platforms — who you talk to day in and day out. And sometimes we argue, sometimes we discuss — we fight back and forth trying to imagine the world that we want to create together.

And I think that’s important — because creating a homogeneous worldview and forcing it upon people isn’t what the queer community does — it’s what fascists do. And by having this open discourse — where we discuss the world we want to — I think it’s a good thing.

As well — when you grow up in a small town — or when you live in a small town, even if you’re all grown up — and you don’t have any queer friends — and you’re 1,000,000 miles away from a major urban center — then connecting with queer people in a big city can be like a lifeline. It’s you see their priorities and their happenings and their protests — and that can save you in some ways. It can help you dream of a way forward.

It’s also a place where you can go for empathetic virtual hugs whenever life kicks you down — or you have a really bad day — which, as a trans person in 2025, is frequently.

We need this connection of the community. I’m not overselling it when I say it’s a lifeline. This connection saves lives — it keeps people moving forward — and keeps them thinking of a brighter day.

Lastly — it’s resistance. Social media is where we learn how to fight back. It’s where we share our battle anthem — share our strategies — share our protests. It’s where we finally get a chance to respond to all the voices in the media talking about us — and we’re not given a voice ourselves to speak. It’s where we fight back — over and over — day and day out — and try and create a sense of what we want this world to be like.

And yeah — sometimes that anger is a bit misdirected. I have thoughts about how a lot of the anger directed towards journalists, centrist, center-left politicians is perhaps a bit unhelpful — but I can also understand. There’s so much of that frustration and that anger — it comes from in my community — because we’re not given a voice in so many different avenues.

So yeah — social media is where we create the resistance — where we create a sense that we can push back — and we will push back.

I’m going to talk a little bit about Green Shoots — which is an idea I’m trying to get rolling. It’s an attempt to monetize my newsfeeds. I’m wanting to get roughly 2% ad saturation on my feeds — which is about 1 promoted post every 50 or so posts — basically one feed load — and wanting to direct about 1/3 of income from my monetization into this trust that I can then distribute to third-party atproto projects — like Northsky, which I’ll talk about in a second — but also just kind of any third-party atproto projects that are benefiting the community — and particularly ones that focus on moderation — particularly ones that focus on improving life for the LGBTQ community on Bluesky.

Since my last talk about 3 weeks ago — I’ve monetized my feeds. I’ve run about 3 or 4 small campaigns — earned a whopping $160 so far — $100 of which I’ve donated to Northsky — and I think it’s a good start. We don’t have myself and people — I’m working with the Grays — we’re not ad industry people — we don’t have a lot of ad industry connections. We’re basically starting from scratch on all this. But what I’ve seen from my initial attempts to run campaigns on the feed is that there’s something here. I think it would be a really powerful force — for instance, newspapers wanting to run description campaigns. It would be a very good place to run those — and hopefully I can get some data that shows that advertising on the newsfeed can lead to subscriber converts. Initial sense is very hopeful — and I’m starting to feel out what works and what doesn’t.

And I think that having regular advertisers on it would be transformative — and I can see it being a useful tool for helping convert newspapers — and newspapers convert feed viewers into subscribers.

Also — last talk I did, I discussed Northsky a little bit — which is a Canadian co-op that is attempting to co-locate PDSs in Canada — and also start to create our own infrastructure around atproto. Since the last talk I did — we’ve managed to incorporate as a co-op. We’re starting to set up PDSs. Our migration tool — which I’m building the front end for — is starting to get towards testing. We’re getting very close to sending out like the first invites — not wanting to put a timeline on — and also not wanting to speak for the other members of the co-op. I’m a humble front-end developer for it — but they have given me the ability to say that these are some of the priorities that we have looking forward — and kind of what we’re thinking about over the next few months.

I think Northsky is very important — and I’m really proud to help fund it — because we’re not really sure what Bluesky PBC will do if threatened by the Trump administration about trans content. Lawrence mentioned the example of Turkey — and stifling political dissidents by having like a labeler. Who knows what will happen if the Trump administration directly tries to impact Bluesky around the topic of trans content? I think hosting PDSs in Canada is a good bulwark against that.

I’m looking forward to the Indie Sky talk tomorrow — the workshops that we’re going to be having to discuss things like adding delays in Europe. I think that’s a really exciting idea — and I love the idea of setting up infrastructure in Europe — kind of outside of the remit of Bluesky PBC — and decentralizing this technology further.

So yeah — I think this is important. And if it comes to pass that the American government decides that — you know — under the guise of protecting children — they’re going to wholesale wipe the trans community off the internet — we need to have service located somewhere where trans content is protected as the free speech that it is — whether it’s journalism, critique of capitalism, critique of genocide, critique of the Trump administration — or merely test questionable taste, shitposting, and sexy selfies. I think it’s all important speech — and I think it should be protected.

Thank you. I know that was simultaneously a lot — and also not much of anything — but perhaps gives you a sense of why I’m so passionate about what we’re all doing here. I’m always happy to talk to anybody about any of the projects I’ve worked on. I don’t think we have time for questions — because I’m already a bit over — but come find me if you want to talk about the news feed, or Blue Moji, or X-Block, or any of the other things I work on. Thank you.

The videos from AHOY! European Social Web Day held in Hamburg, Germany, are being republished along with transcripts as part of the process of preparing for ATmosphereConf 2026, taking place March 26th - 29th in Vancouver, Canada.