Decentered S1E6: Beautiful Blacksky with Rudy Fraser
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Thanks for joining us for another episode of Decentered! Our guest this week is Rudy Fraser, the creator and operator of the Blacksky curated feed on the Bluesky social platform. Blacksky is a custom social feed designed to amplify and bring focus to black voices. We talk about his experience with building this thing, some of the growing pains, and dealing with anti-blackness and black positivity in decentralized spaces.
Show Notes
Building Blacksky
- What is Blacksky? In a nutshell, it’s an effort to focus on and amplify black voices on the Bluesky platfrom, using Custom Feeds.
- The name Blacksky kind of stuck automatically. People joined from Black Twitter and immediately asked “Well, there’s a Bluesky, where’s the Blacksky?”
- An estimate from the episode puts the feed at approximately 3500 users, in the beginning, it was only a few hundred.
- The feed has taken on several forms. Initially, Custom Feeds weren’t super well-documented, visible in the official client, or easily discoverable. A very early prototype was built on scraping user IDs from conversations.
Custom Feeds
- It turns out, there’s a lot more to running a custom feed than just a list of people or some simple JSON configuration. Blacksky literally runs on a hosted stack with queries, for feed generation purposes.
- Some tooling exists to build custom feeds, like SkyFeed, but a lot of it is regex-based. Taking things out or putting things in or other custom operations don’t exist in readily available tooling today.
- Apparently Jay Graber likes to advertise the Mossfeed as a beginner’s demo of what Custom Feeds even are.
- An interesting alternative hierarchy to Mastodon: instead of Instance Admins, Bluesky has Feed Operators!
- There’s not a lot of tooling yet, a lot of it is custom development. Rudy says if he had more time, he would build a lot of things himself for the space.
Headaches
- It’s not always rainbows and sunshine. One early headache was dealing with community infighting, where people claimed that Blacksky was some kind of bullying initiative against other Bluesky members. What do you do when a problematic character gets associated with your community?
- Fighting disinformation is challenging, too. Custom Feeds can be seen as something kind of like an instance, in the sense that operators are curating what shows up there, but it requires active attention and input.
- A lot of people ended up on Blacksky simply because they were black, and got caught in the crossfire of community drama because of what somebody else said or did. For some people who had just joined, this really hurt.
- Blocks on Bluesky are public – Rudy was able to look into the blocks, and found people who blocked 97% of Blacksky, and nobody else. More than a few of them were self-described progressives who claimed to be allies.
Black Joy
- Blacksky is so much bigger than its controversies, and it’s a little disappointing that most press reporting on the space has only focused on those.
- “Everyone should be able to have a safe and fun and enjoyable experience on the network.”
- Black Visibility is incredibly validating. Being able to log in to a space and see people that are parts of your community, seeing people thrive and laugh and come together, is a profound and beautiful experience.
- Sometimes, it’s not even about following celebrities or major community figures. In Rudy’s words, “Sometimes you just have to go see what the guy down the street has got going on.”
- Superbowl Sunday was pretty awesome for Blacksky. It’s a huge event for Black Twitter, and the success on Blacksky felt like a huge cultural moment.
- Blacksky feels like it really taps into some of the things that made Black Twitter great – “there’s a lot of pain, but we tend to turn a lot of it into humor and come together over it.”
