00:03:43.680the growing community forum that brings together technologists
00:03:46.280and movement leaders to explore the intersections of technology and power
00:03:49.640I had the chance to sit down with Black Sky founder Rudy Frazier to talk through Blue Sky, Black Sky, and the future of Black Voices Online.
00:10:07.920Like, I was never really big on Twitter.
00:10:09.340I was, I used it early on and to like follow like, like artists and stuff like that. But I never actually encountered myself the kinds of like challenges you would face from like having a big platform on those spaces.
00:10:27.300So I kind of came I think that probably maybe helped in some ways because I came into working on Black Sky with just like fresh eyes in terms of what are the what are my expectations of how a community should work.
00:10:41.800and that was heavily influenced by my in real life organizing work and so I tried to like
00:10:49.680replicate the things that I was seeing and experiencing in real life because for me like
00:10:56.960I guess bigger than just like the apps it's the kind of like this kind of definition of community
00:11:02.940I have that is between like mutual accountability and before working on Black Sky I was working on
00:11:08.720a project called PaperTree that was a way for folks to kind of practice mutual aid and Bed-Stuy
00:11:14.260be able to pool funds together and be able to buy like pay for each other's groceries essentially
00:11:19.960and so in kind of as I kept doing mutual aid organizing and learning about mutual aid I
00:11:25.540thought it was very I wanted to technology was my thing and so that was the way that I saw myself
00:11:31.820fitting into to that world and not wanting to be like their techno solutionist person who's like
00:11:37.380i'm gonna like you know revolutionize mutual aid by like building some app it was more like i just
00:11:42.340wanted to like find my way of being seen and being able to contribute to what i saw as a movement
00:11:47.340that kind of came out of um 2020 here in new york where i'm based at and building yeah a bit like
00:11:55.180you kind of find that like social media is actually a really great place both for
00:12:00.240real life community to be developed and for people to even practice like these kinds of
00:12:06.500like care practices like mutual aid uh but it's the it's it's then seeing that you can't really
00:12:13.320do something like that in uh in the traditional um platforms right it's more than like the that
00:12:20.400i saw with this new wave of decentralized social media protocols i saw an opportunity to be able
00:12:26.520to like execute against that let's take a quick break
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00:13:38.520When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived,
00:13:45.200and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:13:50.860I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:13:54.480I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying,0.96
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00:14:38.600If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:14:44.540This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:14:57.000I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:15:04.120I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. So obsessed.
00:15:07.240from best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments
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00:15:28.720you're in the right place listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever
00:15:35.180you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.
00:15:47.660It's so interesting to me that you say that the way that your expectations for what being
00:15:52.980on a social media platform could feel like, should feel like, were really rooted in your
00:15:57.300IRL experiences around things like mutual aid. So for you, what are the expectations
00:16:02.700that you have in your mind for what it can feel like or be like to try to find community on social
00:16:07.580media platforms what what is that experience like for you and what have you taken from
00:16:10.920your your work in mutual aid to inform that yeah i think the internet is interesting because there's
00:16:19.920and there's people who have like all different kinds of like philosophies and ideas around how
00:16:24.460the internet should work i think for one i'd take like a uh you know i think there's there's some
00:16:29.980people who view for example that like there's this like instrumentalist kind of view of technology
00:16:34.800where technology is uh it is kind of like impartial it's non-biased it can't be you know it's it's a
00:16:43.640hammer is just a hammer uh and i i kind of reject that i think tools tend to uh better uh they tend
00:16:53.480to like align with power structures and they benefit they benefit someone usually and they
00:16:59.100harm, they often harm someone usually. And so I think in real life organizing, you start to
00:17:04.380acknowledge some things like that. You also kind of, uh, you also recognize that, uh, there's this
00:17:10.240like kind of philosophy that like every cook can govern, but like really anyone can, can contribute.
00:17:15.780There's not, it's not like there's, there's maybe specialized knowledge that's needed to set up
00:17:20.960technical infrastructure, but there's a role that everyone can play in like content moderation
00:17:25.280in community building in getting people into physical spaces together like event planning
00:17:30.940it's like a thing that i'm not really good at but there's folks in the community who are good at
00:17:34.340there's folks in the community who are creators who are like like that idea that everyone can
00:17:39.120come in and just as long as you make it so that this is not like this closed off thing that you
00:17:43.380own that like you have this kind of abundance mindset that there's enough to go around that
00:17:48.100everyone can play a role uh that i think that some of that is the kind of thing that influences and i
00:17:53.680do think you get that from like community forums where it was like you know there was a space
00:17:57.660created and then people came in and gave that space value and then those people were rewarded
00:18:03.120with reputation and respect to a degree you know and like that's a thing you can get on the internet
00:18:08.040there's like a kind of respect capital that gets associated with with someone people sometimes use
00:18:14.080that with like followers or they try to like hack it with followers but there's kind of a um you know
00:18:18.460we we pour a lot into our online identities uh and then you know part of the problem is that you
00:18:24.960don't actually own that identity like a corporation owns that and they can just take that handle away
00:18:29.800from you at any point they could shut your account down if they want to um but but yeah and so those
00:18:37.160fundamentals i think are some of the things that like you you see that in like in real life
00:18:42.200organizing where you're doing work and then people you know that kind of brings people in
00:18:46.880and they make it their own and then it becomes this new thing that's kind of how i think of like
00:18:52.400spaces created online boy you said it and especially you know maybe one day a billionaire
00:18:59.340buys the platform where you spent most of your time building up your capital and followers and
00:19:04.280relationships and connections and it's not a fun place to hang out anymore so that's just that
00:19:08.420maybe something still happens yeah and you know i think that can happen in real life spaces as well
00:19:16.420But, yeah, like trying to how do you build the stuff that makes that less possible?
00:19:22.560Exactly. Let's talk about that. So give us a so I'm curious what drew you to looking at decentralized platforms.
00:19:29.960And for folks who might not know, can you give us sort of a quick and dirty rundown of decentralization?
00:19:36.420Yeah, yeah. So the analogy, I give a lot of analogies with this stuff.
00:19:40.420i'll give an analogy for decentralization in general and then i'll give one for
00:19:43.940decentralization and interoperability which are big big words but then and then then one
00:19:48.640specifically for app protocol so decentralization i would say is like uh a lot of folks you know
00:19:54.320put together are used to um buying furniture from some store ikea target wherever i don't know and
00:20:00.500then like it often there's a allen wrench you know that that like hexagon shape that you you
00:20:06.360use to screw in the bolts together. Usually it's funny. They usually send a lot of Allen wrenches
00:20:11.400with like a lot of the furniture you put together. And then if you keep them, it can work on the next
00:20:15.760thing that you buy. And so that's, that's an example of interoperability. All these, if you
00:20:21.060think about it, all these people who produced this furniture decided that they were going to
00:20:26.140use the same hexagon shape. And you know, now the tools work between each other. That's an example
00:20:33.440of interoperability and decentralization where like decentralization like kind of requires
00:20:40.420interoperability it requires for two things to be able to work together without those two people
00:20:45.800speaking um and right now it's like you can't you cannot you can't be on instagram like let's say
00:20:54.140you were just on instagram you can't from your instagram account dm someone on twitter you can't
00:21:00.260export, you can export your data in a lot of these places. And then it's just like a dead
00:21:04.560set of data. Like you can't take that and put it anywhere. Um, you can't leave and keep your
00:21:11.480followers, right? That's how they, that's how they get you. And folks call this like a walled garden.
00:21:15.700Um, and so decentralization, decentralization eliminates that. It makes it so that you have
00:21:23.220some kind of data portability. You can pick up where you were. And if you don't like it anymore,
00:21:28.800You can take it somewhere else. And then you still have your your identity stays the same. You still have your followers. You still have your posts. You didn't lose anything. You're just under new management. And so and so that's like decentralization, broadly.
00:21:43.660And then there's lots of different ways people have approached designing decentralized systems.
00:21:50.160You know, the one that I, the space that I work in is particularly App Protocol, which the experience of that from a user is like, if every piece, if you download a social media app, if you download Blue Sky, for example, everything is ran by a different, it's one app, but everything is ran by a different company.
00:22:20.560You can sign up on either and your account will work with both.
00:22:23.300And then, you know, there's your social media feed, right?
00:22:26.800Folks are usually used to just like a following feed and then a kind of recommendation algorithm, a for you page, a discover feed.
00:22:34.800blue sky may come with those by default but then you can switch to another algorithm or feed that
00:22:39.960was designed by someone else so we have ones designed specifically for showcasing black
00:22:44.400content um there's a trending version there's a chronological version there's a there's a tiktok
00:22:49.180like version of videos um there's one for just images like instagram and uh and yeah and then
00:22:56.960if you encounter some harmful content you can choose who your moderators are you can choose
00:23:00.880where your data is hosted um that is that's the experience of at protocol and i think where it
00:23:08.940comes into like the you mentioned earlier that there's been a lot of stuff going on in the in
00:23:14.880the ecosystem uh there was an incident that i addressed yesterday where a user who was he had
00:23:22.220his account hosted by black sky but he was suspended from blue sky uh and so folks are kind of had the
00:23:29.680reaction of like well what's the point then of decentralization if you can be you can maybe move
00:23:34.320your account but then they can like they can this other company can still suspend you you're still
00:23:38.380subject to the moderation rules of the company but it's really like the way app protocol is kind
00:23:44.320of set up is that your data it's if you imagine publishing as an example right you're a writer
00:23:50.880uh and you you want you write a manuscript right the pds or some of the infrastructure black sky
00:23:58.540runs is a safe space to store your manuscript but then blue sky what they also had running is kind
00:24:06.260of this the distribution it is the it's kind of like the barnes and noble the bookstore the
00:24:11.460publishing house the thing that gets your your your manuscript from just your hands into the
00:24:16.500hands of millions of people and so this person was banned from the bookstore essentially but even
00:24:22.860though he was banned from the bookstore there are different apps that people have built that instead
00:24:26.960of going to the bookstore to find the manuscript it goes directly to the author so that's kind of
00:24:31.440the example of like what decentralization can allow you can still maintain your data and your
00:24:36.800ownership and not have it deleted because typically when blue sky if you're only if you're only on the
00:24:42.860blue sky infrastructure and they suspended you they would also delete all your data but so some
00:24:48.080of these conversations around data sovereignty is that like you should be able to maintain your
00:24:53.120identity. An app can suspend you because they have their rules, right? They may, you may just
00:24:58.120be promoting something that they don't want to help distribute to millions of people. That's
00:25:03.780their right. You basically have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach is kind of the example
00:25:09.600that folks talk about. Like, you know, that's why, and there's other ways that I can kind of
00:25:16.200explain how that plays out in the ecosystem, but you really should always be able to publish
00:25:20.700whatever you want. But people who govern certain spaces, like Blue Sky governs their space,
00:25:27.240Black Sky governs our space, those organizations, and anyone can start that up. It takes some
00:25:34.220technical infrastructure, some money, but you can start to create those spaces and to kind of design
00:25:39.040the experience you want in there without infringing on other people's ability to speak.
00:25:45.100I was quite surprised at how people reacted to that user that you described, their experience on the platform. And I wondered, do you think that users are, do you think that response was rooted in a sort of anxiety about the kind of things that maybe are the reason why they left Twitter for Blue Sky or other platforms in the first place?
00:26:11.780that concern about how these platforms are moderated and what showing up there means like
00:26:16.500i was genuinely surprised at the reaction to what you just described happening and
00:26:22.860maybe you weren't surprised but uh what do you think was going on there
00:26:25.980uh there's a there's a lot i think there's some folks who say like uh i for i think i agree with
00:26:35.520some people in the ecosystem that's like moderation is your product like if you like
00:26:40.040In a traditional social media experience, their business model is ad driven, right? And so that's why the experience of a social media app kind of plays out the way it does, because they make money by having you scroll the feed and stay on their app for as long as possible.
00:27:01.880that's why tiktok is super addictive they've done you could you could it's all weird to say
00:27:07.100they they've done a great job at their algorithm but they've they've done a great job of keeping
00:27:11.700you glued to the screen uh twitter also has that for folks and there's there's like a ton of
00:27:16.880research there's like books written i have a book here um called like hooked like people have
00:27:20.820there's people have done research on how to keep you addicted to and to these applications it's
00:27:26.460it's like a science uh and and so that's why they keep you locked in they don't want you to be able
00:27:33.860to leave they don't want you to take your data they want you to be able to keep scrolling um
00:27:37.620in a decentralized protocol you don't have the same incentives like um so the users are not the
00:27:45.380product in that case you have to find some other revenue stream and so like blue sky i think there's
00:27:50.900a lot of when there's an absence of information people fill that in with assumptions uh their own
00:27:58.560anxieties like you mentioned so people are like how will blue sky make their money so we don't
00:28:03.880know you know probably blue sky doesn't know uh and so people fill that in with like are they
00:28:10.140training are they taking our data to like train an ai model are they um are they trying to pander
00:28:17.380to like these right-wing conservative folks like why are they doing that like all these different
00:28:22.760things kind of come into play because things are not made explicit uh it's kind of like i'm sure
00:28:28.300there's some theory of this there's like the tyranny of structuralistness where it's like
00:28:31.840there's if there's like a vacuum or like an unclear there's no clarity around a power structure a
00:28:36.960power structure kind of forms it's just a little unaccountable i think the same thing kind of
00:28:41.600happens with like the fact that there's no clear business model and things like that and so people
00:28:46.980just kind of fill in those blanks so for me i wasn't as surprised because a lot of the users
00:28:53.980who are on blue sky as well they've migrated from twitter and so i think some of them without even
00:29:01.600really recognizing they thought it was blue sky was just twitter but ran by you know not elon uh
00:29:08.740and so the expectations like the user education there's a lot of stuff that's like not there so
00:29:14.260So a lot of what I just tried to do that seem to have gotten positive responses for is just try to, like, break things down for people, be really clear, be really transparent, be really honest about where stuff is at and, like, what we're planning to do next.
00:29:29.460I was one of those people who just thought, screw Elon Musk, I'm going over to the Twitter that he doesn't own.
00:29:36.100And then someone was like, oh, you should try Mastodon if you're looking for a decentralized experience.
00:29:40.180And that didn't work out for me. But like there is I think there has been a user education piece of it that I think your work at Black Sky has been so instrumental in being a foundation of.
00:29:51.320Can you walk us through Black Sky, how it works and what makes it different from centralized platforms?
00:29:58.140So if you visit BlackSky.community, which is our web app, that's where you could sign up for an account.
00:30:06.680and you you'll notice immediately that like if you went to it looks similar to blue sky which
00:30:13.100looks similar to twitter but it's branded as our thing and when you create an account on black sky
00:30:18.560community you will be under the black sky terms of service and privacy policy you'll have a handle
00:30:24.660that's like bridget.black sky.app for example uh but the feed that you see immediately is black sky
00:30:30.940The Black Sky community itself. So this is this is an algorithm that is just of the black users on the platform who have opted in voluntarily to be a part of Black Sky as a community.
00:30:43.800From there, you know, and I think even just stopping there, if you can imagine, we sometimes get this question from folks of like, what will stop Black Sky from being overran by bad actors?
00:30:58.620And I think the last two years of us running the platform has been the demonstration of that. You can't stop other people's hate. But we've put up a really good fight, I would say. I've been doxed by a white supremacist because of my work on Black Sky. We've had people try to raid the feed and do all kinds of crazy things.
00:31:20.780But we built in systems to actively prevent that harm. And not only do we have the automated systems to do that, we also have a team of all black moderation team, you know, very familiar with with the the kind of context that we work within that is always there.0.98
00:31:41.620um and so folks folks feel attended to folks feel heard the the we we strike this balance of
00:31:49.280trying to create a space where you can have fun and like not care about all this super technical
00:31:55.200like all this infrastructure that we're running in the background and but we're there when you
00:31:59.780need it right so like we're there when you want to speak truth to power and then you feel like
00:32:05.080blue sky the company may censor you for that right or take your account down we're there
00:32:11.860uh you know if you encounter there's maybe there is some bad actor that rolls up and they're like
00:32:18.300what the fuck is black sky you know we can you can still do the like 300 quote posts on that
00:32:24.100person like feel free but we you could also just quietly and discreetly hit the report post button0.94
00:38:58.920let's get right back into it rudy i did have a question for you i think it somebody mentioned
00:39:11.040this in the chat and i do think it's worth kind of plus plusing the way that you were very
00:39:15.900intentional about things like moderation from the beginning of starting this process and i've
00:39:20.940often wondered is there a balance to be had between scale and making the biggest platform
00:39:27.600that you can have with the most amount of users and saying, well, there might be some value in
00:39:32.300intimacy. There might be some value in us intentionally curating a smaller set of users.
00:39:39.500Is there a tension with what you're doing at Black Sky in that?
00:39:43.740Yeah. I talk about this in some presentations I give where I think there's, you know,
00:39:50.100you mentioned Mastodon. I think Mastodon is a good example. If you want like maybe a hundred
00:39:56.300people in a community and you want like infrastructure that's like owned by you and
00:40:01.300then maybe you selectively connect with some other hundred person communities and stuff i think that's
00:40:08.280good uh that is a use case um i think we want to have the fun the like the funnest block party
00:40:20.500in the city is kind of the experience uh and i think that needs a lot of people uh and so i
00:40:28.260think for the kind of experience and and stuff that we want to build i think you need to be
00:40:34.400looking to scale uh you know we spend a lot of money and time on creating scalable infrastructure
00:40:41.960for communities black sky again has been used by millions of people and uh we want to help out the
00:40:48.360other folks you know i think that's why i use reddit as the example like there are some reddits
00:40:52.280that are used by millions of people like that is the it's it's a technically challenging thing to
00:40:57.880do that though um as a decentralized service so that's where there's some of the technical
00:41:03.120tensions uh there's also moderation challenges i think after a certain number you do encounter
00:41:11.020like there's there's a question that's come up in the community that we're working through to resolve
00:41:15.140uh but like moderation people are very anti-ai but what do you do when you have a hundred thousand
00:41:23.260people like a hundred thousand images and videos being uploaded to a platform every month a lot of
00:41:31.480them are going to be sexual content and you have to be able to distinguish against like what's not
00:41:35.900okay or at least just even just label that content so that people so then end users can make their
00:41:40.880choice of like do i want to see sexual content do i want to hide it do i want to have a blur
00:41:44.640it's the warning label people get that control on that protocol and so um i think some of that
00:41:51.680is a bit of attention because some people are like well someone should manually review all those
00:41:55.380images and it's like well then you have to have then you have to have a smaller space um and so
00:42:01.060i think like we want we don't want to be like we don't want to just have like the billion person
00:42:05.700one space billion person in this space we do want to foster communities of millions of people and i
00:42:11.720think we can I think you can do that with the with the tools that we've created there's also
00:42:16.240like one thing we didn't talk too much about but like we want our it's weird that people make
00:42:21.060community guidelines but their communities don't influence the guidelines and so that's something
00:42:25.240we did where we drop we try to co-create our community guidelines with our community we have
00:42:29.360this tool called the black sky people's assembly that is a deliberation tool where people can
00:42:36.100weigh in submit statements so we had one was like what should be our community guidelines and
00:42:41.280600 people submitted over, um, uh, I think about 500 statements of what should go into our community
00:42:49.900guidelines, over 20,000 votes, um, submitted on the different things of like what people agree
00:42:55.280with, what people disagree with. So these are the things that were, it's like, you know, if you were,
00:42:59.540if you want to do this at scale, uh, there's, there's tools that need to be built to allow you
00:43:06.500to do this kind of decentralized community governance at scale. I think that's just a
00:43:10.460very interesting space for us to work here. Yeah, I mean, that speaks to the question that we got
00:43:14.920from John, who says, it's worth highlighting that Black Sky is incredibly unusual, complimentary,
00:43:21.080for focusing on moderation upfront and having a moderation expert as a core member of the team.
00:43:26.160How many other social networks have ever done that? I don't know any. Rudy, I don't know if
00:43:31.540that's a question that you have any insight into, but I do think it highlights exactly
00:43:35.160what you were just speaking about the importance of of make having these decisions be things that
00:43:40.880are that are thought of very early on and foundational to the experience of being on
00:43:44.820this platform yeah i think that comes from like honestly i mean that's that's more like sometimes
00:43:52.100i think people have this like superficial understanding of like why black sky is
00:43:58.180important and i think that like being a black person on the internet you just anticipate that
00:44:03.020You know, like you just anticipate we will get attacked.
00:44:06.420Like, and so for me, I'm always just like, okay, I know this is going to happen.
00:44:10.840So I'll have a plan for when it happens.
00:44:12.860And then when it happens, then I can just immediately drop the thing.
00:44:16.960Like we have a feature called ban from TV that stops people from being able to view the Black Sky feed.
00:44:22.760And I knew that that was going to be a thing that we were going to want to do at some point.
00:44:26.980And then there was an issue where people were like trolling the Black Sky feed to find.
00:44:31.560they weren't posting to the black sky feet but they were finding people and then harassing them
00:44:35.040so it was like oh like now this is happening so now let me ship this uh and and that was like the
00:44:42.220second month that we were in operation of the of the black sky feet so it happened it all it all
00:44:46.880happened very quickly but we've been battle tested over time and then yeah i've always wanted um our
00:44:52.540community moderators there's folks who used to work at places like tiktok there's people who worked at
00:44:56.860doing trust and safety there there's folks who have done research on misogynoir
00:45:01.200um uh shot of dr k uh yeah so we've got a team of folks who all have done community moderation
00:45:07.600in in other spaces before and i'll do it for black sky they've done it for mastodon etc
00:45:11.680it kind of makes me i haven't it's like a bittersweet thing to hear you describe this
00:45:16.600because on the one hand what a tired story that it's like oh you're a black person or some sort
00:45:23.220of a traditionally marginalized person in a digital space get ready for harassment you know
00:45:28.180But also part of me is like, well, I'm glad the people in charge have that historical and cultural knowledge so that they didn't have to go through the thing of being like, oh, we are shocked this happened and are not prepared for it, which I feel that so often is the case on social media platforms where people don't necessarily have that that cultural background.
00:48:09.860And then there's community conflict. And I think of like the outside attackers, we have generally, you know, knock on wood, but like so far has been a solved problem for us. The really interesting challenges do come with, okay, now there's intracommunal conflict, not intercommunal, intracommunal.
00:48:28.540And so it's like, do you some, there's, you know, like generally our, our approach is to be hands off, like let the community sort itself out, uh, because conflict can be, uh, generative at times.
00:48:45.180as long as folks aren't demonstrating forms of like internal internalized anti-blackness
00:48:51.920or or misogynoir uh you know as long as you aren't breaking our community guidelines um
00:49:00.420again which we develop with the community so like now there's going to be things around like fat
00:49:04.280phobia and and like and and and all these other um protections but as long as you are following
00:49:11.760the community guidelines go off you know um we we want to be we want to leave space for people to
00:49:17.260get creative have fun sometimes you know sometimes sometimes the jokes are at the expense of someone
00:49:23.620but i think they're still like i think that's still like a worthwhile experience that you can
00:49:27.500have in a communal space and then you you brush it off you come back the next day um and isn't
00:49:32.360there kind of i mean haven't we all been roasted by our cousins where it's like or you or you laugh
00:49:37.400a little too hard at a joke and someone is like i know you're not laughing and you're like oh no
00:49:40.940they got me like i uh i posted about listening to young thug and someone was like i hope you heal
00:49:46.160i'm like you know i can't i'm like even i'm getting cooked on my own app so
00:49:52.860and i think i mean having folks who know folks who know our communities at the helm is important
00:50:01.760this is going to be a weird analogy but there's a scene in the movie mean girls where the popular
00:50:06.080girls they all have to have like a like a girl student wide like meeting to discuss tensions0.99
00:50:14.940and the popular girls realize oh the drama girls have their own little you know conflict and the
00:50:20.560softball team they have their own little conflict and there's all these other little micro conflicts
00:50:25.060in these communities that people might not know the norms that dictate those communities and you
00:50:30.060just sort of have to let them talk it out and work it out amongst themselves because that's the only
00:50:33.860way they're going to get anywhere it kind of seems like that of there is some value in just sort of
00:50:38.560letting folks settle things tensions and conflict in their own community via their own norms that
00:50:45.080like you might not necessarily know the ins and outs of yeah i and i think that like i think that's
00:50:51.820like super important community norms are like sometimes people are like what's this hard and
00:50:57.680fast rule that you're going to put in place to stop this thing from happening i'm like well i
00:51:02.480feel like we have norms for that like there's there's laws and then there's norms and i don't
00:51:07.600want to make a law for like something that could just be resolved with a norm um and the community
00:51:14.080should organically come up with that community norm to like enforce that behavior uh and and
00:51:23.040yeah and i think that like you yeah you see that within in real life groups all the time um like
00:51:30.160That conflict resolution is, and I think you have to draw a line.
00:51:36.600You have to be able to draw a line around a space.
00:51:38.140So there's a question around here about, like, the public square conversation.
00:51:41.820And I really, I think the public square is somebody else's problem.
00:51:47.580I am trying to create community spaces.
00:56:43.020This conversation is all about sort of how we are trying to unbreak social networks.
00:56:49.200How do you think Blue Sky helps move us more toward those community-centered digital spaces?
00:56:56.040I think that Black Sky is more so the ones like helping to demonstrate what that can look like.
00:57:04.080I think Blue Sky wants to invest more into the creation of community.
00:57:09.380there's been conversations about like turning kind of following again following in our first
00:57:14.760steps of like combining a feed with a moderation service and then calling that like a particular
00:57:19.400space and so there's a place where you can go you can post to a feed um i think there's like
00:57:25.700some of that work being done i'm personally really there's some like underexplored areas
00:57:31.920with uh app protocol and blue sky that i'm that we're interested in like we we just um
00:57:38.960we just got this fellowship this cypherpunk fellowship uh to help kind of develop uh private
00:57:45.400payments you know i think that's a very i think it's again practice of mutual aid it's important
00:57:50.520uh black sky as a community have done that for a while from the very beginning
00:57:55.000uh but then also creators being able to like monetize their content there's someone on
00:58:00.300on black sky who uh um the name is nigh every every day they post like a they call it question
00:58:07.720sky and they post like these like 20 questions that people all quote post and reply and it's
00:58:12.460always like a different theme and then they end it with like their cash app and so like
00:58:15.700people should be able to like um help you know support the creators in their in these spaces
00:58:21.780and then like you know sex workers as well should be able to be able to monetize their content
00:58:25.760without you know worrying about all kinds of restrictions that could end up being placed on
00:58:30.880them uh the other thing is reputation so verification the conversation around this
00:58:38.760has subsided a little bit but uh folks were a little disappointed that blue sky's model for
00:58:47.140verification ended up being that like blue sky gives out the blue checks uh there are more
00:58:52.940interesting versions of this that can be built out with like web of trust kind of models so
00:58:58.380uh basically like i think of like i really i don't think it's perfect but reddit's karma score
00:59:04.480is very interesting so like are there ways for you to create a decentralized reputation system
00:59:10.620for people because i do think that like once you online identities cost nothing to create
00:59:16.640and so there should be some way for you to be able to build up reputation on against a certain
00:59:22.060identity over time and know that this is like a trusted uh a trusted thing they have like domain
00:59:29.740like you can like make your domain your handle on blue sky uh and that's like that was like the
00:59:36.540original form of verification so you know fake cnn.bisky.social is clearly distinguished from
00:59:42.920cnn.com um or like rudyfraser.com versus fake rudy.bisky.social uh but i think there's like
00:59:51.120more that could be explored there and i think communities can verify people like it you know
00:59:55.500i've always like black sky should be able to hand out verification so like key members of their
01:00:00.020community um badging you know being able to say that like i'm a sucker for like github you get a
01:00:06.440certain amount of stars you get like a gold medal you get a silver medal um being able to incorporate
01:00:11.320stuff like that like if you're a black sky supporter be able to show like a badge on your
01:00:15.080profile um i think stuff like that is really cool and interesting to build to be able to to take to
01:00:22.140basically build on the the decentralized identity layer which is like way in the background for a
01:00:26.900lot of people but there's there's interesting stuff there there's a meeting with someone from
01:00:30.860uh the applied social media lab where i was a fellow earlier this year they want to work on
01:00:35.720verified credentials so you can basically say that like connect your blue sky identity to
01:00:39.820this account on instagram and twitter and stuff like that um so i think that's those are like
01:00:45.560interesting spaces to to work on yeah i'm curious do you see all of these so so both with the
01:00:52.420success of black sky and then the smaller decentralized platforms and communities
01:00:57.200popping up do you see this as the way of the future that we genuinely can help reset or
01:01:03.060unbreak kind of our default settings and default learnings of social media platforms and what they
01:01:08.420can be yeah i think there's a strong signal there even even facebook to their credit like
01:01:12.980build threads and they're trying to integrate with the federalverse uh i think there is it's
01:01:18.440like a half-hearted attempt but i do think that like that's acknowledgement that you know maybe
01:01:23.740that's like zuckerberg in the back of his head like not wanting to be disrupted in the future
01:01:27.860um but yeah i think it lets you unlock way more creativity around around the stuff that you're
01:01:37.920that you're doing being able to like uh and i've been asked a lot about like our niche
01:01:44.780online spaces the future of social media i i want i personally want it both ways i want you to be
01:01:52.820able to have a cozy corner to hang out in and for you to be able to because organize again with
01:01:58.100organizing right like we have we we the people nyc which i'm a lead organizer for as a mutual
01:02:03.280mutual aid group in in in new york we have a like a hundred person signal group chat where we're
01:02:08.800like organizing and talking about stuff and then we like if like the cops you know arrest us at our
01:02:14.700mutual aid distro we then do want to post on instagram and tiktok and get a hundred thousand
01:02:19.220views because that's what brings the news crews around and then we can like get our message out
01:02:23.840and you know um and so like i think you need both i think you need private spaces and you need uh
01:02:30.640to be able to have like a global reach um especially if you think about internationally
01:02:35.720like folks who are like facing like these real life crises around the world like they they need
01:02:43.980a global reach um they need people who understand their context right like if you think of like
01:02:48.880uh facebook's role in in genocides globally like myanmar and stuff like some of that was because
01:02:56.060there were the moderators did not have a local context and they didn't have the tool they had
01:03:01.680the option to use the tools to translate it but they didn't right and there's like a world where
01:03:06.280you know there we aren't we're not seeing this yet but we're actually we're actually seeing with
01:03:11.180europe i guess there's some folks trying to create eurosky there's like building tools that are
01:03:15.720specific to the regulations and norms of your physical geolocation um and then still being
01:03:23.160able to reach everyone around the world you know uh i do think that is the future yeah yeah i mean
01:03:31.860i want i want to sort of click into that because you know i think back to all the different very
01:03:38.700impactful social and political movements that were started on social media platforms things
01:03:43.320like me too things like black lives matter um the racial justice uprisings that we saw in 2020
01:03:48.680Do you think that, have we, because in some ways what you're saying makes me feel hopeful.
01:03:55.220I sometimes get a little pessimistic and think, oh, we'll never see another global movement pop off on social media as effectively as we once did.
01:04:03.800But when you were speaking, I thought maybe it won't look like it did or maybe it won't be on the platforms that it happened in in 2020 or 2016.
01:04:12.100But that doesn't mean it can't still happen.