Rudy Fraser: Building Communities for the Decentralized Era

Rudy Fraser , Founder of Blacksky , gives a talk called Beyond Horseless Carriages: Building Communities for the Decentralized Era at ATmosphereConf 2025 in Seattle

When I originally said yes to doing this talk, I thought it was going to be like 50 people and everyone would know me and I would know everybody, and I wouldn’t have to introduce myself or explain what Black Sky is. I told myself, “Alright, everyone’s going to know each other, so I’m just gonna cause a little bit of trouble.”

Then Boris said it’s like 300 people — or 170 people in person, a bunch of people online — and I thought, okay, that sounds like a lot of people. So maybe people don’t know me. So I told myself, “Alright, I’ll keep it chill.”

And then I came here and it seemed like a lot of folks did know the different work I do with Risque and with Black Sky, and I’m like, “Oh… I think they like me.” So I told Boris, “Okay cool, I’ll still wild out because of that.” And I woke up today and I was like: nah, I’m going to cause some trouble. ApplauseApplauseApplause

I view my position as the AT Protocol Problem Child. I specifically think I’m an entrepreneur because I have problems with authority and I don’t like following rules. If you met my mom, one of the first stories she’d probably tell you is how I used to run around our village in Guyana screaming “F you!” to anyone — not because I was mad, but because it was fun. I like being the antagonist. And if you know the origins of Black Sky Greenlist (I mean, if you know you know), a lot will make sense. Yes, this is a 50 Cent reference. I tried. I can’t change — I’ll always be the same.

So I’ll introduce myself a little bit. You may have heard of me; you may have heard of Black Sky. Long story short: I founded Black Sky two years ago. It is what I assume is the largest Black community on the decentralized web. It is one of the biggest AT Protocol implementations built in Rust. Over 1.5 million people have used the Black Sky feeds. We get about 370,000 people viewing the feeds every month. We have an eight-person volunteer moderator team, all compensated if they hit certain thresholds. The implementation is over 100,000 lines of code — some codegen, but a lot’s not.

And as of February, I am a fellow within the Applied Social Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Thank you, thank you. They provide me with funding and cool opportunities to connect with people.

I am also, very importantly, a mutual-aid organizer at We the People NYC, and that influences a lot of my thinking on things. Basically, the way I view it is that git push origin main has led me to Harvard. It’s also led me to getting doxxed by white supremacists. It’s led me to being mentioned on CNN. And it’s almost got me going broke a couple times trying to do this work.

So — I mentioned mutual aid. Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, who is notably not on Bluesky, wrote this beautiful article about the difference between mutual aid and charity. I found it when I was doing research on a previous project I worked on called Paper Tree.

We’re short on time so I’ll skim some parts: mutual aid emphasizes horizontal networks of solidarity. It looks like members of a community sussing out what each member needs. That can look like an online social media group. These all tie back to community and building community needs.

I blocked out The New York Times because, you know… F**k The New York Times.

This is one part of the mutual-aid work we do with We the People and Bush Muta. I don’t love everything Dean Spade has written, but some things I find really helpful in framing the difference between a mutual-aid organization and traditional organizations. Some folks here build public-benefit corporations, nonprofits, etc. Even though Black Sky is a Delaware SEP, I don’t operate it like that. I operate it like a mutual-aid group.

There’s a very funny line that says: “Beg, borrow, and steal supplies.” I know mutual-aid groups that literally do that. And that is kind of my mindset for how I build Black Sky.

Boris said yesterday that no one here is enemies. But I don't think that necessarily means we’re all friends. Just because we all believe in decentralized tech does not mean we align on values. And that’s important, because good intentions can still lead to anti-patterns.

Something I didn’t consider until I was talking with Blaine and Nick on our walk over here this morning: it also means that as a developer community, we are more robust by having to cooperate between different actors with different values in the system.

But I just want you to know my values — summed up by software as resistance.

Earlier I mentioned the word village. Black Sky has taken a village. Some people — because of the traditional white-founded cult-of-personality kind of tech companies — think one person can come up with this stuff and build it. That is not the case.

Black Sky is what it is because of all the people who contributed:

A.Vetta sent out the first invites for Black users on Bluesky.

Clinton (in the room right now — don’t cry) built a bunch of stuff for Risque.

Dr. K literally came up with how-tos for our moderation.

Linda is the reason there are a bunch of folks here today from Black Sky.

Natalie has been building a bunch of cool stuff to make Black Sky more decentralized, with a tool called Safe Skies that I’ll get into later.

And a bunch of other folks. I’ll get emotional if I keep talking about what they’ve done for Black Sky.

Cool.

A lot of people cite Twitter as an app that put Black cultural practices into it — you know, Black Twitter. But I actually think Cash App is another really cool example. Someone researched this and found that African-American participants attributed their use of Cash App to traditions of mutual aid, sustaining informal economies, and the accessibility of the platform.

For me, that’s important: the technology didn’t invent mutual aid. It’s just the affordances of the system being used for community aims.

TL;DR of all this: I am a conduit of practices. I didn’t come up with all this stuff.

There’s a song I really like — I was singing it while walking in here — a Soca song:

“My great-great-grandmother pass it down, My great-grandmother pass it down, My mother get it from my granny, And Mommy gave it to me.”

There was a TikTok trend of Caribbean folks using this sound, showing all the little things we do — tapping a spoon on a pot to knock food off, tasting food in your palm, certain hygiene products we use. It’s all inherited practice.

And Jean-Michel Basquiat said:

“If you want to talk about influence, man… influence is not influence. It’s simply someone else’s idea going through my new mind.”

The name of this talk is Beyond Horseless Carriages. The Benz Motorwagen — the first automobile — was literally a horse-drawn carriage with an engine. A carriage without a horse.

And I feel like this is where we’re at with AT Protocol. Lots of horseless carriages. Lots of things that look like things we built before, but with new technology.

It’s important — new tech imitates old tech so people understand it. But if we never move past that, then we don’t reap the full benefits of the innovation.

So I wanted this to be the topic of my talk because lots of folks reach out to collaborate, and sometimes there’s a misalignment in values.

First contradiction: Bluesky is itself a skeuomorphism. It looks a lot like Twitter. Ted posted on Bluesky — left side is Bluesky, right side is Twitter. Even in his post he said the app is a skeuomorphism that people “grok.” And “Grok” is literally the name of the app on the right. The irony is wild.

People refer to things as TikTok clones, Twitter clones — but you’re building on a whole new underlying structure. It’s not a clone.

Skeuomorphisms are helpful. They lower the barrier to entry. My tattoo artist referred to Bluesky as “exactly Twitter,” which is funny. But Black Sky users know it’s not exactly Twitter because they know I run Black Sky and I can alter the experience.

I’m a big fan of skeuomorphisms. My previous project, Paper Tree, looked like a bank account. It was for pooling funds — basically a digital mutual-aid product inspired by sou-sous, a Caribbean cultural practice.

But we can’t stop at imitating.

With AT Protocol we can create new experiences:

more control

community-curated content

empower community builders

empower users

It’s not just Big Social vs end-users. End-users don’t want to understand PDSs or relays. They just want to know there’s something new they can do.

Second contradiction: we can learn from the past. There’s a book and talk about queer histories of the internet and BBS systems — small communities with small-world problems. You don’t need AI moderation for a small community. Global timelines introduced global-scale problems.

Older Black internet spaces too: Universal Black Pages, AfroNet BBS, BlackPlanet. Omar Wasow is a huge inspiration. People talk about Black Twitter, but that’s just a social graph. Black Sky is a place — squishy, dotted-line boundaries.

I like thinking about older systems. Also: the Black Panthers weren’t that long ago. This is Bobby Rush, alive, still doing push-ups, still crying about Fred Hampton. We visited him with We the People. Elders exist. Ask them things.

Okay, the “path to a zillion.” There aren’t a zillion people on earth, but the repo literally says “store a zillion users.” The fediverse thinks in 50–100 person communities. Bluesky is paving a path to four billion. There’s nothing in the middle — subreddit-sized communities. Black Sky sits right there.

If we want an open web, I want Black Sky to be a toolkit for others building medium-sized communities:

host your own data

own your moderation rules

customize algorithms

stay connected to the wider network

People don’t want to be cordoned off. People want a home that still connects to the world.

About moderation: people act like no one wants to moderate. But some people do. Some view it as community care. Subreddit mods do it for free. There should be affordances that let those people do that work.

I call these “dotted-line” communities. You don’t post to Black Sky, but it’s a vibe, a place. Early on, I added people by hand, looking at who they followed. It started as like 30 different communities — Blackademics being one of the biggest — then merged into one big thing.

Darius Kazemi talked about “squishy amoeba-like objects.” AT Protocol diagrams had clear shapes for some services, and wiggly shapes for others — ambiguous, flexible. Communities are like that.

One spicy take: raise your hand if you know what a CAR file is or how to open one. It’s interesting — people say it’s decentralized, but most do not understand the primitives. If Bluesky disappeared tomorrow, how would you keep the network running? People assume someone else will pick things up.

I’m more about bringing that to the forefront. Build your own infra. We built a PDS from scratch in Rust. We’re working on a relay.

But I know hosting is out of reach for many. The problem with decentralized tech is always that no one wants to run their own servers. Someone should make it easy — deploy to Heroku, whatever.

Shoutout to Northsky — people should host infrastructure. The pushback is weird.

Now: the “beyond” part.

Ayo asked about private spaces yesterday. I think we should build them — not wait for private state. When I joined Bluesky, the reputation among Black folks was how anti-Black it was. Now the complaint is that people can’t scroll the Black Sky feed after 7 PM — good problems to have.

People want private spaces in addition to the Jumbotron. I’m going to ship that. When private state arrives, we’ll add that too.

Build your own rules. Ban From TV was an early feature I shipped. Aaron said “listen to the most vulnerable.” The most vulnerable will ship what they need. I knew people would harass Black Sky, so I prepared for it.

Safe Skies — built by Natalie — will let me onboard additional moderators for feed-only moderation, mobile-friendly, unlike Ozone. Build tools that fit your community.

Make credible exit more credible. You can export your Bluesky data anytime as a CAR file. Before this, I’d never opened a CAR file. One of our hiring exercises was to diff CAR files.

Do other wacky shit. Put a PDS in the browser. Build local-first apps. Build weird viewers. Build relays. Build whatever you want.

We were hiring — in final stages now. People say Rust is only for games and blockchains. Now there’s a real community-impact project to use it for.

What other people think does not matter. What devs in Discord think does not matter. Build for the community you care about. Figure out what they need and just ship. ApplauseApplauseApplause

TL;DR: march to your own beat. And if I or Black Sky can help — say hi.