Blacksky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

Blacksky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

Blacksky - Open Collective

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

Introduction | Blacksky Documentation

Blacksky Algorithms builds open-source, community-driven infrastructure for decentralized social media. Our mission is to empower communities with tools for safety, governance, and control over their online spaces. This documentation is designed to help new users understand what Blacksky offers and how to get started with our feeds and moderation services.

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 […]

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 […]

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.

Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky

The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users. These decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a prominent decentralized microblogging platform. In contrast to alternative approaches (e.g. Mastodon), Bluesky decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders. We collect a comprehensive dataset covering all the key elements of Bluesky, study user activity and assess the diversity of providers for each sub-components.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.

Medsky

Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? | Internet Archive Blogs

When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:

Free Our Feeds

Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.